This book really grabs you by the shoulders early and tells you to pay attention cause it has something to SAY! Multiple times I had to put the book down and try to focus on something else, cause this book has made me furious beyond belief at multiple times. It strikes such a wonderful balance between being fictional but having a lot of truth mixed inside it, with some of the notes in the book being very much factual and giving insights to a prison system I've not wanted to understand. Mostly because I find it a little barbaric, it kinda feels like a privilege to not live in the US.

The multiple POV could sometimes make it hard to figure out who was talking or who we were following. This just made me pay more attention to what was happening, and loved the way the different story lines connected and how chapters further along shed some light at what was actually going on. The book asks some very interesting questions about how convicts are being treated, if by taking a human life or other heinous acts of crime does that mean they no longer are human?

There are some chapters in here that's going to live with me probably for the rest of my life, showing how people with good intensions can create horrible inventions that they never wanted to see the light of day, can be twisted and used to further an evil company to earn more money. I feel this one should be required reading for so many. To be able to see absolutely horrible humans are still humans. Also seeing how kinda close we are to this kind of reality, where people profit from people killing even more people than they already have. Death begets death begets death, this is not how you make productive members of society, this is how you keep the heinous crimes going to get more money from their suffering. I'm just angry, and sad, this was just a great book all around.

Damn. This book chewed me up and spit me back out and left me reeling.

This book is about magical thinking, searching for answers, obsessive intrusive thought spirals, panic attacks, abusive relationships, alcoholism, and dissociated, enigmatic Twitter posts.

It's about Twin Peaks and Red Dead Redemption and Stevie Nicks and Tarot and how we search for meaning and signs from the universe in every meaningless moment.

It's about an indigenous woman trying to break free from the colonization of her mind - the generational trauma of theft and rape and grief - and return to her land and her soul. It breaks every boundary and shatters every rule and snatches every satisfaction away from the reader.

Washuta's obsessive thinking is brazenly presented for examination and judgment. Each essay attempting to find a new meaning in the same moment, a new explanation for the same behavior, a new answer to the unsolvable riddle of trauma.

The titular white magic is squished and pressed and pushed until every last drop of meaning is squeezed out of it. White magic as culturally appropriative new-age spirituality. White magic as healing via writing and spellcasting and feeling. White magic as magical thinking and angel numbers and searching for signs in the nothingness.

It felt like the ground was constantly shifting under me, like I was falling into a rabbithole, then being yanked back to the surface, then being thrown into the air and plummeting back down. There is no center, no beginning and no end. Only flashes and flares of memory that twist and turn until up is down and left is right.

There were moments that felt like the dim in-between of dreaming and waking, when you can't quite remember if you heard something before, or if you just dreamt about it; when you can't quite remember if you actually did something, or if you just dreamt that you did.

Every single line forces you to stop and reflect and interrogate yourself. Does this line mean something because it means something, or does it mean something because you want it to mean something? Does this book make you uncomfortable because the topics are heavy, or because you weren't expecting to be implicated and examined too?

Her writing reads exactly as it feels to be trapped in the throes of PTSD cycles: trying anything, reading and consuming and examining everything for an answer and a solution, seeing yourself reflected in moments that would be meaningless to anyone else. Scratching and clawing and praying and hoping and begging and screaming for any sort of meaning or answer or way forward.

Each topic addressed and abandoned and re-addressed and re-forgotten, worried and reworried under Washuta's fingers as the essays tangle around seemingly unrelated topics until you have paragraphs building upon each other to paint a hazy picture of Washuta's mental state.

Obsessively watching and rewatching Silver Springs to see Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham's prolonged eye contact becomes a way for Washuta to work through her own tumultuous relationship. Twin Peaks' The Log Lady becomes a mirror for her own magical thinking and connection to the supernatural.

Remembering bits and pieces of a DARE video she watched in the 70s becomes a way to understand her own alcoholism. The Oregon Trail becomes a simulation for what it means to live as an indigenous woman who passes as white in an America built upon genocide. Playing Red Dead Redemption becomes an outlet for her to explore her relationship to herself and question her attraction to men that hurt her.

Mirroring her interiority, Washuta's writing is somehow both painfully self-aware and dreadfully oblivious. She's trying to piece together answers that are impossible to find, and you're helpless but to watch as she walks herself further into traps and cycles that seem beyond her control, as she self-sabotages and relapses and hurts herself because hurt is the only thing that has ever meant anything.

She repeats sentences and epigraphs and conclusions and then cheekily breaks the fourth wall to check if you're following along. She's witty and poetic and drily repetitive and pitiful and full of rage all at once. In all of this, she directly challenges the colonial structure of writing itself. Are you able to sit with a woman who refuses to be healed, an emotional arc that refuses resolution, a narrative that breaks you and interrogates you without apology?

Tumultuous and ungovernable, White Magic is frustratingly inventive, and breathtakingly human. I have never read anything like it, and doubt it can ever be replicated with Washuta's skill and candor.

“Do you think this is a good book? How do you know? Is it because you compared it to other books? I do want to make you uncomfortable if you’re accustomed to being the ideal audience, your wants prioritized.“