There were rumors—Sydney had heard them; she had spent her first month out of Shadows learning how to function in the mundane world and her second month learning everything she could about the Unseen World—that there was something wrong with magic.
These long asides make these sentences hard to read. I feel like you could make the statement and then emdash section the follow-up/aside afterward to much better effect. This is not the first very long aside I've seen.
