Lessons in Magic and Disaster

Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

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. 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.

Charlie Jane Anders is one of my favorite authors. I will read everything she publishes! This is a great book with fully formed characters. Read it today.

Anders, Charlie Jane. (2025). Lessons in Magic and Disaster. New York: Tor. 

For the Rest of Us

For the Rest of Us edited by Dahlia Alder is a collection of short stories about holidays from various cultures.

Fourteen acclaimed authors showcase the beautiful and diverse ways holidays are observed in this festive anthology. Keep the celebrations going all year long with this captivating and joyful read!

From Lunar New Year to Solstice, Día de Los Muertos to Juneteenth, and all the incredible days in between, it’s clear that Americans don’t just have one holiday. Edited by the esteemed Dahlia Adler and authored by creators who have lived these festive experiences firsthand, this joyful collection of stories shows that there isn’t one way to experience a holiday.

With stories by: Dahlia Adler, Candace Buford, A. R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy, Preeti Chhibber,
Natasha Díaz, Kelly Loy Gilbert, Kosoko Jackson, Aditi Khorana, Katherine Locke, Abdi Nazemian, Laura Pohl, Sonora Reyes, and Karuna Riazi.

Adler, Dahlia. (2025). For the Rest of Us. New York: Quill Tree Books. 

Martyr!

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is a beautifully told story that encompassed enough to be an epic, but personal enough to be intimate. A masterclass in writing along with a moving story.

Cyrus Shams has always been lost. He’s grown up tangled in the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields, a haunting work of art by an exiled painter, and his mother, whose plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby. Now, newly sober and maybe in love, he’s headed for an encounter that will transform everything he thought he knew. Can a final revelation change the truth of Cyrus's life?

Electrifying, funny, and all-consuming, Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is a masterpiece. Read this book.

Akbar, Kaveh. (2024). Martyr! New York: Random House.

Skye Falling

Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie is the story of a woman who has built her life around travel, partly as a way to avoid close relationships. 

When she was twenty-six and broke, Skye didn’t think twice before selling her eggs and happily pocketing the cash. Now approaching forty, Skye still moves through life entirely—and unrepentantly—on her own terms, living out of a suitcase and avoiding all manner of serious relationships. Maybe her junior high classmates weren’t wrong when they voted her “Most Likely to Be Single” instead of “Most Ride-or-Die Homie,” but at least she’s always been free to do as she pleases.

Then a twelve-year-old girl tracks Skye down during one of her brief visits to her hometown of Philadelphia and informs Skye that she’s “her egg.” Skye’s life is thrown into sharp relief and she decides that it might be time to actually try to have a meaningful relationship with another human being. Spoiler alert: It’s not easy.

Things get even more complicated when Skye realizes that the woman she tried and failed to pick up the other day is the girl’s aunt, and now it’s awkward. All the while, her brother is trying to get in touch, her mother is being bewilderingly kind, and the West Philly pool halls and hoagie shops of her youth have been replaced by hipster cafés.

With its endearingly prickly narrator and a cast of characters willing to both challenge her and catch her when she falls, this novel is a clever, moving portrait of a woman and the relationships she thought she could live without.

McKenzie has written a smart, fun tale of Skye rethinking her plan to keep running from people, make peace with her past, and maybe building a chosen family. Great views of West Philly and it's past.

McKenzie, Mia. (2021). Skye Falling. New York: Random House.

Weather

Weather by Jenny Offill is an epic tale in a small package.

Lizzie works in the library of a university where she was once a promising graduate student. Her side hustle is answering the letters that come in to Hell and High Water, the doom-laden podcast hosted by her former mentor. At first it suits her, this chance to practice her other calling as an unofficial shrink—she has always played this role to her divorced mother and brother recovering from addiction—but soon Lizzie finds herself struggling to strike the obligatory note of hope in her responses. The reassuring rhythms of her life as a wife and mother begin to falter as her obsession with disaster psychology and people preparing for the end of the world grows. A marvelous feat of compression, a mix of great feeling and wry humor, Weather is an electrifying encounter with one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Offill is unlike any other writer I have read. She can convey so much in such a small space. Fans of writing should study her!

Offill, Jenny. (2020). Weather. New York: Alfred A Knopf.

The Ride of Her Life

The Ride of Her Life by Jennifer Dugan lesbian romance set on a horse farm.

Molly McDaniel’s life is falling apart. Between her day job as a barista, her night job at a call center, and her crushing student loans, she’s barely getting by. And that dream she has of starting a wedding event planning business? The dream that led to all those student loan in the first place? She can feel it slipping farther and farther out of reach every day. So the absolute last thing she needs is to discover she’s inherited a run-down, struggling horse barn out of the blue, courtesy of her estranged late aunt.

Molly is so ill-equipped to run the barn, it’s laughable. She certainly doesn’t have the money, time or knowledge needed to save it, no matter how much faith everyone who loved her aunt has that she will. But the more Molly gets involved, the more she starts to wonder: maybe the barn is a blessing in disguise. If she can sell the land, the profits could be the small-business seed money miracle she’s been waiting for. So what if she’s starting to love everyone in the mismatched family she’s found here?

Well, everyone except Shani, the resident farrier and family friend who took care of Molly’s aunt in her last days. Judgmental, grouchy Shani, who refuses to give up on the barn; who walks around like she so much better than Molly; who’s actually really good with the horses…and kind of thoughtful. And obnoxiously hot. And unfailingly loyal.

Dugan has written another great lesbian romance. Her books are always enjoyable and worth a read.

Dugan, Jennifer. (2024). The Ride of Her Life. New York: Avon Books.

The Fiancée Farce

The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur is a lesbian romance with an unusual start. 

Tansy Adams is tired of going to family get togethers about her step-cousin's upcoming wedding to the worst man in the world. To get out of a dinner she makes up a date. When asked with whom, Tansy says Gemma. Gemma West is a woman she has never met, but is the cover model on a book she was looking at during the call.

Months later, at the cousin's wedding, Gemma walks into the room. Of course Tansy's step-sister says something to Tansy. But Tansy never dreams that not only will Gemma go along with her lie, she will up the stakes.

Bellefleur has written a sweet, hot romance about a bookstore manager and a publishing heiress. A really fun read.

Bellefleur, Alexandria. (2023). The Fiancée Farce. New York: Avon.

Sandwich

Sandwich by Catherine Newman is a beautiful look at a hard time in life - being part of the sandwich generation between aging parents and newly adult children. 

Rocky and Nick are spending a week on Cape Cod with their adult children and Rocky's aging parents. This is a tradition of two decades, each in the same rental house. 

If you have not yet had the pleasure to read a Catherine Newman adult book (she is also a children's book author) - NOW is a good time. She writes about the parts of life that many books gloss over. You will laugh out loud and you will sob at some point. 

Sandwich is a story about love and family. It is relatable even if you don't have children, but I imagine even more impactful if you do. Go buy this book today. Once you read it a few times, you can gift it to a loved one.

Newman, Catherine. (2024). Sandwich. New York: Harper.

The Thirty Names of Night

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar is a story set in the Syrian American community in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. This is a beautifully told story.

Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria.

One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. [from Fantastic Fiction]

Joukhadar, Zeyn. (2020). The Thirty Names of Night. New York: Atria Books.

We Deserve Monuments

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds.

Mama Letty is very ill in the late stages of cancer. Though Zora left the second she was old enough, and has an unspoken of, decades old, conflict with her mother, she and her family are moving to Bardell, Georgia to help.

Avery know little of her grandmother. She and her mom visited once when she was five, but all she remembers of the visit is yelling. Now, at the beginning of her senior year of high school, she is leaving D.C. and her two best friends, moving to a town that looks tiny and run-down. 

Luckily, right away Avery meets Simone and them Jade. Finding two new friends is a blessing. But what Avery doesn't know is the history between their three families. The layers of secrets, racism and town history will slowly be revealed.

As friendships grow closer and time is spent in Bardell, stories are revealed that will both bring Avery closer to her mother and grandmother as well as reveal how racial violence can ripple through generations. 

Hammonds has written a story about family relationships set in a small town with big secrets. This is a beautifully written novel of our history as well as current day country. 

Hammonds, Jas. (2022). We Deserve Monuments. New York: Roaring Brook Press.