Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic.

A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic--with very unexpected results--in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is the average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, generational trauma, and an esoteric dissertation proposal. But she has one extraordinary secret: she's also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie's mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie's busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it's up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy's first book, Victories Greater Than Death, as well as the short story collection Even Greater Errors. The City in the Heart of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky are two of her other works. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney's, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, and Wired Magazine. In its first week, her TED Talk, Go Ahead, Dream About the Future, had 700,000 views. She co-hosts the podcast Our Views Are Right with Annalee Newitz.