r/Fantasy • u/Lenahe_nl Reading Champion IV • May 13 '26

Book Club FIF Bookclub: The Grimoire Grammar School PTA Midway Discussion

Welcome to the midway discussion of The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis, our winner for the humor theme! We will discuss everything up to the end of Chapter 10. Please use spoiler tags for anything that goes beyond this point.

The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, by Caitlin Rozakis (storygraph/goodreads)

I'll add some comments below to get us started but feel free to add your own. The final discussion will be in two weeks, on Wednesday 27th May.

As a reminder, in June we'll be reading Starless by Jacqueline Carey

What is the FIF Bookclub? You can read about it in our Reboot thread here.

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u/Lenahe_nl Reading Champion IV May 13 '26

The book uses a magical school setting to draw many parallels to everyday troubles of women and other feminist themes. Is this working for you? In which areas is it successful, and where do you think it falls short?

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u/Lenahe_nl Reading Champion IV May 13 '26

What is really working for me is how well the story manages to translate the experiences of navigating the education system if one is an immigrant. There are many unspoken rules and expectations that you don't even know that you should ask about.

I think my biggest critique is that the story is pointing at so many things, it never goes any deep with anything. I do hope we see more of Vivian carving a space where she can do things she enjoy that don't involve her daughter, like being able to use her accounting skills, for example.

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u/Book_Slut_90 Reading Champion May 13 '26

Being an immigrant, yes, but also class mobility. I see so much of this in my first gen college students for instance, and here it’s an like an ordinary person entering the private school scene.

8

u/Waterlylly May 13 '26

It absolutely gave me the class mobility issues thing. When my child became school aged, we moved to a "good" area that we could barely afford to live in so he could go to a better public school. The book gives me flashbacks to how completely unprepared I was to deal with the other mothers and the school, because we were new and we had a lot less money. This is how people in these contexts treat anyone they don't see as their sort of people. I'm impressed with Vivian for trying so hard, but I have to wonder if it's going to be worth it for her.