I've been struggling to succinctly define magical realism. It's one of those things that I can identify it when I see, and I can point to examples (of which there is frequently no mutual frame of reference). However, providing a one or two sentence definition is just not there. This story is clearly there, but there's no underpinning metaphor as is frequently seen in magical realism.
My snarky answer to define magical realism is fantasy that the literati have rebranded so that they can get away with writing fantasy. Maybe, like this one, it's the injection of fantastic elements in order to better explore character development. But that's also imperfect, because science fiction's been doing that for ages without getting a different brand.