Lessons in Magic and DIsaster

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

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review. Pub. date: 8/19/25

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