Jamie's mother, Serena, has been hiding in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, since her life fell apart. The death of her wife, to cancer, proved too much for Serena. And Jamie, well Jamie hasn't been doing too well either.
But Jamie has a secret: she's a powerful witch, and now she's decided to teach Serena to cast spells, so her mother can get her life back. Her magic is a question of exchanges, of creating the world you want to live in.
As the strains of her grief start to affect her marriage to Ro, Jamie realises she doesn't know the whole story of what happened to her mothers all those years ago. With Serena heading down a destructive path with her magic, and the secrets Jamie is keeping from Ro piling up, it's only a matter of time before something gives.
Desperately trying to hold it all together, Jamie seeks to understand the secrets of a three-hundred-year-old magical book, her mother and her wife, before it all falls apart.
Charlie Jane Anders is the Hugo, Nebula, Crawford, Locus and Lambda Award winning author of Victories Greater than Death, The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She is former editor-in-chief of io9.com and her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies.