Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders Release Date: August 19, 2025 I was honored to be one in a chain of readers sharing an ARC from the author. It was a pretty cool idea; we each were mailed a copy, read it, and received an address to mail it on to the next person. As one of the last readers, when I received it, the inside cover was almost filled with messages and signatures from previous readers! No one, however, had marked the book in any way, so I will have to wait until I get my own preordered copy to do all my underlining and annotating! This was such a beautiful, melancholy yet hopeful, contained yet genre-expansive, story of an 18th century Brit lit grad student who teaches her mother magic, with somewhat disastrous consequences. I enjoyed the embedded 18th century Brit lit discourse and the interpolated fictional 18th century novel, and particularly the spotlight on real 18th century women writers (Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier). The novel wrestles with the eth...
Life, Books, and SFF