Jamie is a New England academic in-training and is also a powerful witch. Her mother, Serena, has been stuck in her grief alone in an old one-room schoolhouse. Jamie is trying to teach her magic and get her out of her shell, but doesn't know all of Serena's story. With those secrets causing problems, Jamie is left trying to find the connections between a novel from 1749, a long-buried scandal, and learn the true nature of magic before her mother ruins both of their lives.

Jamie's magic spells are offering up items with an intention, letting the universe decide whether to answer or not, and it invariably does. It's a system she's worked out over time without any formal training, so trying to teach her grief-stricken mother is difficult. We learn a little about them, their lives, and history in the beginning, but it's only fragments of who they are. They're academics; Jamie's in grad school now, working on 18th-century literature, but her mother had worked in queer spaces and journalism before going to law school.

There are epigraphs to each chapter and snippets of the novel Jamie is doing her thesis on. She's figuring that out as the novel progresses, so we get a close look at academia as well as complicated parent-child dynamics.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC of Lessons in Magic and Disaster.

This book wasn't it for me. The characterization and dialogue felt stilted throughout, which made it difficult to feel connected to this world and the people in it. I felt like I was slogging through the mud while reading and couldn't find my footing. I'm sure other readers will love this, but the writing style and characterization left something to be desired.

I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders adult novel, All the Birds in the Sky, and Unstoppable, her Young Adult Space Opera Series, so was excited to read her newly released novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster.

In this novel Jamie is not studying magic, but literature, but she uses magic to help her with her research and teaching her classes in subtle ways by making offerings of food at places where the human and the natural world have met such as a former road being overtaken by grass. In this way much of the story has less a fantasy and more a magical realism feel to it since it is not completely clear how much is real and how much is the characters perception of reality towards the beginning of the novel. Those who enjoy Sarah Addison Allen and Alice Hoffman will enjoy both the magical realism elements as well as the strong female characters depicted in the novel.

When Jamie attempts to teach her mother, despite her mother seeming to have a natural talent for magic, things unfortunately do not always go as planned when her mother's desires are often cloudy and unconcise leading to unexpected consequences. There is strong LGBTQ representation in Lessons in Magic and Disaster with Jamie's moms being lesbians, her partner is nonbinary, and she herself is a transwoman. It explores the complex and sometimes heartbreaking relationship between both married partners and mothers and their children.

Charlie Jane Anders has a unique talent for blending messy human relationships and wild nature-based spells, and I loved untangling the clever thoughts and big emotions of this book. While the blurb is about a young witch teaching her mother magic, the story ambles in all sorts of directions: protagonist Jamie sets out to re-connect with her mom and to finish her dissertation, but along the way she finds herself confronting deep grief, aggressive transphobia, and academic perils, culminating in the threat of losing everyone she holds dear.

Though the characters deal with some heavy content, I found the overall tone of the writing was hopeful and light; I have a fondness for nerdy lit weirdos, and Jamie’s voice was so fun and sensorily evocative, whether she was discussing mysteries from eighteenth-century novels or describing spells gone catastrophically wrong. The magic system was also fascinating to me, focusing on forgotten places and intention and reclamation, and I loved that Jamie and her mom Serena figured things out together without ever really knowing any of the rules.

Overall, this book took me on an emotional journey, and I was very moved by the bittersweetness of the central queer relationships and all the mistakes and acts of forgiveness that wove their ways through the narrative. “Lessons in Magic and Disaster” is a complex and thoughtful novel with literary and fantasy elements, and I loved spending time in its world.

4.25 stars

Thanks to Tor Books and NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Lessons in Magic and Disaster and your relationship with your momma(s).

Set in Cambridge, MA, Jamie (she/her) is a trans woman who’s in the early stages of writing her diss. Between her academic research into 18th-century letters by Jane Collier, Jamie also intentionally begins diving into practicing magic. Through learning about spells and incantations, Jamie wants to keep an eye on her mom, Serena, who has been stuck in a state of despair ever since her wife, Mae, died from an illness. Jamie introduces Serena to magic, hoping they can connect on this level. But Serena, driven by strong negative desires, seems to take her spell-casting too far, and Jamie attempts to help ground Serena (e.g., through recruiting people—fellow witches—based on the same interest) before she completely loses herself. On top of this, Jamie juggles her marriage to Ro (they/them) in their poly marriage.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster alternates between Jamie and Serena’s perspectives, with Jamie’s in the present and Serena’s in the past before Jamie transitions and Ro passes. I appreciated the unsparkly nature of Anders’s book; the magic is not fantastical, matching the overall tone of “academic research” with the type of witchcraft I’m more familiar with irl (in contrast to Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, which I also enjoy). The characters are nuanced, and their relationships are also carefully designed, making the novel an interesting read that parts from easy solutions. One aspect I desired to come out more was the fantastical magic, although I realize that specific world isn’t the one Anders chooses to build here. I questioned Jamie’s decision to leave academia for public intellectualism, given my bias toward her original path. Nevertheless, I cheered at the end when Jamie declared, “We need the humanities more than ever. But the systems we’ve built to commodify them are suffocating them.”

My thanks to Tor Books and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on Augusst 24, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7842866233).

I loved Anders’ previous book, All the Birds in the Sky, so I was happy to receive an ARC of her newest book. This was a book with many layers, and one that was much more about relationships than about magic. In fact, this book explores quite a few relationships: between Jamie and both of her mothers, between Jamie and her partner, and even some true historical relationships between queer women in the 18th century.

Jamie is a trans woman teaching in a small college and trying to write her dissertation on women writers of 18th century literature. She’s struggling to cope with the death of her mother Mae, and the emotional collapse of her mother Serena. Since childhood, Jamie has kept a secret: she can cast spells. Her magic is mostly instinctual; she has to find places that were once used by humans and have now returned to nature. Then she has to figure out what she truly wants, and offer something symbolic of that want.

Jamie has always felt her magic has to be secret to work — but she decides to connect with Serena by teaching her magic. While this brings her closer to her mother, it also causes problems. Jamie feels magic should be used for small and harmless things, but her mother has bigger ideas. Jamie’s secret also puts her relationship with her partner, Ro, in jeopardy.

Anders focuses on themes of trauma, accountability, and forgiveness. When Jamie is a child, Serena tells her that there is nothing she could do that would keep Mae and Serena from loving her, and this comforts Jamie at some of her lowest moments. At the same time, she learns there are consequences to one’s actions. Jamie hurts Ro deeply in this novel, several times, despite her good intentions. Ro still loves her, but that doesn’t resolve the problem. I loved the complexity of the relationships in this novel. Mae and Serena, Ro and Jamie, and Serena and Jamie, all have close, loving relationships that aren’t easy. Their differences create a constant push and pull. And each of the characters are layered and flawed enough that they feel very real.

Why is it so hard to tell love from obligation? Maybe because humans are not really built to sustain an intense emotion for hours and years, so we need connective tissue to carry us between the moments when we can feel. Or maybe it’s that the people we love always seem to need us at the most inconvenient times.

Jamie and Serena have to explore their guilt about Mae’s death, and how that guilt has harmed their relationship. Jamie has to come to terms with her grief, something that can’t be fixed by magic.

I loved the exploration of the ethical uses of magic. Jamie thinks by keeping things “small”, she can avoid impacting others and also avoid being corrupted by power. But where do you draw the line? As another character points out, if you cast a spell so you get a job or a raise, someone else will probably be denied one.

Gender identity, feminism, and queerness are important to the story and its characters. Anders explores how technology and social media are used by right-wing groups to attack and intimidate the people they hate. Additionally, I really enjoyed the use of literary research to emphasize how things have changed, and how some things haven’t changed at all. It’s more complex than that, and I loved Anders’ use of real and imaginary literary texts. She educates the reader about little-known women writers of the 18th century, but also brings them to life by combining reality and fiction. It reminded me a bit of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, but through a queer lens.

Readers looking for action and adventure may be disappointed, but I thoroughly enjoyed this slow-paced, character-focused novel. Thanks to NetGalley and publisher Tor Books for this advanced review copy, which published August 19, 2025.

Anders really wowed me with this layered story that's part queer family portrait, part exploration of modern-day witchcraft, and part literary criticism. I was especially invested in the flashback sections where we see the story of how Jamie's moms met. Grief is a common thread running through all the different layers, along with the impact of public shaming campaigns on already marginalized populations. The women authors Jamie's studying for her dissertation basically deal with the 18th-century version of cancel culture, finding themselves expelled from personal and professional circles for daring to defy gender norms or be glimpsed hanging out with the wrong crowd. In the present-day narrative, Jamie and her moms also get targeted, more or less for being queer people trying to live their lives. This is a complex, refreshing, and ultimately heart-warming story about honoring your own desires in a world that sometimes shames you for wanting anything at all. Thanks to Tor and NetGalley for my first ever ARC!

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy*

Charlie Jane Anders is one of my favourite authors, and this was really good!

I loved how it felt like a patchwork of things put together to make a book; usually stuff like that doesn’t work for me but in this?? Yeah it worked SO well!

Jamie is our main MC, and she’s a trans woman. She’s the daughter of Serena and Mae (lesbians), in which one of them provided the egg (with a sperm donor), and the other carried Jamie (I don’t remember which one whoops). I really liked this dynamic/showing of IVF to queer couples. And furthermore, since Jamie is trans, anytime she is referenced in the past, her deadname is just “R”. Her pronouns are always she/her, even in past scenes, and I really loved that aspect of never misgendering her, even in the past!

The other main MC we have is Serena, one of Jamie’s moms. I really enjoyed the balance between the two of them, and seeing their relationship grow after Mae dies.

Highly recommend this book!

This was so dorky (the author's word, not mine) and charming and didn't take itself too seriously while also really hitting those more emotional notes. It's a love letter to research while also critiquing academia. It's about stories and people reaching out to each other across time. It's also about grief. Especially the grief caused by people who love each other without fully understanding each other.

I'd definitely call this magical realism, and the magic is minimal in most regards. The spellwork is understated, the results dubious, the fallout mostly self-inflicted. It reminded me of Practical Magic, but 100% more trans and 100% less Zionist. (win/win)

I screeched, "What? WHAT!?" at the end, because that was just plain rude. But I loved it. The only reason this was 4 rather than 5 stars for me is that I sometimes wandered off, mentally speaking, in the bits that had to do with the birth of literature. I studied in that field for a while and now my body goes into a defensive coma when I read about it.

Charming, literary, magical, and funny, while also hanging a lantern on how cringey it is to be too sincere. I enjoyed this so much. The nerdy pillow talk between Jaime and Ro had me cackling. Very much recommend this if you've been burned by academia for thinking knowledge matters more than $$$.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Tor for the ARC.

(I understand what traditional book reviews should look like, but I'm not that kind of reader, or review writer. I'm interested in how stories transform, and how being a reader is a cultural action in our society, so that's what I write about and talk about around books.)

Like other Charlie Jane Anders writing, this novel contained moments and phrases and evocations of memory and connection that resonated and drew me into attention and alertness that some magical working was happening in my experience of the story.

You should probably read the book soon, unless it doesn't feel like the right time for you right now, and then you should probably read it in a bit, when you are ready.

The remainder of this review is really just personal stories about why this book is and will continue to become a sacred text for me that I read and re-read.

I've held onto the advance copy of this book by a favorite author of mine all summer, holding it close in the liminal space between my one of my dearest friend's passing and their memorial service several months later. I could tell from the description that I needed to wait. And that this book would be ready for me when I was ready for it.

Maybe part of the magic is that I was presenting a webinar last week on "Building community through craft programs" to librarians and then I was sitting next to a religious studies major at a leadership group who spoke about how she sees religious groups as part of community leadership, and then I was revising a grant about how to connect people across difference in bridgebuilding work while holding all of these ideas in my mind, and reading a story from the 1660s for book group and discussing the ways that the author may want to convey an idea or theme being different from the ways that each reader may receive or interpret the idea or theme through their own thoughts and experiences. And this book isn't about any of that and also it is about all of that.

I rarely allow myself to try to know my own desires. This book makes that feel like something to prioritize. As part of grieving. And as part of learning.

Thank you, Charlie Jane, for creating something beautiful and transformative. Your working is out here in the world, with a power that is difficult to talk about in anything but the most vague terms. You will always be loved.

I wanted to love this. I loved so many elements of it—the queer sensibility that permeates every sentence, academia and the 18th century novel of it all, complicated mother/daughter relationships with well-drawn characters. But my fundamental problem was at the lack of worldbuilding around magic, its role, and its functioning, in this universe.

Beyond all this, the book was just slow. It was a slog. A lot of the same emotional beats were hit too many times. The author also had this habit of creating conversations without context. It was naturalistic, but frustrating when reading a novel. Characters would have conversations in which their motivations, actions, and reactions weren't clear until later scenes.

I really enjoyed the complex characters and layered story that Charlie Jane Anders built. Jamie and Serena both feel so real, with their flaws, secrets, and desires, and the way their relationship unfolds is both touching and believable. I loved how Anders blends family dynamics, queer identity, and magic in a way that feels natural rather than forced. The historical elements of the magical book add intrigue, and each twist kept me turning pages. This is the kind of novel that pulls you in completely, and I found myself invested in both the magic and the emotional heart of the story.

Unexpectedly healing and wholesome, Lessons in Magic and Disaster is queer, witchy, and compassionate in just the right amounts. Anders manages to acknowledge the effects of intergenerational trauma while at the same time holding characters to account for their individual bullshit. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Tor in exchange for a review.

Jamie is a graduate student writing her thesis on a fictional novel (Emily) by a real eighteenth-century novelist (Sarah Fielding). She’s also trans and, technically, a witch—though that last label becoming more identity than hobby is a concern of hers throughout the book. In any case, Jamie decides to teach her mother, Serena, the rudiments of magic. She hopes this can help Serena, who has been mired in grief over the death of her partner and Jamie’s other mother, Mae, for years. Jamie is successful—maybe too successful—and even as this newfound craft brings mother and daughter closer together, it starts to wreak havoc on Jamie’s own romantic life. Meanwhile, budget cuts at her college and a transphobic activist both threaten to throw her academic life into disarray. Jamie’s not having a good year … how much of it is her own doing?

I really enjoyed the pacing of this book. Anders keeps the plot moving and has enough mysteries in the air to sustain interest. Just as I’m getting bored with Jamie/Serena, there’s Jamie/Ro drama, literary sleuthing drama, or a flashback chapter to Serena/Mae/kid Jamie. (Indeed, these flashbacks are dope in their own right, and I would welcome a prequel novel or novella about Serena and Mae, kind of like Concrete Rose, should Anders ever deign to write it.) All of these subplots and relationships are important and interesting in their own right, and Anders synthesizes them into an important and interesting novel.

Jamie and Serena’s tumultuous relationship looks like it’s the backbone of the story with the way Anders introduces it right off the hop. However, I would argue that Jamie and Ro are more significant. Her mother is an important part of her life, yet her relationship with Ro is (as Jamie herself notes) a significant source of stability. When Jamie’s magic use creates problems, it upends Jamie’s entire life. I really like how Anders models an affirming, enthusiastic relationship that includes some kinky sex and then shows how even these relationships can run aground if one or both partners makes mistakes. Jamie is far from a bad person, yet Ro’s objections to her behaviour are totally valid. Watching the two of them work out these issues is painful and uncomfortable yet so necessary.

Jamie’s own mistakes, especially regarding Ro, are the heart of this book and the most important conflict—far more so than anything McAllister Bushwick can conjure up. I think it’s so interesting that Anders dangles Bushwick like a spectre of a villain yet he ultimately proves to be a kind of red herring. But I’m not surprised either. Jamie’s transness is an important and fundamental part of her character, yet it isn’t that important to the plot. Lessons in Magic and Disaster is notable in this way for featuring a trans protagonist who has happily transitioned, experiences some transphobia, yet for whom transition and being trans is not the focus of the story. Similarly, the fact that Jamie can fuck up in these little yet big (from her point of view) ways is important too; trans protagonists deserve to be just as flawed and messy as cis protagonists. Finally, I just want to note that I really love how Anders deals with talking about pretransition Jamie in the flashback chapters (by censoring Jamie’s deadname, similar to how eighteenth-century novelists would, and always using she/her pronouns retroactively). Maybe it isn’t surprising that Anders, as a trans woman, would approach this matter sensitively, yet I still want to laud it as much as I would a cis author doing so.

I also really like how Anders portrays magic in this book. Just as Jamie finds herself drawn to liminal spaces to perform spells, magic itself is a liminal creature herein. I can’t speak for readers who actually believe in or practise magic themselves, but as a naïve reader it feels like a respectful way to explore ideas around magic use without committing too hard to depicting any actual systems or rituals of magic. This freedom allows Anders instead to explore its connections to relationality overall.

The same goes for the fictional novel she has conjured up—again, I would love to read the full text of Emily if Anders ever wanted to write it! Reading about Jamie’s intense, sometimes dramatic search for information about Sarah and Jane and this novel stoked my latent love of classical English literature (though I must confess I am more of an early nineteenth-century lass myself: George Eliot foreva!). Although I never seriously entertained a career in academia, had I pursued one, perhaps I would be like Jamie in my zeal. Her obsession not just with Emily but with learning more about Sarah and Jane’s world and how women of their time experienced it is nothing short of infectious.

Above all else, though, what will stick with me from this novel is just how doggedly Anders pursues the idea of dealing with trauma. She accurately captures how trauma comes at us from various angles and sources. Some if it is passed down from parent to child, as we see through the flashbacks where Serena and Mae’s struggles imprint themselves on Jamie. Some of it comes to us from social forces, like transphobia and other oppression. Some of it comes from the consequences of our own mistakes. In this novel, Anders makes it clear that everyone should be accountable for those mistakes—Jamie in particular, but Serena also—yet, in the same vein, those mistakes do not render you unlovable, unworthy. It’s this compassion, so deeply baked into every sentence and paragraph, that makes this novel truly memorable. So many of us queer folx carry a lot of trauma, and even those of us lucky enough to escape a lot of personal traumatic experiences are part of a wider collective of trauma stretching back across decades of oppression and hatred. Anders needles around the edges of these ideas, both in the flashback chapters and in Jamie’s own encounters with transphobes and right-wing zealots (I loved and simultaneously despised the nihilistic gleefulness of Gavin … too real, Charlie Jane, too real). I didn’t expect the inclusion of these ideas to hit me as hard as it did, yet in retrospect, I am so grateful she explores them.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a complex and careful book full of interlocking ideas and credible characters. I’ve vacillated on whether to rate it four stars or five. Maybe I’m being too harsh by going with four stars, so I hope you don’t take that as a sign that this book is in any way wanting. If anything about its description or my review has you nodding along and interested, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for early copy for review*

Really enjoyed the character work and reading a literary fantasy centering queer women doing magic. The added bonus of an academic writing a dissertation examing the queerness of 18th century literature was also a delight.

I have not had the chance to read anything else by this author, but plan to check out their backlog of works.

(this is not the full/finished review!)

→ Well-researched
→ Warm, clever writing
→ Complex, messy queer characters
→ Making things worse with food intentions
→ Correct use of “flogger”

→ Takes a while to pick up
→ Feels like it's meandering until it picks up
→ Gotta be okay with looking references up once in a while (Unless you're already familiar with 18th century literature)
→ Lacks perspective on moral stances
→ Flagellates characters for the crime of being imperfect


Story: 0/5
Characters: 4/5
Writing: 4.25/5
Setting: 4/5
Themes: 3.5/5
Enjoyment: 0/5
Heat: 1.5/5



LiMaD alternates between Jamie's POV in the present and Serena sketching out the family's history, beginning when she met her now-deceased wife, Mae, to the messy present day full of messy, disastrous magic.


This ties into my overarching criticism of morality and perspective, but I personally HATED Ro.


God all the lines about grief and the bad parts
Missing a coherent through line
Sometimes there is a long rambling and yes intelligent line when silence would hit harder
It's really messing with me emotionally, despite not being a dramatic book
A LOT of American political references
I do wish there was more (outwardly) about grief and processing it
Making things worse with best intentions
The book phrasing Mae's health around her queerness when it was probably her weight
Will make you mad at the unfairness of it all

Completely lacks perspective when it comes to moral stances, often positioning people who are mundanely imperfect or flawed as some sort of pariah.

It's problematic, especially from a trans woman, and especially RIGHT NOW with the “”controversy”” around wishing ill on JKR. Hoping a bigot gets unending diarrhea is not the same as actively harrassing someone.


Taking the moral stance of saying you can't wish someone ill

There is this essence re:fucking up that's very faux-fragile, Tumblr early 2010s, burn-everything-to-the-ground when–not even when someone necessarily fucks up big time but when they are simply imperfect–that it goes without saying they must be chastised and exiled. It's a lack of awareness about the actual–usually MINOR in the broad scope of things–magnitude of an issue.

I kept wanting to shake Ro and scream “get some fucking PERSPECTIVE” I would LOVE if the worst thing someone ever did to me was send luck my way.

Like, imagine kicking your wife out and blowing up your marriage because they sent some luck your way.

In Charlie Jane Anders Lessons in Magic and Disaster magic *might* work, but if you are uncertain or lack a true choice things could go awry. At least, that is what Jamie has come to believe through her own practices seeking little boons or the occasional cash. At the start of the book, Jamie is trying to reconnect to her mother Serena who has closed herself off from the world in an old school house following the death of Jamie's other mother, Mae and her loss of identity after losing her job following a smear campaign.

Day to day Jamie, is a trans graduate student struggling to make progress on her Ph.D Dissertation and spends. much time writing, teaching and considering female writers of the 18th century as they were expanding beyond traditional boundaries. However, as in much of higher education, Jaime's positions is unstable and financially precarious, and as an out an visible trans person there is much hatred in the form of misogyny and transphobia directed at her, even by students.

Thinking it will stir something, Jaime teaches Serena how to cast spells. Serena takes to it with alacrity, immediately seeking the return of what was lost, and faces magical backlash. Despite a resolution to this issue, Serena resumes something of her focus and drive seeking ways to make spells more impactful and powerful. Their's is the driving relationship of the book. A key issue is that Jamie has never told Ro, their spouse about magic.

It is a novel with many themes and elements, and is actually much more of the type of book I was expecting of A Discovery of Witches before it went all torture porn and fated romance. Jamie's academic research remains an important story thread balanced by Jamie's activism and growing awareness of magic.

Family and grief are the other major story components, all told through the lens of a minority group both by identity and by the secretiveness of witches. When you build your own space but others just see you as a threat that should not exist, how do you continue to live?

A very compact but contemporary novel with much to consider.

Unfortunately, I did not finish this book. I felt that the writing had more of a clinical feel and did not flow well. Due to this, it was distracting to me as a reader and pulled me out of the story.

It takes a very deft novelist to tie together a story about so many things: the main character's arc, her mothers' arc, the author that is the subject of the main character's dissertation and the author's novel. This novel does not manage that. You feel dropped into one section or another. Even the dialogue of the main character and her mother feels very stilted. The result is that you are never in the story.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders is a third person multi-POV Queer speculative light academia. Jamie meets up with her mother Serena and announces that she will be teaching her mother magic. While Jamie analyzes a three-hundred-year old magical text and drops further and further into obsession, Serena is getting deeper and deeper into dangerous magic.

This is just as much an exploration of Queerness in a lesbian and transgender context as it is a work of speculative fiction and academia. We see a lot of Serena and her wife Mae’s relationship and insights into the lesbian community during and after the riot grrrl era. Serena and Mae are imperfect people who make mistakes but they are doing their best to raise their transdaughter in a world that they know isn’t always kind. When we see that Serena secretly wished that her child would be cishet because she didn’t want her child to suffer, I felt that. My own mother cried when she realized I was Queer, not because she was homophobic, but because she knew my life would be harder. It’s not a fun thing to admit, it makes parents feel like monsters, but it’s a very human reaction to not want your child to suffer.

Throughout the book, we see the Queer, specifically trans, experience within academia with brutal honesty in terms of the work that is done and the classroom. We get lots of excerpts of the text that Jamie is analyzing, Emily and we can see how Jamie really wants to call it ‘Queering the moral romance’ and explore the Queer elements of the text that have gone unrecognized as Jamie teaches a class where one of the undergrads challenges her constantly. It’s all handled very well without holding back any punches.

This is my first book by Charlie Jane Anders and I absolutely understand why she is so beloved and why she has won awards. Jamie’s feelings grow more and more complex and not all of her opinions will be ones that people agree with, but she calls things out like she sees them and it feels in touch with modern and current conversations. Sometimes I read books coming out now that feel like they’re six years behind the conversation because they’re meant for people who are not where I am (and that’s fine. We all start somewhere and we all get to where we’re going eventually). This felt right about where I am, mess and complexity and all as well as the things that people who want things to be morally pure do not want to hear. Sex work is treated as a perfectly fine career and the treatment of ‘freaks’ is directly addressed as well as their contributions to shaping art as we know it.

Content warning for depictions of transphobia, homophobia, and anti-sex work attitudes

I would recommend this to fans of works focusing on academia with a light speculative element and readers of fantasy who want something that feels very current in how it handles social justice

Highlights
~nerds (affectionate) nerding
~book hunting
~mysteries through time
~quiet but unmistakable magic
~I would die for these dorks

Initially I wasn’t sure this was going to be for me – I found the first chapter pretty dull – but I’m so glad I stuck with it, because Lessons in Magic and Disaster ended up being one of my favourite books of the year!

And it really shouldn’t have worked for me? Lessons is not a very typical Fantasy story: it almost might be Contemporary instead. The magic involves (almost) no special effects, no wands or glowing lights, and it’s more than a little vague (intentionally: a significant part of the book is the characters figuring out how magic works). Jamie is researching her dissertation and teaching a literature class at her university, beset by an absolute dickwad of a transphobic student; her researches into 17th century English lit written by women is a semi-constant thread woven throughout the rest of the story. All of this should have bored me to tears; would have, methinks, in the hands of a lesser author.

Instead, I was absolutely obsessed.

It’s hard to put my finger on why! A big part of it, I think, was how – how comforting the familiarity of it all was, and by that I don’t mean the travails of being a grad student or trying to lead your mom out of her grief or the intricacies of 17th century literature, none of which I’m familiar with at all. It’s – the flavour of it? The vibes? Anders has described Lessons as her queerest book yet, and that’s the magic x factor, that’s why it feels so familiar: this is such a queer book. These people are my people! We would click immediately despite our wildly different interests and lives! And that queer quality I can’t figure out how to define – it suffuses the whole book, every single page, and makes it feel homey. Comforting, even when Major Stresses are happening to the poor characters. Familiar, even though most of this is new territory for me. I mean, check this out;

>Ro slaps a flogger made of recycled rubber against their left palm. “So. Which cardinal virtue are we to expound today?”

A shiver starts in Jamie’s scalp, she can enumerate every follicle on her head. They’re doing the cardinal virtue game! Corporal punishment for cardinal virtues–it’s the tits.<

THESE NERDS (affectionate) BRING CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY INTO THEIR BDSM GAMES. Plato and St Ambrose and John Donne-level stuff. HI I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. Are Plato and St Ambrose my thing??? No, not really. (Donne totally is.) But that’s irrelevant, it’s not the subject matter that makes you click instantly with these other nerds (although it can), it’s the passion of the interested parties – and yes of course this is not exclusively a queer thing, at all, but this example in Lessons is just one scene among many that captures a particular shade (strain? genre? stripe?) of oddball, earnest, unconventional queerness that I don’t know how to define but surely you get what I mean!

(The scene quoted above is not very explicit at all, for the record, and I think is the closest thing to a sex scene in the book.)

It’s the way these characters talk, and think, and build relationships; the things that are important to them, the causes they care about, the way they care about each other. Obviously they mess up sometimes (who doesn’t?) but boundaries, consent, and autonomy are concepts they’re aware of and work hard to respect. As is the way they – feel their feelings? I don’t know how to put it better than that. But even if I can’t quite put my finger on it, even if I can’t put a name to this Special Queer Thing – it is going to be immediately recognisable to so many readers, and as appealing, as welcoming, to them as it was to me. Especially because – despite the travails the characters all go through over the course of the book – there’s a very strong element of queer joy to Lessons, too. You walk away from it happier than you were when you picked it up. Warmed. A little bit more able to face the rest of the world.

>Since Jamie needs to prove that Emily is important and worth discussing, she scoops up these tiny shout-outs up like a basket of kittens and cradles them in her arms, cooing and covering them with little kisses. Who’s a good citation? It’s you, it’s you.<

Other than queerness, what suffuses this book is the passion I mentioned before. There is nothing like listening to a person talk about their special interest when they really get going about it. Any topic becomes wildly interesting when someone who knows all about it and loves it is tripping over their own tongue to tell you why it’s cool. Lessons is, in some ways, one of those conversations – Jamie’s love for the books and authors she’s studying comes through loud and clear, to the point that it made me interested, not because this was the main character’s Thing and it’s therefore relevant to the story I’m reading, but because it became objectively interesting. And I think many if not all readers are going to find themselves caught up in it like I did, simply because it’s impossible not to be swept up in that passion. This is excellent for a number of reasons, but the one I want to highlight is the sheer craft and skill it takes to pull this off! Very few stories can make you care about a character’s special interest when it’s not already an of-interest-to-you-topic; the intense love of a thing is much less catching in text than it is in listening to someone in person happily expounding on it, for some reason. But Anders does it, captures that incredible, addictive energy, that love and delight in a subject, perfectly – AND makes it look easy!

(It definitely doesn’t hurt that the mystery and story of Emily – the novel Jamie’s obsessed with and is writing her dissertation on – is genuinely fascinating, especially in how Anders weaves it in parallel with Jamie’s life. The secrets hidden in this book-within-a-book DELIGHTED me utterly! And there was such a beautiful, wonderful theme of – of a hidden but powerful and unbroken line of women who reached for more; a line Jamie is a part of. It made my heart ache in the best way. Emily is Jamie’s inheritance, in a very real way that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with spirit. I had to hug my ereader to my chest!)

>(Why do we say, “benefit of the doubt”? Why not “benefit of the belief”?)<

Plot-wise, Lessons is what would typically be considered low-stakes Fantasy – there are no Dark Lords or armies or saving-the-world quests. Jamie and her remaining mom are trying to rebuild (or recreate?) their relationship; this leads to them exploring and experimenting with magic, past the bounds Jamie’s already familiar with. The stressors are every-day stressors: the Humanities are in peril at Jamie’s university, putting her under even more pressure to get her dissertation done; she has to navigate a horrible student without telling him to crawl back into the sewer he came out of; there is much research to be done into Emily. But all of these things – I still seized up at the tension, I still freaked out when Things occurred, because even if they didn’t matter to the world they mattered to Jamie, and to me. Anders is most excellent at engaging us, making us care, and even though Jamie is imperfect (WHO ISN’T?) she is still this ridiculously cool, lovely person I wish I could befriend in real life. I did not want terrible things to happen to her! Even when those terrible things were ‘just’ screamingly awkward moments and the like!

>“I wear my mistakes like my scars: proudly,” Delia says. “They’re credentials, because I learned better.<

Some of the things that happen are much more serious than that, and there’s probably a lot of very clever things to be said about what Anders does – or rather, doesn’t? – do with the idea of A Villain, or possibly Villainy, in this book. It helps to have read her newsletter, particularly this issue here, where she says:

>Case in point: Lessons in Magic and Disaster features a couple of characters who are bigoted assholes, and neither of them gets much “screen time.” They show up long enough to inflict some damage, and then they’re gone again. The book isn’t really about them, and the only reason they really matter is because my characters struggle with what to do about them. They could almost be natural disasters.<

This is not a common approach to villains in Fantasy, at least not in the books I read – but I’m fascinated by it. The idea of…de-platforming the villain, almost? The idea of a villain who isn’t important, in and of themselves. It’s a surprisingly refreshing contrast to the approach I’ve seen in the last few years, where villains are humanised. And I like humanised villains! I do! But there’s something…kind of intoxicating, almost, in going nope. This isn’t your story. Stfu to the bad guy(s). You only matter because you affect the ones who matter. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything Anders was doing with this, but damn, I loved what I did catch!

>“I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”<

Lessons is such a gorgeous, poignant, heart-warming book – quietly but powerfully magical; hilarious; heart-breaking and heart-mending. It taught me things I didn’t know, and re-affirmed things I did; it’s a reminder of how wonderful and ridiculous and worth-living-in the world is. I adore it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.

And if you read it, I think it’ll be one of yours too.