My Review of "The Grimoire Grammar School by Caitlin Rozakis"

Reviewed by Me! 

      I only write reviews for books I really dig, so I won’t bury the lead. Caitlyn Rozakis’s "The Grimoire Grammar School: Parent Teacher Association" is good. Damn good. Bad things happen to great characters.
     The novel centers on Vivian, a former corporate accountant, now stay-at-home-mom, her husband Daniel, and their daughter Aria. One beautiful day, while on a hike through the mountains, supernatural horror slammed headlong into a parent’s worst nightmare. Vivian's family survived but not unscathed. Aria was turned into a werewolf.
     Vivian and Daniel uprooted their lives to save their daughter. They had two choices: move into the deep red forests to live with the other wolves, or Veilport: a cursed, magical WASPs nest (pun intended) full of old gods and older money to enroll Aria in Grimoire Grammar, an elite private school that catered to the supernatural. Veilport won. Wi-Fi, paved roads, and lattes. But from the very start, Vivian and her family are made painfully aware that this is not their community.
     The entire ordeal nearly tears Vivian and Daniel’s marriage apart. Raising a child with power while maintaining routines of affection when everybody is stretched to their emotional breaking point by commutes, what’s left unsaid, and terror dogs from the underworld is... a lot.
     Although the supernatural plot is riveting, this is truly Vivian’s story. Mother. Wife. Wizard (that last one not by choice, and she’s kind of terrible at it). The compromises that Vivian makes to fit in with the wrong people seem to overshadow even her small successes. And it turns out, this willingness to sacrifice pieces of herself for social access, a character flaw harder to wash out than grass stains, is only exacerbated by random demon attacks. Who knew?
     Vivian becomes the accountant to the Parent Advisory Council (not to be confused with the PTA) in hopes of making herself indispensable to Grimoire Grammar, thus securing Aria's precarious position in the school because, apparently, Grimoire takes kindergarten way, way too seriously. Vivian navigates poisonous relationships with selkie, wizards, and sirens. Doing so pulls her into a deepening occult prophesy, and despite her best intentions, paints a target on her back. In the end…well, no spoilers.
      There are many reasons I love this novel. Some are simple, and some deserve explication. But first of all, Grimoire Grammar is fun. “Just as one should not bring a knife to a gunfight, one should not bring brownies to a magic school picnic.”
      The writing is dope, meta-textual (with WhatsApp messages and school notifications), and TV ready. There are stand out favorite characters that I have cast in my head. Steve is played by Aldis Hodge or, for a very different look, LaKeith Stanfield. Madhuri is obviously Priyanka Bose (Alanna Mosvani from Wheel of Time).
         You know it’s a good book when you reread a scene just for the dialogue, to relive a particularly well executed exchange, or one that does what only good genre writing can—build a world in a few words. One of my favorite moments is when Vivian and Daniel finally take Aria to meet the (liberalish?) werefolk. In that single scene, the world cracks open to reveal what goes on beyond the confines of our main stage in Veilport.
     If the novel were any more suburban gothic, there might be a Dorian Gray cameo with him wearing nothing but his bathrobe and a wizard’s hat while he waters his front lawn and chugs merlot from the bottle. Caitlin shows how the scrabble for privilege is a ledge with a downward slope, and is its own type of horror. Even monsters can fall, and it’s scary how people will smile in your face as they push you into oblivion. Then again, if you know the history of privilege here in the United States, it just seems natural. But it’s not the kind of book that leaves you broken. Instead, we find, very early on, a muse-like figure in Vivian’s therapist. She gives powerful insights that eventually lead to healing; This story is about a woman’s self-portrait corrected.
      One of the most interesting things about the development of the story is the way characters feel alive even when they are not on the page. Nobody is waiting for Vivian to act in order to meet their own needs. Not only does Rozakis make this clear, but she connects their growth to one of the central themes. Vivian’s voice is internally consistent and dramatic, pulling you in just as much as it drags her down, and she forgets that her family, friends, and others live their own lives with or without Vivian’s interaction, no matter how much she might torture herself with the delusion that she is at the center of everything. 
     This novel is plotted around a who-done-it and has procedural elements to it. Yet the real mystery at the center of the story goes to another one of its themes. What are you willing to sacrifice for your child’s future? Or, more to the point, who? If you’re a parent of young children, you might read "The Grimoire Grammar School: Parent Teacher Association" on the edge of their seat. It’s that good.
 
#Parents#FirstTimeParents#FormerHarryPotterFansWhoAreAdultsNowAndWantBetter