An emotional story about queer families, queer scholarship, and (queer) witchcraft.

I want to start this review stating that I am a huge Charlie Jane Anders fan. I have been reading her work (on io9) long before she published her first novel. A new Anders feels like a personal gift to me. That being said, Lessons in Magic and Disaster feels like a very different book than her others.

Jamie is a graduate student who is knee deep in her dissertation, is in a solid queer relationship, and who secretly practices witchcraft on the side. When she teaches her mom, Serena, witchcraft as a grieving/coping mechanism for her wife’s death, Jamie’s world begins to crumble under the consequences of magic.

Unlike Anders other books which are solidly genre stories, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, is more akin to Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman in that it is a literary story with strong fantastical/magical realism elements. Jamie’s world is presented in two dichotomies: a realistic look at scholarship and witchcraft that plays out very similar to the way it does for the practicing witches that I know. Magic much more subtle in this book than in most fantasy stories.

Rather than of focusing on the fantastical elements of the story, Anders allows Jamie, Serena, and the other characters space to have complex emotional relationships with each other. This is a book more about being human than it is about being magic. It’s beautiful. It’s tragic. It’s scholarly. And it’s queer. So very queer.

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group for an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

Lessons in Magic and Disasters is a heartfelt, intimate story about magic, grief, and the complicated ways love persists. Jamie, a young witch, steps into the role of teacher when her mother, Serena, retreats from the world after losing her wife and career. The magic here isn’t just spells and rituals — it’s the awkward, tender process of reconnecting, of facing the truths that hurt, and of discovering that even well-meant magic can stir up old wounds. Charlie Jane Anders blends queer and trans community life with a deeply personal family drama, creating a story that feels both fantastical and strikingly real. A lovely story, but a little stilted at times - 4/5 stars.

It physically pains me that I did not like this book. I desperately wanted to like this book.

It had so many interesting moments and profound things to say. There are scenes that were a shock right to the heart. "Your love is better than ice cream, Better than anything else that I've tried."

But it constantly gets in its own way and the momentum runs into a brick wall. The naval-gazing and inner monologue turned it into a trudge where I ended up skimming large sections. 😩

I'm so bummed. However, I really liked what the author had to say, so perhaps I'll try one of her other books.

Jamie is a grad student and a witch who’s still figuring out life. When she teaches magic to her mom, Serena, who’s been struggling since her wife died, things don’t go as planned. The magic brings up old emotions, secrets, and tension between them. At the same time, Jamie is studying an old book that starts to connect strangely with her own life.

It’s a story of grief, healing, queer identity, and the messy power of magic—both the kind that changes the world and the kind that changes hearts.

I struggled with the writing style. The structure of the book threw me off so I didn't find myself wanting to read the book. HOWEVER, I think a lot of people are going to love this book and resonate with it. It just wasn't for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for the free ARC in exchange for this review.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster has been so hard to review because my response to it has been deeply personal. It’s an achingly beautiful book. The ache starts in the opening paragraph,

Jamie has never known what to say to her mother. And now–when it matters most of all, when she’s on a rescue mission–she knows even less.”

Jamie discovered as a child that she could do magic. If she found a spot in nature at the intersection of cultivated and abandoned, and wished for something she really wanted, made an offering and then put the spell out of her mind, she might get what she wants. Or maybe it’s a coincidence. As far as she knows, she is the only witch. The story begins when Jamie decides she’s going to share her magic with her mother, who has retreated from the world in grief. Of course things go wrong. Jamie’s spouse, Ro, gets pulled in, which strains their relationship, and then Jamie’s academic career gets pulled in and her life is in complete disarray.

This book is all about tension and perspective. Jamie is a student and a teacher, a teacher and a daughter. She hands her mother a tool that her mother uses out of fear instead of hope. She loves her spouse deeply, but hasn’t shared a foundational piece of herself with them. While her mother tries to expiate her guilt and grief through magic spells, she further unravels Jamie’s life, creating more tension between them. But Serena also finds other witches and brings together a community to support Jamie.

This book made me miss my mom so much. She died 14 years ago, so this isn’t a fresh grief, but Anders tapped right into it. Jamie is trying to form a relationship with her surviving mother based on equal adult footing. The dynamic between them of love and frustration, the constant shifting of parent and child roles, felt so familiar to me. I could feel the tension that would fill the space between us when my mom and I were trying to talk to each other like adults, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Where Jamie and Serena land at the end of the book felt cathartic.

Also woven through Lessons in Magic and Disaster is the frustration of the ebb and flow of bigotry. Jamie is a trans woman, daughter of lesbians, and married to a nonbinary spouse. She has a student who makes clear he doesn’t respect her, and she becomes the target of a transphobic campaign. Through her characters, through Jamie’s study of Emily, Anders is illuminating the queer women and queer people who have always been in the world, living their lives.

I loved this. I think it’s the best thing I’ve read from Charlie Jane Anders. I’m going to need this in every format and it’s going to be on my shelf, right next to Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle.

I received this as an advance reader copy from Tor Books and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.

This contemporary LGBTQ+ story of relationships between mothers and daughters, spouses and partners, cleverly juxtaposes then and now with a vein of witchcraft joining different times. Jamie is a grad student writing her dissertation on an 18th century novel which helps her after the magic she taught her mother who has sunk into a terrible depression while grieving the death of her wife goes awry.

2.5 stars. I loved the concept, but I did not connect with the execution.

Thank you, NetGalley, Tor Publishing Group, and Charlie Jane Anders for this eARC.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I have loved Charlie Jane Anders’s writing since her io9 era. I really enjoyed All the Birds in the Sky and her YA trilogy. I think it was back in 2017 when I was at NYCC and got an ARC of The City in the Middle of the Night and got her to sign it and she was thrilled because she didn’t think they had them available for giveaways yet. (That may be my favorite book of hers.)

So I was overjoyed when I got an eARC from Tor and NetGalley of her new novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster. It is a story about a trans woman teaching her lesbian mother magic, as the back cover promises, but it is about so much more. It is about love and loss and parenthood and childhood and how to exist in the world. This book made me laugh and it made me sad in all the best ways. The flashbacks to the life of the protagonist’s mother were some of the most riveting sections of the book. I wonder what a nonSF book by this author would look like? Probably also amazing. The view of academia and anti-trans right wing hate in this book seems almost quaint compared to the hate and vitriol I’m seeing in the news today- it’s hard to believe that the real world has gotten so much worse since the author wrote this novel. I cannot recommend this book enough.

I had to DNF this book unfortunately, which I don't like to do. I just couldn't get into the writing style or the story. :(

*3.5

Lessons in Magic and Disaster follows Jamie as she sets about teaching magic to her mother, Serena. Through this process, she ends up learning a lot more about the rules and the power of their magic. It also follows Jamie’s academic and married life.

Jamie and Serena are complex and compelling characters, they feel fleshed out. The flashbacks to Serena and Mae added a lot to the story; we get to know both her and her wife, Mae, along with a young Jamie and see her grow into who she is present day.

There is very little magic throughout the book, even though it is the thing that sets up most of the conflicts. We do see the use magic and learn about it along with the characters, especially at the end; but magic is used as a device for Jamie and Serena to process their grief over losing Mae, Serena’s wife and Jamie’s mom, and to reconnect with each other.

The writing is atmospheric and richly descriptive, but it felt contrived at times with some of the lingo the author uses (e.g. the frequent use of "trolling"). The constant, and frequently long, tangents into Jamie’s dissertation felt unnecessary and could have been cut short. While interesting, they took me out of the story, and there was already a lot going on.

Giving this 4.5 stars. It's an exceptionally well-written and thought-provoking story, with interesting characters and great representation. It's a touch too literary for my personal taste to hit 5 stars, but don't let that discourage you.

I would describe this book as mainly literary fiction, focused more on characters, themes, and ideas than plot - but with fantasy/magical realism playing a key role. It's also unapologetically queer and feminist, and I love that. Not to mention, if you're looking for a good exploration of mommy issues, look no further; this is full of it.

It's not necessarily the easiest read - the main character is an academic studying 18th century literature, and it shows - but the prose is beautifully done, so it's a challenge in the best way.

This was a bit of a step outside my comfort zone, and while I'm not likely to reread anytime soon, I highly recommend giving this a try. It's hard to beat queer witches, after all.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders is a charming light fantasy about loss, love, and identity with a simple plot and complex themes.

Grad student Jamie - a trans woman and self-taught practitioner of magic - is writing a dissertation while teaching, maintaining a relationship with her spouse, and teaching her mother magic. Their lives are mostly mundane - dinners and picnics and work and shopping and sex and some occasional ritual magic, which she teaches her mother, with unforeseen consequences.

As apparently simple as the plot is, the characters and ideas are not, as Jamie ponders on intricacies of her relationship with both her moms and, especially through the texts she’s studying, the idea of femininity and feminism itself - and it is this and the complex relationships between the characters which makes this book special.

Stray thought: One of my favorite bits of world building in Lessons in Magic is the concept of using liminal spaces as part of the spell casting - in this case, the space in-between claimed by humanity or by nature. As Anders says through her character Jamie, “these places were loved once, and the neglect only makes the love more palpable.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for the ARC for my honest review.

I really loved the way Charlie Jane Anders immerses you in the internal lives of the characters to make you care about the tiny and large stakes of their personal lives.

Anders does a great job laying out the day to day struggles of Jamie, a trans grad student wishing for an end to her dissertation, and her mother Serena, who's been wasting away ever since her wife Mae died. Jamie decides to teach her mother about the witchcraft she's done since she was a teenager to empower her mother to move beyond her grief. But is Jamie ready for what giving this much power to the activist lawyer means?

The structure tying parallels of Mae and Serena's relationship with Jamie and her partner Ro's as well as with the literature Jamie studies for her PhD is just done so incredibly well. It's a book that the small stakes feel like it should feel slow but on the contrary, I got so invested in what came next that I couldn't put it down. I really enjoyed this one.

If you like stories about the little bits of magic in the everyday and stories of when children become the teacher to their parents, you'll enjoy this one.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Books for the free ARC in exchange for this review.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, out next month on August 19, is a book with many layers. There's magic and witches, literary works, LGBTQ romance and relationships, and coming out stories. At the heart of the novel, however, is the precarious relationship between a daughter and her mother.

Jamie is a grad student in her late 20's who teaches Literature and is working on her dissertation, which is a painfully slow process. She has a good relationship with her wife, Ro, but not so much with her mom Serena, who has been hiding from the world for the past seven years, ever since her wife (and Jamie's other mom) Mae died and her career blew up.

Jamie sets out on a mission to bring Serena out of her self-imposed prison by teaching her the magic she has accessed since she was a girl. Serena is hesitant at first but soon finds she has a knack for it. But when Serena takes her magic too far, it changes everything for everyone.

The way the book is structured initally threw me off. I was confused by the placement of the many quotes and excerpts from a strange book from the mid 17th century. They didn't seem to have much to do with the story and I started losing interest. Also, it seemed to take a long time for me to really get into the story. Because of this I almost stopped reading 27% in. But I didn't and I'm glad I kept reading. Anders writes with a slow burn, meaning that when I got hooked into the story I couldn't put it down.

3.5 stars

Unfortunately, this writing style just isn’t for me and I had to stop reading it about 10% in. There is a lot of inner monologue and not a lot of dialogue. It felt like it jumped all over the place. And while I appreciate the concept of magic as something you do but don’t think about, working the first two chapters, this is said about a dozen times and it just became too repetitive for me. It became a show me, don’t tell me situation.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Publishing for this ARC!

The irritating thing about cliches and proverbs is how often they turn out to be correct. In the case of Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, Lessons in Magic and Disaster, the proverb that turns out to be true is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. All Jamie wanted was a little luck with her thesis, for her partner to find success with theirs, and for her mother to start recovering from the loss of her wife. Jamie uses the unique magic she discovered with the best of intentions, only to see their lives spiral out of control.

Jamie has learned that she can cast spells—little more than wishes and tokens—in places where nature and humanity have tried to claim the same patch of earth. Abandoned gardens, overgrown cemeteries, and even beaches hold a bit of magic for her to tap into if she can frame her intentions clearly enough. The important thing, she emphasizes later, is to not think too hard about the magical wish. This last step had me thinking of the strange effectiveness of the placebo effect until things actually start happening when Jamie and her mother, Serena, start casting a lot of wish spells.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster really starts to take off once Serena gets her hands on magic. And thank goodness it does. To be honest, I struggled with the first third or so of this book because I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the characters. Serena gets some good character development once Anders starts including interstitial scenes of Serena’s love story with her wife, but I found Jamie’s primary characteristic to be naivety. We never really get to know Jaime’s partner or any of the other characters. Jamie’s research project, about Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding (sister of novelist and satirist Henry Fielding), isn’t very well integrated until later in the novel. I found Jamie’s very academic dialogue very jarring; these passages felt like jumping back and forth between a seminar and something a bit like a fairy tale. This book would have worked a lot better for me if it had been more tightly written, both in terms of pacing and in subject matter.

I’m trying not to knock this book too much, because there are some things I genuinely liked about it. I enjoyed the originality of the magic in this world. It’s refreshing to see a magic that mostly rejects rules and is based on what feels right in the moment. I also appreciated that both Jamie and Serena learn, finally, to have a care for how their actions affect others. The conclusion really redeemed the experience of reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster. I think book clubs that like books about mother-daughter relationships will find a lot to talk about here.

Thanks to Tor/forge and Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.
I've been a fan of Charlie Jane Anders and read all her prior novels. So it came as no surprises when my assumption about the magic in this new novel was all wrong. There is a form of magic but this is really a tale of a mother and daughter reconnecting. There is no secondary world witch giving her mother lessons in a cottage.

The book has the occasional flashback chapter to explore the relationship of Jamie's lesbian parents when she was younger. The main plot focuses on Jamie, a trans woman, as she works on her PhD researching an obscure woman author from the 1700s. It was the perfect book to read when I needed a break from some epic fantasy. But towards the end I was hooked and gave it my full attention.

Though the novel Jamie writes her dissertation on is fictional, it is rooted in an era where women were writing novels but are not well recognized. For those who find this era fascinating there is a detailed list of sources at the end of the book. The excerpts from this novel add another layer to this story.

What makes this book 5 stars is the deep emotions that run through it. Both the relationship between Jamie and her mother Serena and between Jamie and her partner Ro are engaging emotional rides. There is an underlying plot about a conservative douchebag who tries to cancel Jamie for her woke views as well. But at its core this is an exploration of grief and how we process those heavy emotions.

Things come to a satisfying conclusion that resolves enough of the plot threads while leaving other things open. Life is rarely as neat as we would have liked in our perfect endings. The fantasy elements are light enough that I would recommend this to people who normally don't like fantasy.

The second book I’ve read and loved by Charlie Jane Anders, who just further cements herself as an author I need to read all the things from. This book has so much going on I barely even know where to begin unpacking it all, much less talking about all the awesome things she pulls off in here.

In a random but determined attempt to improve her relationship with her mother following the death of her wife and Jamie’s other mother, she decides to let her mother in on a secret she’s held since childhood; she can do magic, and she’s going to teach her mother. But Serena, essentially living in self-imposed exile since the death of her wife and the implosion of her career, isn’t necessarily in the best place to be given the reins to power of this nature, and what follows is a series of events that are chaotic, to put it mildly.

Charlie really hit it out of the pack with this one. A family drama driven by top tier character work, Jamie, Serena, Ro, and the drama that ensues are going to keep you engaged, entertained, amused, horrified, heartbroken, and every twist and turn between all of that as we explore the complicated relationship between Jamie and Serena, their shared and unaddressed trauma over the death of Mae, the impact this has on Jamie and Ro’s relationship, and then there’s the range of secondary characters who add crunch to these events in some of the best ways possible. If you’d told me before this book it was possible for someone else’s family drama to elevate your blood pressure, stress you out and keep you under tension from start to finish, I’d never have believed you. The relationships between these three are at the heart and soul of this book.

And then we have the way the plot unfolds in this book. What actually unfolds are four main threads that are unpacked through a few different methods; we have Jamie and her mother’s story, Serena and Mae’s, then 18th century authors and associates who Jamie’s dissertation focuses on, and finally the story-within-the-story of the book that’s at the heart of Jamie’s dissertation. The basic sequence of events plays out fourfold even as the threads themselves interweave and become tangled, and it’s pretty epic to watch unfold as one feeds off another and our understanding of how this world functions deepens.

And then there’s just the thematic work that Charlie Jane Anders dives headlong into. There’s the queer centric stuff, from the dangers of being queer in a world where radical conservatism forgets where the line into fascism is, the challenges of growing up queer, even within a queer family and the way society reacts to that. Then there’s the more general stuff that’s baked into here, such as the way truth has been completely set aside in favor of narrative and propaganda, the way love for those closest to us can be messy and complex, uplifting and earth shattering. And then through the dissertation there’s the historical exploration of women who chose to live alternative lifestyles. There’s so much fascinating stuff going on in here, you’re going to find this a very satisfying, very fulfilling story to sink yourself into even as you get completely wrecked by the cascading chaos of events Charlie Jane Anders has her characters go through.

Spectacularly executed. If you’re a fan of family dramas with a splash of the fantastic to it, there’s no way this isn’t going to work for you.

NOTE: Youtube link goes public on 4th August 2025 @ 3PM EST.

I thoroughly enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders’s latest book, and flew right through it. She tells a layered story with magic, love, and family at its heart. Jamie is a grad student struggling with her dissertation on novelist Sarah Fielding. But she does have a way to get a little bit of extra luck on her side. When she was young, she discovered she could do magic — nothing showy, but a way to push things in the right direction, towards what she most wanted.

Jamie’s been mostly estranged from her mother Serena since her other mother died some years ago, but she’s decided to reach out to Serena again and see if magic could help her get back to herself. Jamie doesn’t account for her mom’s anger and guilt, however, and things go sideways, putting them all in danger.

We get to follow the story not only from Jamie’s point of view, but also get to learn Serena’s story of falling for her wife, Mae, and raising their daughter together, adding depth to our understanding of her motivation. Jamie’s exploration into Sarah Fielding’s writings and life add a third historical perspective, and we discover that Jamie may not be the only one able to cast magic that influences the fates.

Recommended for anyone looking for a contemporary fantasy, though it would also appeal to newer fantasy readers — the magic is central to the story, but the relationships Anders explores shine even brighter.

A fun read, one that spends a lot of time very much gesturing towards fantasy without getting lost in the weeds of magic or anything too out of the ordinary. When magic is invoked, the rules are hazy and the consequences are real and interesting, but the focus here is very much on the relationship between two women who have drifted apart in the face of a shared tragedy.

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a bit, even if it was a little quieter than I expected it to be.