There's a kind of magic I *love* to read about - the kind where it's not entirely clear whether the person purporting to do magic is acting entirely on instinct, and neither they nor we can be entirely sure whether anything magical has actually happened. This ambiguity just *tickles* something in me, the part of my brain that tries to bear down on traffic lights to make them turn green, or on board-game dice to get a good roll.

2/

It's the mode of Iain Banks's *The Wasp Factory* and Kelly Link's *Book of Love.* It's a mode that Anders does superbly, and has done since her 2016 debut novel, *All the Birds in the Sky*:

memex.craphound.com/2016/01/26…

That's the kind of magic at the heart of *Magic and Disaster*, which tells the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation.

3/

For Jamie, holding it together is a tall order. Her relationship is on the rocks, her advisor is breathing down her neck, a smartass alt-right kid in her class keeps trolling her lectures, and to top it all off, her mother Sarina has withdrawn from society and is self-evidently preparing to lie down and die, out of grief and penance for the death of her wife, who died of cancer that everyone - her doctors and Sarina - downplayed until it was too late.

4/

That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic - magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might - or might not - conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

5/

Jamie's never told anyone about the magic, but when she and Sarina have an especially bitter confrontation, it slips out. In desperation, Jamie gives her mother - a campaigning lawyer who has withdrawn from life and become a hermit - a demonstration of magic. Her mother approaches the demonstration with a lawyer's don't-bullshit-me skepticism, but something in her responds to the magic.

6/

When Jamie leaves her, Sarina tries to bring back her dead wife, a forbidden conjuring that has disastrous consequences.

Jamie had hoped to give her mother something to live for, but catastrophic magical experimentation wasn't what she had in mind. Soon, Jamie is dragged into Sarina's life, to the detriment of her relationship with Ro, a fellow academic who is rightfully suspicious of Sarina and the effect she has on Jamie.

7/

When Ro finds out about the magic, the relationship breaks, and now Jamie has to face her problems alone.

Those problems keep mounting. Jamie is working on a dissertation about a 300 year old "ladies' novel" that promises to reveal some profound truth about the life of its author and her challenge to the role that she finds herself confined to as a woman, but it's slow going.

8/

Jamie's advisor is at pains to remind her that there are dramatic changes in the offing to the university, and that Jamie had best get that thesis in *soon*. Meanwhile, the Men's Rights Activist bro in Jamie's class keeps upping the ante, mixing disruptive "just asking questions" behavior with thinly veiled transphobic digs (Jamie is trans, a fact that is woven around her relationship to her mother and to magic).

9/

Anders tosses a *lot* of differently shaped objects into the air, and then *juggles* them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device. There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere.

10/

There's romance, heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all,there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

This is a wonderful magic trick of a novel from a versatile author whose work includes YA space opera, hard sf adventure stories, and a wealth of brilliant short stories. It's a remarkably easy novel to read, given how much very difficult stuff Anders is doing in the writing, and it lingers long after you finish the last page.

eof/