Believe in Magic
4.9/5
Critic Rating
Charity, celebrity, illness and control. The extraordinary story of a teenage girl and her charity Believe in Magic, which ends up challenging the very nature of sickness itself.
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Leah Bauer • The List • Jun 13, 2023
"Gripping from start to finish...Most striking is the penultimate episode which drags listeners through an emotional quagmire as results of a safeguarding review make us question whether Meg was a complicit offender or the original victim of this elaborate scam."
Score: 5
Lauren Passell • Podcast The Newsletter • May 29, 2023
"Believe in Magic gets dark fast. Much like The Missing Crypto Queen, this story feels like a live wire flicking and alive, and Jamie has invited us along for every twist, turn, and dead end. And much like The Missing Crypto Queen, I doubt this story is over."
Score: 5
Fiona McCann • Irish Times • May 27, 2023
"...the attention that illness – grave, terminal illness – can grant you, even when it’s illness by proxy – well, it’s seductive, and that seduction is at this story’s heart. The podcast investigates this sad and sordid tale with compassion and tenacity, peeling back layers of deception in search of an elusive truth. Though one of their subjects is dead and the other refuses to engage, Bartlett and Mayer find their way to some kind of truth, and then grapple with whether to put it out there. And though listening is grim, discomfiting and maybe, if we’re being honest, even implicating, I’m glad they did."
Score: 4.5
Ximena Smith • Radio New Zealand • May 24, 2023
"Hosted by Jamie Bartlett... a previous series of his is 'The Missing Cryptoqueen', which is also an excellent series along the same lines... this new series is very similar in substance and style and pace, lots of twists and turns, and also has a really nice mix of field recording as well as stuff that's been recorded in a studio."
Score: 4.9
Anna Leszkiewicz • New Statesman • May 10, 2023
"This investigation from Jamie Bartlett, of the popular podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen, zips along – he narrates facts and surreal details straightforwardly, in the present tense. has that compulsive quality that often makes me queasy – what are the ethics of serving up a story as strange and dark as this one, with such a young person at its heart? But in its themes of social media fame, money and online deception it also serves as a deeply contemporary cautionary tale."
