Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

  By Charlie Jane Anders

• Pub Date: 2025

• Genre: LGTBQ fiction  

• Where I bought this book: The Bookmatters Bookstore, Milford, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I like her writing style

• Bookmark used: The Bookmatters Bookstore

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    The further one gets into this book, the better it gets.

     It's a delightful confluence of fiction, non-fiction, and faux fiction.   

    It revolves around Jamie, the child of a pair of lesbian activists, who is struggling with multiple people in her life. There's her mother, Serena, who has become a hermit and is mourning Mae, her wife, who died more than a decade ago. Jamie tries to reconnect with Serena by teaching her magic.

    But Jamie has other issues. Her own relationship with her partner, Ro, is in trouble, and Jamie doesn't know how to fix it. That's because she also is struggling to finish her dissertation while teaching classes to students who just don't get her fascination with 18th Century women writers. Those students include Gavin Michener, "who looks like the villain of every eighties teen comedy (wavy dishwater hair, beady ice-blue eyes, letterbox chin)," who deliberately antagonizes her with his conservative views on women, literature, and LGTBQ people.

    But wait, there's more. Jamie's dissertation is on a series of early feminist writers and their books -- some real, some Anders admits she just made up. Jamie attempts to make some sense of their novels and relationships with the events of the late Restoration and early Georgian periods in England. 

    There's also a buried story in there about Jamie's sexual identity, which comes out over the span of the novel.

    Yes, it's complicated, but Anders can weave a tale like no other. She's a stylish and witty writer unafraid to look peculiarly at her own people and their foibles.  

    For instance, as Jamie teaches her mother magic, mom insists on bringing in other women, and forming a union of witches. In another effort to get her life together, Jamie joins a book club, but it's full of women with cars "that have Planned Parenthood stickers and messy backseats." Their discussions veer quickly away from books and into mindfulness techniques. 

    There's a lot to take in with this book, but it gets there in the end. It's got a somewhat snarky tone, but Anders gets away with it because she's writing about a people she is a part of, and she wants to show off their charm and pitfalls.

Book Review: The Gales of November

    By John U. Bacon

• Pub Date: 2025

• Genre: Non-fiction, history 

• Where I bought this book: The Joseph Beth Bookstore, through author speech at The Mercantile Library 

• Why I bought this book: The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald has fascinated me for 50 years now, and, of course, the song

• Bookmark used: Stop Book Bans, the ACLU

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   Part history, part geography, part maritime lore, part biography, and part legend that lives on, Bacon's book, subtitled "The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a work of art.

    Untold may be an exaggeration, but the book does give a broad look at the 1975 tragedy that resulted in 29 deaths when the ship went done in Lake Superior during a record-shattering storm.

    It's true the lake never gives up her dead, but we can admire its strength, power, and history. And Bacon's does a marvelous job of showing it all with precision, focus, and feeling. 

    If you want to know why the wreck of boat carrying 26,000 tons of iron ore that crashed 50 years ago on Dec. 10 has captured the imagination of millions around the country, listen to the Gordon Lightfoot song, then read this book.

    It begins with history, including a previous "storm of the century" that began on Nov. 7, 1913, and raged with blizzard conditions for four days over four of the five Great Lakes. Hurricane winds reached up to 80 mph, and waves breached 35 feet. Some 250 died, and nearly 40 ships were damaged or destroyed.

     Bacon said the 1975 storm also came in early November, which had an unusually warm autumn with calm and clear conditions.

    Adding to the threat was a dangerous dynamic all too familiar on the Great Lakes. The later winter shows up, the angrier it becomes.

    The story continues with the geography of the Great Lakes, the connection between the shipping and iron ore industries, and the growth in the region, especially Toledo and Detroit, in the early and mid-20th century.  The construction of the Edmund Fitzgerald -- named after the executive of the company that built it -- began in 1957. Launched the following year, it was the biggest ship the lakes had ever seen. At 729 feet long and 75 feet wide, it was built specifically to fit into the Soo Locks on the St. Marys River, between lakes Superior and Huron.

    He explains how large and perilous the Great Lakes are. Fresh water lakes are more dangerous in storms than an ocean because salt water weighs down and smooths out the waves. Superior, sometimes called the GLOAT*, is 350 miles long a 160 wide, meaning your cannot see a shore from its center. The lakes stretch from New York in the east to Minnesota in the west. They border eight states and two countries.

    The facts and history are interspersed with taut but emotional biographies of the men who went down with the ship, based on interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, mariners, former crewmen, and rescuers. We can envision their lives ending all to soon, and what could have been. We can admire their strength and courage -- and their fears as they saw "the Witch of November** come stealing."

    Bacon explains how the tragedy brought together the families of the 29 men who died. To this day, the wives and the sons and the daughters -- now into the second and third generations -- have struggled together, supported each other, and became a small community.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed

In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral

The church bell chimed 'till it rang twenty-nine times

For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald***

The Mariners' Church of Detroit

    Through the interviews, we learn how the tragedy brought together the families of the 29 men who died. To this day, the wives and the sons and the daughters -- now into the second and third generations -- have struggled together, touched each other, and become a small community.  

    The families have cried together at the site of the wreck, which is now a internationally protected burial ground. They meet yearly at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Bay, where the ship's bell -- brought up in 1995 from under more that 500 feet of water -- is always on display. They have prayed together at the Mariners' Church of Detroit -- which Lightfoot had dubbed the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral. 

    Despite its sober topic, and its width and breadth, the book is quite readable. It combines short chapters on the history and geography, then includes chapters on the people involved, often bringing them back to discuss their lives, the lives of the crew, and of the people who live and work on the Great Lakes.

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*     Greatest Lake of all Time.

**   A storm in early November.

*** In the original lyrics, Lightfoot called it a "musty old hall." After he visited and parishioners gently chided him for the term, he agreed and started singing, "in a rustic old hall." After he died, on the anniversary of the wreck, they rang the bell 30 times.