Lessons in Magic and Disaster
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- 24,99 €
Publisher Description
"Listeners will be captivated as each narrator provides glimpses of Jamie's present and Serena's past, interspersed with snippets from the book of magic that Jamie is studying." — AudioFile
In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a multicast audiobook 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 basically your average New England academic in-training--she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This charming fantasy asks a deeply relatable question: If you had actual magic, could you be make your incredibly stressful life and the world better, or would it just make everything even worse? Jamie is a witch who uses her power to improve her life in little ways, like holding onto the grant she needs to finish her PhD research. In an effort to help her mother, Serena, cope with the grief she still suffers from her wife’s death, Jamie tries teaching Serena magic, which goes catastrophically wrong. The audiobook keeps the story threads clear by employing three narrators: a blunt, practical-seeming voice for Jamie’s storyline; a slightly cool, reserved reader for flashbacks to Serena’s younger days; and a refined British voice for extracts from Jamie’s research into a 19th-century London women’s literary circle. We were amazed at how many plotlines and themes Charlie Jane Anders manages to pack into a turbulent but ultimately hopeful novel, from balancing family and personal responsibilities to academic workplace politics. But mostly this is about the search for magic and grace in a world plagued by serious social problems.
