Review of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

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.