“How did we all get so lucky to have Charlie Jane Anders writing novels right now? Lessons in Magic and Disaster has everything I like: an utterly absorbing story, a huge heart, emotional intelligence, the real problems and delights of queer families and communities, a book-within-a-book, a couple of graduate students, and legit queer magick.”
— Andrea Lawlor (Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl)
Read the first two chapters here!
“Lessons in Magic and Disaster will conjure a wickedly brilliant spell.” — Amber Tamblyn
“Lessons in Magic and Disaster is a marvel.” -Torrey Peters (Stag Dance)
“A novel that shimmers with fervent imagination and astute observation” — Meredith Talusan (Fairest)
"Charlie Jane Anders writes the kind of stories that break your heart and expand your mind simultaneously. Charlie Jane is a true gem in the literary world. I am a proud fan.” — Janelle Monáe
(Image: Daderot/Wikipedia).
Lessons in Magic and Disaster is about a young trans woman named Jamie, who is a PhD student in English lit. She's also a witch! Jamie has learned how to go into the abandoned places, where people built stuff that's being reclaimed by nature, and cast spells to make her life better. (Plus other people's lives.)
Jamie decides to teach her mother Serena how to do magic.
Serena has been living in an old one-room school house in the middle of nowhere for the past several years — ever since her wife died and a bunch of other bad stuff happened.
Jamie thinks that learning about magic will help her mom to feel powerful and start wanting things again. She wants to help bring her mother back to the world. But there's a lot that Jamie doesn't know about what happened to her mom back in the day, and the baggage that Serena still carries.
The novel has a lot of flashbacks to Serena's past as a lesbian activist in the 1990s and 2000s, including protests against the bombing of a lesbian bar, and other actions. And we see how Serena met her wife, Mae, and how they eventually had a child, Jamie. And how Serena and Mae dealt with raising a trans child in the 2000s and 2010s.
This storyline is so full of joy and coziness and family and love — Serena starts out as kind of a feral queer who is just messing around, but then she falls deeply in love and has to grow up in the process of building a family. Serena goes to law school and becomes an attorney, while Mae does a million jobs, including being a pro domme.
I really loved researching a million things about queer people from the 1990s to the 2010s, and it really drove home how much the struggles we're having today are exactly the same as back then.
Following the trail of Emily eventually leads Jamie to discover hints about a mysterious scandal that happened in the 1730s. And the scandal involved Charlotte Charke — who was a real person, but I made up the scandal in question. Charlotte Charke was an actor who usually performed in men's clothing, and she also lived as a man offstage. When she couldn't get work on the stage, she did men's jobs, and she married a woman who stayed with her for most of her life. (I'm using "she/her" pronouns for Charlotte because that's what she used when she was alive, but she was very clearly transmasc.)
That's Charlotte in the picture at left, wearing a totally fabulous pink outfit — she often played a foppish, overdressed man on stage. And pink was a manly color back then.
Anyway, we start to realize that the same struggle for liberation has been going on for CENTURIES. And also that maybe the author of Emily knew something about magic... something that can help Jamie and her mother in the present.
There's also a third storyline in the book! Jamie, the main character, is writing her dissertation about 18th century literature. Jamie becomes obsessed with a mysterious novel called Emily which was written by an anonymous woman in 1749.
(Emily is a fictional book that I made up, but all the stuff I include in Lessons in Magic and Disaster about how amazing the women authors of the 1730s and 1740s were is true. They were incredible. I was taught in college that Jane Austen was the first great lady novelist, and that was a lie. I found out so much great stuff researching this book.)