nevanna | Spells To Forget Us: Book reaction and some thoughts about writing and genre

I recently read Spells To Forget Us, a YA contemporary fantasy about a young witch and her non-magical girlfriend who have to deal with the consequences of a memory-erasure spell gone wrong. If you like time-loop stories or the neighborhood resets in The Good Place, you might like this book. I did not love it as much as I wanted to, but that’s primarily because it didn’t give me the story that I hoped for when I picked it up, not because there’s necessarily anything wrong with the story itself. I truly hope that this title finds its audience, even if – for reasons including but not limited to my age – I am not it.

I did enjoy a lot of things about the book! I appreciated that it was set in the Boston area (and definitely turned into the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme when the girls went to Flour Bakery in Harvard Square). Aoife’s desire for autonomy and privacy, despite her influencer parents’ determination to record and profit from every aspect of her life, was extremely compelling and unfortunately very relevant. I was actually more invested in that plot than in the politics of Luna's supernatural community, though she was also a very sympathetic character and her sacrifice-based magic had some nicely creepy moments. It’s awesome that, in today’s publishing landscape, two queer teenagers of color – one of whom is plus-size – get to have magical, romantic adventures. And although I feel itchy whenever a story describes non-magical people as “mundanes,” I was able to tolerate it here, possibly because the main character was one.

Until she wasn’t anymore.

I don’t hate stories in which the protagonist is the only one in their family, relationship, or community without superpowers, and then gains them over the course of the plot – I understand the wish-fulfillment value there – but it’s the least interesting resolution to that conflict that I can imagine. Likewise, I’m trying to accept Aoife’s revelation that she used her “beauty magic” to get her parents off her case, as a power fantasy for teens who feel like their parents never listen to them, especially since I’ve never been exploited by the adults who care for me and had to do something desperate and morally questionable in self-defense… and yet, as a narrative payoff, I still found it disappointing. I had hoped, based on the book’s synopsis, that it would explore how Memory Erasure Is Wrong, Actually, and – as I said before – it’s not the book’s fault that it didn’t give me exactly that.

Some of you might be thinking, “Hey, Nevanna, maybe you should write a YA fantasy novel about relationships between people with superpowers and people without them, which explores how Memory Erasure Is Wrong, Actually.” Believe me when I say that I have tried. I’ve been trying to tell some version of that story for over half my life. That’s why my first fanfiction.net profile mentions “my pride in being a Muggle.” A lot of my fic, across various fandoms, has been about ordinary people dealing with their proximity to the extraordinary, and I have made several attempts to file the serial numbers off some of that fanfic (none of which is online anymore; I wrote it a long time ago) and reimagine it with my own world and characters. Google Drive contains several partial drafts of original fiction, most of which I started during NaNoWriMo, about the families and friends of magic users, and my brain currently contains one more potential take on that same premise that I haven’t even committed to the page yet.

I used to dream about a successful writing career. Now, I like my day job enough that I probably wouldn’t try to pursue writing full-time even if I eventually could (which I know is rare). At the moment, I’m not confident that I have the self-discipline to complete an entire manuscript, or a thick enough skin to navigate the YA publishing world, and my brain-weasels insist that I have nothing substantive to contribute to the literary landscape in the first place, and that it would be a waste of my time and energy to even attempt it.

But my reaction to books like Spells To Forget Us might be proof that some ideas have yet to leave me alone.