Thank you NetGalley and Tor Books for the advance copy! This book is an incredibly ambitious display of insight into family, change, grief, and perspective. There are so many layers to the story it’s almost difficult to keep all of them in hand. While I really admire Anders’s close details, incisive commentary, and academic thoroughness, the story did really lag in places that felt too disconnected from its core. But it also makes me want to wander through the local woods to find sites of natural reclamation and start casting spells, and anyone who enjoys solid literary analysis and/or critical cultural thought will find Jamie a highly relatable protagonist. We follow Jamie, a young trans woman working on her PhD dissertation, as she struggles with the death of one parent, attempts to reconnect with her living mother, clashes with conservative students in her classroom, and exists under the judgmental eye of late-stage capitalism. She toils on her dissertation, taking deep dives into the lives of 18th-century women who transgressed social boundaries and wrote their experiences in novels. In the backdrop of it all, she casts spells in secret, workings in nature that draw on her truest wants — but the small innocence of these moments is shattered when she tries to teach her mother how to be a witch as well, and magic goes from being a comfort to being a disaster. I loved the way Jamie’s dissertation research is woven together with her contemporary experiences; I actually wish this had been a bigger part of the novel. There’s a lot to be said here for the way perspective changes, switching between subject and object, moving between being the observer to having the experience of being viewed and analyzed. The interwoven timelines of the 18th-century women and writing of Emily (the novel Jamie is researching), the younger Serena and Mae (Jamie’s parents) getting together and figuring out their relationship, and finally Jamie and the older Serena finding each other again really worked for me in tandem with the conservative bad actors shadowing the plot. The addition of Jamie’s relationship with Ro (Jamie’s spouse), however, really dragged me out of everything else. I found Ro a particularly unlikeable character, and every scene Ro was in slowed to a crawl for me. Much as I love to see nonbinary rep, they felt like more of an unnecessary complication than an actual part of Jamie’s life. This is the sort of book that will speak to a very particular audience. The dialogue is largely unnatural, and the prose style never really stays in a particular POV; often it feels as though Anders is addressing the reader directly for a paragraph or several before returning to the story. This is a slow read that will make you think, and in that, it really succeeds. —— This book took me about 8.5 hours to read.