In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls Unbecoming an “excellent feminist fantasy…Readers will be taken with this powerful and deeply satisfying tale.” In Locus, Gary K. Wolfe notes “hilarious echoes of the sort of gonzo academic satire we used to see in the novels of David Lodge and others.”
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The story of a woman leading an ordinary life who discovers within herself extraordinary powers, UNBECOMING is sage, funny, and warm, like a long conversation with your best friend about all the strange and wonderful things that have been happening to her lately. Lesley Wheeler’s writing is so deft and magical that I’m convinced that she must have learned it from the fairies. This smart, beguiling debut fantasy casts a spell that readers won’t want to break. –Emily Croy Barker, author of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic
Lesley Wheeler’s Unbecoming is a delightful, beautifully written 21st century gothic novel set at a Virginia university and also in the borderlands between the literal and the metaphorical, between the realistic and the fantastic. Like all universities, this one is a school for wizards and conjurers. Professors offer portals to undiscovered countries and enchanted lands. Portals lead to demons and horror and death too. Cynthia has recently become English Department Chair. She’s perimenopausal and coming into her blood-magic, witch woman power. The English Department is a tiny realm, fighting other more powerful realms at the University that would swallow any beleaguered humanities discipline. How do we survive each other, resist the demons or easy escape to a deadly realm that could destroy us? How do we conjure a path to the world we want? Lesley Wheeler says, ask the poets and the painters! –Andrea Hairston, author of Will do Magic For Small Change & The Master of Poisons
Unbecoming is framed largely as a satirical academic tale, but one leavened with more than a bit of witchery and magic, principally the notion, which begins to haunt the narrator, that certain women entering middle age somehow develop magical powers…there are occasional hilarious echoes of the sort of gonzo academic satire we used to see in the novels of David Lodge and others. -Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
May 2020, Aqueduct Press, ISBN 978-1-61976-167-4, 248 pages, softcover $18
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LESLEY WHEELER 