After discovering Caitlin Rozakis last year and finding her fantasy satire, Dreadful, utterly delightful, I immediately set my sights on her new book for 2025. In The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, Rozakis takes us into an urban fantasy of sorts to tell a story of a mundane family suddenly thrust into the magical world.
Nothing could have prepared Vivian for parenthood, especially when it comes to raising a five-year-old werewolf. While Vivian’s husband keeps his job in the city, Vivian must learn to navigate a magical world while her daughter, Aria, attends a specialized school to hone her abilities. As a mundane, Vivian doesn’t understand anything, and her “shifter” daughter is an anomaly amongst all the highfalutin mages, faeries, selkies, and sirens. Vivian must learn how to manage her constantly shifting daughter, a magic town steeped in history, and parents who fret over the expectations of the highly competitive school. As if that wasn’t stressful enough, the town’s prophecy of doom begins just as Vivian and her family arrive in town.
At its heart, GGSPTA is about the difficulties of motherhood and highlights many aspects of this role, from leaving the workforce to dealing with a new identity to navigating the trials of having a young school-aged child. I didn’t walk away from this story feeling that motherhood was deeply explored in this fantasy satire, but it’s ever-present and certainly gives voice to the ongoing worries and triumphs. The plot is centered around the motherhood lifestyle and its minutiae, like making appropriate foods for a potluck, helping with school projects, and managing the personalities of parents. The story and the prophecy unfold between PTA meetings and disastrous scrimmage games, all while Vivian tries to learn how to be a good parent and support a child who is on an unfamiliar journey to her own.
I did not enjoy living through Vivian’s anxious and stressed perspective throughout GGSPTA. Vivian has complete control of the story through her first-person narrative, and she’s going through a difficult time after a traumatic event, getting thrown into a magical community, and losing common ground with her husband. So the reader is enmeshed in her inner monologue, which I did not particularly like, mostly because Vivian’s state of mind feels like a plot device and not a character trait that is contributing to her arc in the story. We get a lot of Vivian stressing about something until it ultimately causes her to act, but there’s no real development with it. Vivian does this over and over again while the supporting characters come in with clunky dialogue and mini therapy sessions. It all feels superficial and left me unsatisfied with Vivian’s development overall.
The humor in GGSPTA also never landed quite right with me. A lot of the funny moments tried to come through by pointing out mundane things that occurred in the magical world. Like, why was there a pause for laughter when we’re told that a wizard owns a Roomba? Or that the submarine car with seaweed hanging off of it obviously belongs to a siren? There’s no substance beneath the “jokes” to make it meaningful or funny. Fantasy readers are well accustomed to the fish-out-of-water trope. But where Vivian’s observations are meant to be funny, I took them more as observations to give the reader a sense of the world she is operating in.
The real issue with GGSPTA is that it’s trying to be a cozy fantasy centered around extremely serious and difficult topics, and the light, funny tone just does not work. Vivian and her daughter experience a violent, traumatic event that pushes them into the magical community. Aria is repeatedly bullied for being a werewolf, kids are targeted at the school with dangerous magical attacks, and Vivian’s mental state is degrading under the pressure. None of these are treated with the kid gloves it so desperately needs, and instead act as fodder for Vivian’s internal musings, flippant remarks, and snarky jokes.
I didn’t end up loving The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association as much because it lacked some of the depth and heart that I cherished in Dreadful. This story felt a little out of synch and tone deaf. Did it want to be a cozy read or a serious commentary on motherhood with a special needs child? GGSPTA attempts to do both.
Rating: The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association – 5.5/10
-Brandee
