Lessons in Magic and Disaster
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
From the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Award-winning author of All the Birds in the Sky comes a heartfelt and intimately drawn portrait of a young trans woman witch who teaches her mother magic, following the death of her wife. Perfect for fans of Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke.
Jamie's mother, Serena, has been hiding in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, since her life fell apart. The death of her wife, to cancer, proved too much for Serena. And Jamie, well Jamie hasn't been doing too well either.
But Jamie has a secret: she's a powerful witch, and now she's decided to teach Serena to cast spells, so her mother can get her life back. Her magic is a question of exchanges, of creating the world you want to live in.
As the strains of her grief start to affect her marriage to Ro, Jamie realises she doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mothers all those years ago. With Serena heading down a destructive path with her magic, and the secrets Jamie is keeping from Ro piling up, it's only a matter of time before something gives.
Desperately trying to hold it all together, Jamie seeks to understand the secrets of a three-hundred-year-old magical book, her mother and her wife, before it all falls apart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nebula Award winner Anders (All the Birds in the Sky) brings gentle humor and a clear-eyed sense of justice to this lovely standalone contemporary fantasy. Literature grad student Jamie Sandthorne has a secret. She doesn't fully know how it works and can't think about it too much, but for years she has quietly been practicing witchcraft. Years after the death of her mother Mae, Jamie decides to share this gift with Serena, her surviving mother, who's still trapped in a spiral of grief. However, fierce, driven former lawyer Serena sees magic not as a gift but a weapon, and ropes Jamie into a mission of revenge. Anders lets the unintended consequences of this revenge quest unfold alongside a clever framing narrative centered on a pair of 18th-century women novelists and uses the dual plots to tease out a skillful commentary on social precarity and the way vulnerable people trying to make a difference can become casualties in the culture war. With a lovably messy trans protagonist and a deep, tender-hearted exploration of grief, guilt, and the difficulty of asking for the things one wants, this is perfect for seasoned readers of queer feminist speculative fiction looking for a cozy escape that still challenges.
