(by Charlie Jane Anders)
I think the three storylines of this novel and the way the narrative switches between them made it a slow start for me, but once I was about halfway into the book I was fully invested. In one storyline we have Jamie, who’s working on her PhD dissertation and also trying to figure out if she can use witchcraft as a way to help her mom, Serena, who’s been hiding from the world since her life imploded (her wife died and she lost her job, all at the same time), while also navigating difficulties in her romantic relationship and in her own work life.Then we have the flashback storyline of Serena and her wife, Mae, and Jamie when she was a kid—how Serena and Mae met, various episodes in Jamie’s childhood and college years, et cetera, up until the point where Serena loses her job and Mae dies. And then we have the story within a story (and actually, another story within that): excerpts from Emily, the (fictional) novel that Jamie is writing her dissertation on. Witchcraft is one thread that runs through all the storylines; questions of love and connection and how to support the people we care about most are also a big aspect of all of the parts of this book.
While Emily is fictional, Anders situates it within the real context of eighteenth-century British literature; part of Jamie’s dissertation hinges on who actually wrote the book, and the contenders are all actual authors from that era. I liked the bits of cultural and literary history that Anders works into the novel as a result: the parts about Charlotte Charke—who played male roles in plays and wore men’s clothes offstage as well—were particularly great. I also like the Cambridge/Somerville setting of the present-day part of the book, including the references to real places like Diesel Cafe and Toscanini’s (I lived in Cambridge for exactly one summer, over twenty years ago, but I still think about the burnt caramel ice cream from Toscanini’s.) And oh, this description of Philly, where Jamie goes for a conference, is excellent too: she thinks of it as “one of those cities where you can still find endless treats: strange tiny bookstores on the top floor of rabbit-warren malls; gay bars sneaking between the stained-glass blades of civic institutions; basement music venues whose air has gone thick with the trapped exhalation of uncountable drunken cheers and whose floors are tarry from years of spilled drinks.”
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