Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Jamie is worried about her mother. Serena has hidden herself away after the death of her spouse, grieving her loss and her imploded career. Jamie decides that teaching her mother how to do magic might help draw Serena back to the land of the living, but this act has unintended consequences.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders contains some fantastic story elements. The magic is gritty, the relationships are intriguing, and the literary mystery is compelling. It falls short in connecting these various elements to the internal wants and needs of the protagonist in a way that doesn’t make the reader have to work very hard to see the underlying connections. It’s not a failing per se, but it did make the book itself difficult to get lost in. I found myself often trying to understand how everything fit together rather than getting immersed in the story. That being said, I still enjoyed the book, especially all the queer elements. “The history of English literature is all freaks and perverts” might be one of my favorite lines ever uttered about studying English literature. I wish that all of the story elements had come together more naturally.