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
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.
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