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.
"Narrators Sena Bryer, Lisa Flanagan, and Marisa Calin enliven the characters of Jamie, a young witch, and her mother, Serena, along with the text in a mysterious 300-year-old book that weaves through this queer fantasy audiobook. In the present, Jamie, a New England graduate school student who is studying literature and is secretly a witch, has a lot on her plate. She's also teaching her reclusive and grieving mother magic in an attempt to bring her back into the world. But Jamie's best intentions turn into disasters that bring chaos and harm. Listeners will be captivated as each narrator provides glimpses of Jamie's present and Serena's past, interspersed with snippets from the book of magic that Jamie is studying. The narrators keep listeners hoping that Jamie and Serena's powers will bring good things into their lives. B.A.G. � AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine"
