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Jeanne is the best at writing teenagers and I think she is one of the greatest at writing sorcery, magic, invocation and dreams. If you've read Black Emerald or Summer Fun and had a good time, you will like this one. It's about three trans girls, all of whom participated in online game design communities in the 1990s and who are all psychically indebted to the character of the Sorceress from the popular Mystic Knights video game series.

The form of the triangle is a powerful one for magic--and for drama-- and the relationships between three trans girls closeted to various degrees, in various ways, serves as the wheel spinning in this plot. While having never met in person, the girls spend hours talking, and planning the levels of their game, in which a powerful sorceress will resurrect Norwood Abbey as a thriving center of art, magic, and community in a devastated wasteland. When romantic drama brews and one girl is sent to Boy Scout Camp, the game flounders, and the girls drift into adulthood separately.

Solemn Sash, once a bossy, serious teenager who cared about the game more than anyone, has become a dominatrix, but her lack of patience for bullshit or absence of vision means that the business side of her business challenges her, and she has limited contact with trans friends. Survival-mode Lilith, whose online moniker has become her real identity, works at a bank, turning down or approving loan applications as part of an irrepressible machine-part, while enduring come-ons from her boss. Abraxa, never dominated, and never in doubt about her identity, has rocketed meanwhile from one unstable life situation to the next, and after accompanying a straight couple on an abortive sailboat trip, she crashes with a friend in Jersey and then finds the abandoned, burned-out church that will become the subject of an intense psychosis which might also contain real magic.

Moved by dreams from childhood, but caught in unconsummated ripples that leave all three women unsatisfied, Sash and Lilith are vulnerable when Abraxa manages to make contact and reveals she has been squatting at the abandoned church, which she is trying to turn into a real Norwood Abbey. Just when it seems that dreams from another realm might really break through into our world though, there are failures of communication, of cooperation, which prevent the vision from emerging. Abraxa learns the truth about dynamics between Sash and Lilith that she thought she understood, and the spell breaks. i won't spoil too much.

This book has MORE than you have yet seen in most books about what it feels like to love someone you have never met, to need them, to be unable to explain threads from your past which are tied up in the magic spell another teenager cast on you through the computer. Like many novels, it doesn't have answers for revolution, but it encourages catharsis, contact, care, and empathy. Abraxa, in her multidimensional consciousness, is both a homeless woman experiencing insane visions and a visionary whose reality is not ready for this world, in a way that feels the most true to me of anything I have read about a crazy friend. The way her visions are the same as those of a businesslike cis woman who wants to start a community center, but different, is also highlighted. There is at the heart of the book a promise: if a few more things fell into place, it would be possible to build Norwood Abbey. Perhaps another playthrough would get to it. Jeanne writes sadness with the solidity of someone who believes in happiness. Lilith too, having experienced magic at the digital hands of Sash as a teenager and since at the hands of various good and bad trans girlfriends, tries to protect the possibility of better things coming, while living among many women who have accepted a certain degree of misery. Sash longs for more contact, but despite internal desire and decisiveness, she behaves in ways that others find erratic and untrustworthy-- the reactions of the world at large to our central women are an expert exploration of what transmisogyny actually looks like in queer spaces, while also lingering on the moments where our central characters fail themselves and each other. This sounds more pat than it actually is in the book. I was on the edge of my seat in so many interactions. No book has ever made a loan underwriter's actions so exciting.

The sorceress figurine falls off the shelf: your best friend named you and vanished. What would you do with the magic residue left behind? Where can you find safety in this dark world? And who will build the levels?

Read it.