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 ethics, tension, and power dynamics of bringing liminal spaces and people into the forefront, and the very real effects of reputation and appearances on people's lives, in the 18th century and today. It uses magic kind of as a metonym for those power tensions--how bringing those people and works of art into public view can be useful and powerful but there's also backlash and consequences. It's also very much about the central queer relationships between Jamie and her mother Serena, and Jamie and her wife Ro, and the dynamics of that love and the desire to protect each other, the latter of which can be as destructive as it is powerful.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster pulls no punches, and is itself a kind of quiet, liminal but powerful (I keep coming back to that word!) space for queer, nerdy, English lit majors to contemplate their discourse. Highly, highly recommend--for nerds, queers, former English majors, Brit lit lovers, Charlie Jane Anders fans, and anyone whose interest is piqued!
Read for review from the author; all opinions are my own!
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