Annae, a brilliant graduate student in psychiatric magic and survivor of academic abuse, can't stop reading people's minds. This is how she protects herself, by using her abilities to know exactly how her colleagues view her. This is how she escapes the torturous experience of her own existence.
When Annae moves to England to rebuild her life and finish her studies under the seminal magician Marec Górski—infamous for bringing to life a homunculus made from his unwanted better self—she sees, inside his head, a man who is both a desructive force to everyone around him, and her mirror image. For Annae to survive, she'll need to break free from a lifetime of conditioning to embody her own self and forge her own path.
(spoilers below the cut)
I found this, inexplicably, in the queer fiction section, but it was really the story being about a graduate student that drew me, being one myself lmao. It's a wonderful world of academic magic that's been built in this book, and I hate to say it, but it's kind of a shame most of the book is spent on Annae! It feels like a book that has had chapters cut out of it, leaving only what's going on inside of Annae's head, and inside of the heads of others as Annae reads them. For all of her trauma that she works through in, it seems as though a lot of it is also tossed aside — her autism and masking she learns as a child is mentioned, but then treated as though that's the end of it. It's also a shame that it ends by cutting to her years later at a conference, seemingly having resolved all of her problems, and only meeting Torquil again then. I really liked Torquil as a character, and I found myself really wanting to see what his life was like, before and after having the empathy sucked out of him, before and after his and Annae's academic advisor straight up dies.
There's a few specifics to really nail down that this story takes place in the current internet age, but some of them are too jarring for this task. In particular is the explicit mention of Facebook, which is weirdly dated for a book written in 2022; another is Uber, and who knows how long they'll stick around for or whether they'll be displaced by something else? I know the existence of smartphones in contemporary-set stories are inevitable, and maybe this is really because I grew up reading stories where that wasn't the case, but the way phones showed up in the plot felt intrusive to me, like it was making a point about them existing. On top of that, not really related to technology, there were bits of weird UK vs US stereotyping going on. The teeth thing isn't even really true anymore these days...
I recently read The Dispossessed, which happens to also kind of be about academia and research. One of the things that stuck out to me was how specific and realistic the situation with Sabul felt, being stuck in an advisorship with an advisor who won't let you advance. Here the situation felt vague and... not unbelievable, I'm sure the kind of abuse of power depicted does happen, but that it could happen so overtly seemed unbelievable to me, especially in this day and age. I imagine it would be more subtle in real life, in what I assume is a large graduate program there's surely enough basic failsafes that severe abuses of power have to be discreet and indirect.
Overall, I'm not sure the whole book was cohesive enough, it seemed to want to cover a lot of themes without really bundling them all up properly with the plot. I did enjoy reading it all the way through, and I think maybe the book was just too short.