So, there’s a subgenre that’s been proliferating like mad lately: Midlife Women’s Fantasy. I read it because there are so many things I love in it. Myths and magical houses are often incorporated. It makes me angry because the beginnings are generally so formulaic and stereotypical. And then it interests me again because authors do so many wild and wonderful things with those same elements.
It generally goes like this: MC is a woman, generally in her forties (occasionally a little older or younger but not by much). She feels old, sometimes with exaggerated physical manifestations of aging that strike me as unrealistic for her age, sometimes not. She finds herself in the middle of an acrimonious divorce, usually one that caught her totally by surprise. Occasionally the husband dies instead. She hadn’t known that he’d been cheating on her for years. Sometimes she catches him in flagrante, sometimes he coldly tells her to get out. She may have one child, generally off at college, or none, one best friend or none. She is adrift; something has also gone wrong at work and she’s out of a job. Her financial situation varies: sometimes she’s comfortably off, sometimes she’s destitute. Either way, she’s adrift emotionally because she’s spent all of her adult life trying to to make her husband (and family, if applicable) happy, treating them as her main job and doing all the emotional labor in the home, except that if she has a child, that child takes more after her and is usually loving. Sometimes they’re estranged, generally through a misunderstanding.
And right then, she learns that she’s been left a home or a business by a relative she might or might not have known, in a town she doesn’t know. If it’s a home, there is usually some sort of job role attached to living there. In a few cases, she stumbles in some other way across mysteries related to her family. Or else she’s known about her magic but has rejected it for some reason, and now it’s no longer impossible to live a fully mundane life. There may be magically-induced memory loss to overcome. She moves to the new town and learns that it’s full of magic. The house itself is often magical, maybe sentient. She develops magic powers of her own. She makes friends. Generally there is a brooding, dark (either physically or metaphorically), mysterious man in the mix (sometimes two) with whom she gradually develops a romance, though often that takes two or three books. Very often, she has a powerful and unique role in the new place, something she is uniquely destined to fill. If not, then she becomes important to the happiness of her new town or neighborhood.
The variety that erupts within those bounds, or uses them as a starting point, is what makes it interesting. Some authors play them straight (KF Breene, whose Midlife Magic series is AFAIK the start of the genre). Some use them as a stepping stone to whole new worlds (Linzi Day’s Gretna Green) often with mythic components. Some authors step outside the bounds I’ve delineated above (Elizabeth Hunter’s Glimmer Lake series stays in the MC’s hometown, and one of her three MC’s rekindles the relationship with her own spouse, while another is widowed after a wonderful marriage; Debra Wilde’s Magic After Midlife heroine is best friends with her ex, they coparent a child in her early teens).
I love them because they have so many of my favorite fantasy elements: magic existing in our own world (my favorite form of fantasy since I read Edward Eager’s Half Magic, back when my age was in single digits); women finding their own power; found family; magical or sentient houses. What I hate is that most of the original husbands are such formulaic villains – but I’m also feeling sorry for them because so many of the MCs have made their families’ well-being their main job in life, and who wants to be seen as a project rather than a person? Some of them are so evil they’ve deliberately gaslit the MC for decades, but I wonder if others lapsed into bad behavior in part because they weren’t ever treated as adults able to run their own lives. (Only in part, because cheating is always a choice and they could have simply had an adult discussion and tried to change things!)
My own AHiP probably falls within the genre (as one local bookseller told me, “It’s all about the vibe”) but it’s one of those that pushes the bounds. Macrina knows about her own magic, though it expands over the course of the book (and will expand more over the trilogy). In fact, the magic mostly isn’t secret; even people outside the Magical Community know magic exists, though they may not know much about the MC or have ever met a magical person. (I was thinking about the way everyone knows Judaism exists, or Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, whatever but they may never have met a Jew/Buddhist/Zoroastrian and may not know much about the actual associated beliefs.) She’s at a loose end at the start of the series due to outside forces, but not a divorce, and she had already moved to a new town a year before the book starts. And importantly, she’s happy in her current relationship and has no plans to ditch Gil. She doesn’t even expect her relationship to change (though she’s not completely right about that.)
Of course I know plenty of women whose first husbands really were that awful, but I know plenty of happily married people too. I’d really like to see a few more cases where a solid couple discover magic together. Sort of like a fantasy version of Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, who happily embark on solving new mysteries together in middle and even old age.
Quick warning note: much as I like the idea of it, though, I have to recommend skipping the last Tommy / Tuppence book, the one where they’re in their 70s. It was Christie’s own last book and sadly, it shows. It’s much worse written than anything else of hers I’ve read, and I’ve read most of them.