
Lessons in Magic and Disaster
Kindle Edition
Tor/Forge · Ebook · August 19, 2025
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.
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- Who it’s for
- A family story where spellcraft, grief, and literary curiosity share the same unruly page.
- Themes
- Family relationships, Grief and memory, Magic and identity
- Genres
- Contemporary Fantasy, LGBTQ+ Fiction, Witch Romance
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Matched by what the books are about, then ordered by what their readers also loved. Most of these share its genre: Witch Romance.
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For younger readers: Lovely Dark and Deep, A Feast for the Eyes, Night Owls
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
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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.
Magic, With Family
A family story where spellcraft, grief, and literary curiosity share the same unruly page.
Come here for
- A witch teaching her grieving mother to cast spells
- A three-hundred-year-old magical book and a literature-minded grad student
Expect
- Warmth edged with family secrets and peril
- Magic tangled with identity, loss, and love
Where it sits
| Contemporary Fantasy | 87% |
|---|---|
| Witch Romance | 47% |
| LGBTQ+ Fiction | 33% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Contemporary Fantasy
- Literary Fiction
- LGBTQ+ Romance
- Authors
- Charlie Jane Anders
- Publisher
- Tor/Forge
- Published
- August 19, 2025
- Format
- Ebook
- Theme
- Family relationships · Grief and memory · Magic and identity
- Reading lane
- Contemporary Fantasy