Heart-Mending: Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders
UK cover; US coverLessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Pansexual trans MC, nonbinary spouse, lesbian MC
PoV: Third-person present-tense; third-person past-tense; dual PoV
Published on: 19th August 2025
ISBN: 1250867347
Goodreads
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 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.
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
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~book hunting
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~I would die for these dorks
Initially I wasn’t sure this was going to be for me – I found the first chapter pretty dull – but I’m so glad I stuck with it, because Lessons in Magic and Disaster ended up being one of my favourite books of the year!
And it really shouldn’t have worked for me? Lessons is not a very typical Fantasy story: it almost might be Contemporary instead. The magic involves (almost) no special effects, no wands or glowing lights, and it’s more than a little vague (intentionally: a significant part of the book is the characters figuring out how magic works). Jamie is researching her dissertation and teaching a literature class at her university, beset by an absolute dickwad of a transphobic student; her researches into 17th century English lit written by women is a semi-constant thread woven throughout the rest of the story. All of this should have bored me to tears; would have, methinks, in the hands of a lesser author.
Instead, I was absolutely obsessed.
It’s hard to put my finger on why! A big part of it, I think, was how – how comforting the familiarity of it all was, and by that I don’t mean the travails of being a grad student or trying to lead your mom out of her grief or the intricacies of 17th century literature, none of which I’m familiar with at all. It’s – the flavour of it? The vibes? Anders has described Lessons as her queerest book yet, and that’s the magic x factor, that’s why it feels so familiar: this is such a queer book. These people are my people! We would click immediately despite our wildly different interests and lives! And that queer quality I can’t figure out how to define – it suffuses the whole book, every single page, and makes it feel homey. Comforting, even when Major Stresses are happening to the poor characters. Familiar, even though most of this is new territory for me. I mean, check this out;
Ro slaps a flogger made of recycled rubber against their left palm. “So. Which cardinal virtue are we to expound today?”
A shiver starts in Jamie’s scalp, she can enumerate every follicle on her head. They’re doing the cardinal virtue game! Corporal punishment for cardinal virtues–it’s the tits.
THESE NERDS (affectionate) BRING CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY INTO THEIR BDSM GAMES. Plato and St Ambrose and John Donne-level stuff. HI I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. Are Plato and St Ambrose my thing??? No, not really. (Donne totally is.) But that’s irrelevant, it’s not the subject matter that makes you click instantly with these other nerds (although it can), it’s the passion of the interested parties – and yes of course this is not exclusively a queer thing, at all, but this example in Lessons is just one scene among many that captures a particular shade (strain? genre? stripe?) of oddball, earnest, unconventional queerness that I don’t know how to define but surely you get what I mean!
(The scene quoted above is not very explicit at all, for the record, and I think is the closest thing to a sex scene in the book.)
It’s the way these characters talk, and think, and build relationships; the things that are important to them, the causes they care about, the way they care about each other. Obviously they mess up sometimes (who doesn’t?) but boundaries, consent, and autonomy are concepts they’re aware of and work hard to respect. As is the way they – feel their feelings? I don’t know how to put it better than that. But even if I can’t quite put my finger on it, even if I can’t put a name to this Special Queer Thing – it is going to be immediately recognisable to so many readers, and as appealing, as welcoming, to them as it was to me. Especially because – despite the travails the characters all go through over the course of the book – there’s a very strong element of queer joy to Lessons, too. You walk away from it happier than you were when you picked it up. Warmed. A little bit more able to face the rest of the world.
Since Jamie needs to prove that Emily is important and worth discussing, she scoops up these tiny shout-outs up like a basket of kittens and cradles them in her arms, cooing and covering them with little kisses. Who’s a good citation? It’s you, it’s you.
Other than queerness, what suffuses this book is the passion I mentioned before. There is nothing like listening to a person talk about their special interest when they really get going about it. Any topic becomes wildly interesting when someone who knows all about it and loves it is tripping over their own tongue to tell you why it’s cool. Lessons is, in some ways, one of those conversations – Jamie’s love for the books and authors she’s studying comes through loud and clear, to the point that it made me interested, not because this was the main character’s Thing and it’s therefore relevant to the story I’m reading, but because it became objectively interesting. And I think many if not all readers are going to find themselves caught up in it like I did, simply because it’s impossible not to be swept up in that passion. This is excellent for a number of reasons, but the one I want to highlight is the sheer craft and skill it takes to pull this off! Very few stories can make you care about a character’s special interest when it’s not already an of-interest-to-you-topic; the intense love of a thing is much less catching in text than it is in listening to someone in person happily expounding on it, for some reason. But Anders does it, captures that incredible, addictive energy, that love and delight in a subject, perfectly – AND makes it look easy!
(It definitely doesn’t hurt that the mystery and story of Emily – the novel Jamie’s obsessed with and is writing her dissertation on – is genuinely fascinating, especially in how Anders weaves it in parallel with Jamie’s life. The secrets hidden in this book-within-a-book DELIGHTED me utterly! And there was such a beautiful, wonderful theme of – of a hidden but powerful and unbroken line of women who reached for more; a line Jamie is a part of. It made my heart ache in the best way. Emily is Jamie’s inheritance, in a very real way that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with spirit. I had to hug my ereader to my chest!)
(Why do we say, “benefit of the doubt”? Why not “benefit of the belief”?)
Plot-wise, Lessons is what would typically be considered low-stakes Fantasy – there are no Dark Lords or armies or saving-the-world quests. Jamie and her remaining mom are trying to rebuild (or recreate?) their relationship; this leads to them exploring and experimenting with magic, past the bounds Jamie’s already familiar with. The stressors are every-day stressors: the Humanities are in peril at Jamie’s university, putting her under even more pressure to get her dissertation done; she has to navigate a horrible student without telling him to crawl back into the sewer he came out of; there is much research to be done into Emily. But all of these things – I still seized up at the tension, I still freaked out when Things occurred, because even if they didn’t matter to the world they mattered to Jamie, and to me. Anders is most excellent at engaging us, making us care, and even though Jamie is imperfect (WHO ISN’T?) she is still this ridiculously cool, lovely person I wish I could befriend in real life. I did not want terrible things to happen to her! Even when those terrible things were ‘just’ screamingly awkward moments and the like!
“I wear my mistakes like my scars: proudly,” Delia says. “They’re credentials, because I learned better.
Some of the things that happen are much more serious than that, and there’s probably a lot of very clever things to be said about what Anders does – or rather, doesn’t? – do with the idea of A Villain, or possibly Villainy, in this book. It helps to have read her newsletter, particularly this issue here, where she says:
Case in point: Lessons in Magic and Disaster features a couple of characters who are bigoted assholes, and neither of them gets much “screen time.” They show up long enough to inflict some damage, and then they’re gone again. The book isn’t really about them, and the only reason they really matter is because my characters struggle with what to do about them. They could almost be natural disasters.
This is not a common approach to villains in Fantasy, at least not in the books I read – but I’m fascinated by it. The idea of…de-platforming the villain, almost? The idea of a villain who isn’t important, in and of themselves. It’s a surprisingly refreshing contrast to the approach I’ve seen in the last few years, where villains are humanised. And I like humanised villains! I do! But there’s something…kind of intoxicating, almost, in going nope. This isn’t your story. Stfu to the bad guy(s). You only matter because you affect the ones who matter. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything Anders was doing with this, but damn, I loved what I did catch!
“I can read the ransom notes left by my own heart.”
Lessons is such a gorgeous, poignant, heart-warming book – quietly but powerfully magical; hilarious; heart-breaking and heart-mending. It taught me things I didn’t know, and re-affirmed things I did; it’s a reminder of how wonderful and ridiculous and worth-living-in the world is. I adore it. It’s one of my favourite books of the year.
And if you read it, I think it’ll be one of yours too.
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