Book Review: Guardians of the Keys

Guardians of the Keys. Megan Wheless, Warren Publishing, 21 June 2022, Hardback, Paperback, and eBook, 304 pages.

Reviewed by Stephanie Wilson Medlock.

The battle between rationality and an acceptance of magic takes center stage in this novel about a woman whose personal losses have caused her to shut off her imaginative side. Left orphaned at age five when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, Elaine is raised by two eccentric aunts, Daphne and Mildred Cooley, who own an antique store.

But at thirty-five, Elaine suddenly loses her aunts in an accident. As their heir, she is left to clean up the messes in their disorganized antique shop, even as she feels crushed by sorrow. Besides the fact of their loss, their attorney informs Elaine that the store has been running a deficit and may have to be sold to repay debts. Elaine is overwhelmed by guilt that she has not paid more attention to their finances.

But first things first: she will have to sort through all their things to determine what can be sold or salvaged and what should be discarded. In the course of her sorting and disposing of junk, she comes across a strange green key—one that begins to glow as she picks it up and even burns her hand.

This begins a long journey of discovery, as Elaine finds out her aunts were members of the Apothecary Guild, a centuries-old organization with only six members who hold the secret to various medicinal cures. Each guild member has a special key that allows them to space travel to see each other. A person who accumulated all six keys would amass a great deal of power. Centuries before, a man named Lazlo was cured of his tuberculosis by a guild member and became immortal by taking her medicines. He is now desperate to accumulate all the keys for himself for his own profit. It is when Elaine discovers that the time-traveling Lazlo murdered her beloved aunts that her disbelief begins to dissolve, and she joins forces with her best friend, Grant, and friends of her aunts, Adele and Teddy, to find and protect the keys.

Author Megan Wheless does a fine job of revealing aspects of the keys’ histories bit by bit. To increase the reader’s desire to know more about them, she draws the reader in with attention to detail and a fine description of all the supporting characters in the book. Her narrative shows how Elaine comes to change and accept more than what her immediate senses can tell her in a believable way. The gradual romance between Elaine and Grant is also charming. The story keeps the reader interested with a lot of twists and turns, as characters are revealed to be other than what they seemed at first.

But, for a book based on magic keys and a magical society, there is surprisingly little magic on display. In addition, Elaine and her friends are so focused on finding and protecting the six magical keys that we don’t really learn specifics about what the Apothecary Guild is designed to do. What, for example, are the cures that society members have developed, and why haven’t they used their powers to eradicate disease in the centuries since this secret organization started? The end of this tale seems to point to a sequel, so perhaps some of this information will be provided in a later book.

Despite this gap, the book offers likable and believable characters who each react differently to the fact of magic in their lives. The author makes you wonder how you would react to a magical key if you found it.