Recently, I was complaining to my sister about one of my pet peeves in fiction: stories featuring an academic or student that is vague about that character’s area of interest or research. Get specific about it! Include some nerdy tangents! Don’t just have a character vaguely be described as an art historian or a classicist without making me feel their passion and depth of knowledge for a field.
Serendipitously, I picked up Charlie Jane Anders’s Lessons in Magic and Disaster shortly after voicing this complaint and discovered that it was exactly what I’m always looking for in terms of stories with an academic setting. Jamie Sandthorn, the protagonist of Anders’s latest novel, is a grad student at the fictional Rugby College where she specializes in eighteenth-century novels, especially those dealing with womanhood and matrimony. The whole novel is deeply infused with Jamie’s love for and expertise in the area, weaving in a wealth of information both fictional and (largely) about the historical context and evolution of Jamie’s literary speciality.
The perfectly timed coincidence of picking up Lessons in Magic and Disaster is also rather fitting for the novel itself because, as you may have guessed from the title, it’s a fantasy novel. Jamie is not just a grad student, but also a witch. Witchcraft, however, in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, is not a precise science of potions, spellbooks, and alchemy. Rather, it is about intent and sacrifice. It’s about figuring out what it is that you truly want, offering a token of that desire to the universe, and hoping that the strength and clarity of that desire will reflect back to you. But it’s also an imprecise process that requires a certain vagueness and relies more on instinct than method, like looking at something out of the corner of your eye and knowing it will vanish if observed head-on. As such, the magic that Jamie has performed in solitude ever since she was a teenager doesn’t take the form of potions or broomsticks, but of little turns and coincidences—a sudden scholarship just as funding is cut or an unexpected boost in donations to a GoFundMe.
Jamie is also scrupulous about her secrecy as a witch—the combined vagueness and precision of magic is difficult for even her to understand, so how could she ever explain it to anyone else? She has no coven, no witchy mentor, no heirloom spellbook, and even her partner, Ro, is oblivious to Jamie’s supernatural extracurriculars.
But Jamie’s mother, Serena, has been trapped in a rut of grief and isolation for the past seven years since the death of Jamie’s other mother, Mae, and the implosion of Serena’s professional life. Desperate to reconnect with her mother and rebuild their relationship, Jamie takes a leap and introduces Serena to magic. But family is never simple and Jamie and Serena both find that the addition of magic makes it even less so.
Those looking for a fantastical tale with great feats of magic and spectacle might find themselves disappointed by Lessons in Magic and Disaster, but for me it emotionally hit me in a way that I found both effective and unique. It’s a story that uses magic to explore grief, trauma, and the difficulty of really knowing a person. It’s about building queer families and communities and the efforts and struggles of maintaining those things in the long run, but also how their legacies can echo down through the generations. It’s about how passion and creation can be ground down in the face of capitalism and industry and how to hold onto that hope and love anyway.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster is also a deeply queer book through-and-through. Jamie is a trans woman, her partner in marriage is a nonbinary person, and she was raised by a lesbian couple. Anders’s novel is intensely interested in the experiences of queer people across time, whether that’s the from the outsiders of the 1700s, Serena and Mae’s lives as a lesbian couple in the eighties and nineties, or Jamie’s position as a queer trans woman in present-day America who is subject to conservative scrutiny and outrage. The novel alternates between Jamie’s perspective in the modern day and flashbacks to Serena and Mae’s earlier days—oblivious to magic, but still dealing with the same kinds of struggles that Jamie faces down with witchcraft.
I found Lessons in Magic and Disaster to be an immensely touching novel that is as poignant as it is complex. What does it mean to pour love into a community as opposed to hate your enemy? In a world where non-conformity and queer self-expression has been met through hostility throughout time, how are legacies and communities remembered? How can we heal beyond simply naming what has hurt us? Like the best of stories, Lessons in Magic and Disaster offers no easy answers to the questions, but I know Anders’s novel and its collection of witches striving for a better world will linger with me.
Content warnings: past death of a parent from cancer; depictions of transphobia and homophobia; suicidal ideation
