#witch week

I know a lot of people are happy to read fanfic in between writing letters to Netflix demanding a second season of our favorite show, but I thought I’d put together this list to help tide us over. These books span different age demographics, genres, and time periods, but they all strike a few notes of that chord that makes Dead Boy Detectives resonate with so many of us. Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments and reblogs!

Cemetery Boys by Aidan Thomas A queer coming-of-age story featuring magic, troublesome ghosts, teenage drama, and a murder mystery, this one reminded me a lot of DBDA when I read it. The main duo, Yadriel and Julian, bear a striking resemblance to the straitlaced (but not straight) magician and cheerfully chaotic brawn we know and love, and Yadriel’s cousin Maritza is a delightful strong female character to round out the trio.

Rules for Ghosting by Shelley Jay Shore No murder mysteries in this one, but there’s a lot of drama between the characters. We get an extremely messy found family as well as an extremely messy bio family, and the story tackles a lot of difficult subjects and different kinds of grief in a sensitive but hopeful manner reminiscent of DBDA. And yes, there are literal ghosts as well as metaphorical ones.

A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske If I had a nickel every time I fell in love with an Autistic-coded gay British Edwardian-era magician named Edwin, I’d have two nickels. Edwin Courcey isn’t Edwin Payne, but they have a lot in common, including a love of books, childhood trauma, and a determination to do the right thing even when it’s hard. Rounding out the cast are the stubbornly optimistic Robin Blyth, the practical Adelaide Morrissey, and the adventurous Maud Blyth—and yes, both Blyth siblings need a lecture about their impetuous tendencies. I love the way neurodivergent characters are written in this book, as flawed people who truly care about others, much like in DBDA. This book (and its sequels) also offer good world building, fantastic imagery, excellent banter, murder mystery, magical conspiracy, queer romance, and found family—what more could you ask for?

Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer I know this one is science fiction not fantasy, but it really feels like DBDA in a way that’s difficult to pin down. We get a cast of neurodivergent queer teens, a good balance of humor against darker topics, fabulous dialogue, a suspenseful mystery, a slow-burn romance, a few surprisingly nuanced and sympathetic antagonists, all against the backdrop of small-town America. There’s also an AI with a fondness for cat pictures and a scene where the kids hack the school’s lesson materials to make it provide accurate LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed. But I think the real heart of the story is the loneliness, the friendships and community the characters find. This one is dear to my heart and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss Returning to the realm of supernatural mystery—and to London from over a century ago—we have this story about women monsters reclaiming their narratives while solving a series of murders. Daughters of Jekyll, Hyde, Rappacini, Moreau, and Frankenstein come together and strike back against the mad scientists who wronged them. There’s also an appearance made by Sherlock Holmes. Readers hoping for canonically queer characters will be disappointed, but book two features lesbian vampire Carmilla and American spy Irene Adler.

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones This is the only children’s book on this list, as well as the only book from a series with no canon queer characters. But the world where magical history is censored and accusations of witchcraft lead to arrests, even for minors, certainly feels familiar. This boarding school might be co-ed, but it rivals St. Hilarion’s with its tendency for the adults to turn a blind eye to the bullying and the pranks gone too far. Magical shenanigans abound and unlikely friendships form as the children discover their abilities and scramble to stay one step ahead of the inquisitors. Technically, this is book four in the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, but it really is a stand-alone novel, and probably my favorite in the series.

The horrors of the British boarding school, the things you learn about yourself in the men's locker room, and what the Chrestomanci series is really about (it's Chrestomanci.)

Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Archer's Goon!

Witch Week

by Diana Wynne Jones

I'm trying to get caught up in doing these book reviews. Thankfully I am quite a slow reader. Because of this I really enjoy novellas, or in this case, a longish middle grade book from the 80s.

Apologies in advance for the way this review is going to be a Harry Potter comparison, as I know these comparisons have been making DWJ fans roll their eyes for at least 25 years, if the marketing quotes on the front of newer copies of the Chrestomanci books are anything to go by.

I read this book because a friend of mine was telling me about the "horrible, wretched children" in it and I was thinking that really that was the aspect of Harry Potter I most connected to as a kid and why I am baffled by the direction the Harry Potter fandom has taken today, what things other people seem to have gotten attached to as important. To me, Harry Potter was always about an abused orphan finding power and connection in his relationships with others. What's all this about the Marauders and Pure Blood Houses as a vehicle for writing dark, vaguely regency inspired romance? I thought we were here for Harry as a character. Or we were, before Joanne Rowling's crusade against trans people. Anyway.

Witch Week washed out the bad taste Rowling's descent into transphobia and the Harry Potter fandom's refusal to engage with this in favor of shifting attention to background characters in the series left in my mouth. There are lots of small details in this book that really emphasize for me that Rowling was writing in a specific tradition of British boarding school stories that seemed new and interesting to an American audience, and to children of the time they were coming out, just through lack of exposure. The detail I keep coming back to is the sequence of Charles Morgan sneaking out at night to an empty classroom and then having to hide from the caretaker and his ugly little dog. DWJ did it, if not first, at least before JKR did.

Ultimately I think this book demonstrates that Jones has a better grasp on the experience of childhood than Rowling, and the book also has a more sympathetic ending in terms of character growth and narrative cohesion. It's impossible to read Harry Potter now without thinking about all the ways her prejudices baked into the text may have anticipated the person she's become today. To pull out a specific example, there's a lot of fatphobia in both Harry Potter and in Witch Week. However, in Harry Potter fatness is used to emphasize the immorality of the male Dursleys, Vernon and Dudley, and contrast them to their victim Harry who is thin and deprived. It's straightforwardly equating fatness with deficiency of character. In Witch Week, however, fatness is portrayed as a vector of bullying and self-worth issues for Nan Pilgrim. It's a much more engaging and sympathetic thing to do with fatphobia.

Interestingly enough, this more complicated and nuanced understanding and usage of existing forms of prejudice extends to the realm of gender, in contrast to Rowling's transphobia. Here is an excerpt from Witch Week in which Nan Pilgrim writes in her journal after an unhappy experience sitting at the high table with the teachers and then being accused by her classmates of being a witch:

I do not know if [the class of] 6B is average or not, but this is how they are. They are divided into boys and girls with an invisible line down the middle of the room and people only cross that line when teachers make them. Girls are divided into real girls (Theresa Mullett) and imitations (Estelle Green). And me. Boys are divided into real boys (Simon Silverson), brutes (Daniel Smith), and unreal boys (Nirupam Singh). And Charles Morgan. And Brian Wentworth. What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all the girls to be better than me and all the boys better than Charles Morgan. They are allowed to cross the invisible line to prove this. Everyone is allowed to cross the invisible line to be nasty to Brian Wentworth.... Some of Brian's trouble... is that Brian is really good at things and comes top in most things, and he ought to be the real boy, not Simon. But SS is so certain that he is the real boy that he has managed to convince Brian, too.

I think Nan Pilgrim's estimation of the gendered dynamics of her class and how race, fatphobia, and her own understanding of masculine hierarchy (what we as the audience might understand as socially assigned queerness in men and boys, the failure to perform the gendered role of "boy" and the connection with queerness this evokes) is the philosophical heart of this book. Nan is not a "real girl" because she is fat; her body is degendered in her mind and through the bullying of her classmates; they accuse her of being a witch because in their world being a witch means the removal from public life and eventual execution. Nirupam Singh is not a "real boy" because he is Indian; his separation from white gender roles others him and suspicion forms he is a witch because of it.

And then there's Charles Morgan. Charles Morgan wears thick glasses and is unpleasant to others and what Nan and the other children are sensing in him in thinking him not a "real boy" is the kind of social isolation children who are keeping secrets, whether that be abuse at home or, in Charles' case, the knowledge of being a witch-orphan and his sympathy towards the young witch who he saw when his parents died, often face. Charles is odd; Charles is secretive; Charles is paranoid; Charles almost goes bad at the end of the book because he wants to keep what makes him separate even if it will kill him (and everybody else). In some ways this makes him read as queer, and it also makes the ending of the book, where the world where these prejudices and paranoias melt away into another world where magic was always supposed to exist and all the factors that led these children to hate and ostracize each other were not, feel somehow like a deconstruction before the fact of the Harry Potter series' perspective on wizarding secrecy and muggles.