pickAnders writes about relationships—mothers & daughters, wives with each other, students & teachers, rivals—with great nuance, compassion, & acceptance & it‘s her investigation of those relationships, with each characters strengths & flaws on full display which drives this narrative about a graduate student investigating a 300 year old text while also interrogating gender, magic, love & more in the present. Political, very of the moment read.
The only thing better than a new Charlie Jane Anders book is wining an ARC in a Goodreads giveaway and getting an early look at it. Excited to start reading!
pickPlease forgive my lack of review and embrace this heavily edited quote from the novel that bled my heart dry:
'a story about nature, change, and chasing your own heart's desire in spite of everyone else's expectations...about the games we play along the cliff edge. About nature encroaching in the places that people have left behind...about the trade-offs between security and self-determination, and [the] struggle to find a way to have both.'
pickHugo and Nebula Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders casts her most powerful spell here—transforming the raw ingredients of grief, generational trauma, smear campaigns, and transphobia, with queer love, community organizing, and the heart‘s truest desires to craft a deeply relevant, resonant, painful, and healing masterwork, charged through with unwavering realism and unwieldy magic, and an 18th century literary mystery bubbling up from below!
Lessons in Magic and Disaster | 
