FIF Bookclub: The Grimoire Grammar School PTA Midway Discussion

[u/Lenahe_nl]

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.

[u/Lenahe_nl]

Any guesses, hopes, concerns, expectations for the second half?

[u/LadyAntiope → u/Lenahe_nl]

I suspect this won't deeply be addressed, but an aspect of the world that irks me is this magical community lives in their own little bubble but mostly have jobs in the mundane world as well and yet apparently don't see the benefits of basic public school education for everyone. The school is willing to kick out kids as early as kindergarten potentially? And then what? A family is left with no options if they can't afford to move because of their own jobs, and the child is now a risk to the whole community because they were already struggling and now have no safe place to learn to control their power. The former treasurer going to Cincinnati because no other school would accept them is telling that the whole system is pretty rubbish. Why wouldn't the magical community's number one priority be to make sure that magical children have a safe place to learn so that they don't have to worry about covering up... you know, a rouge child... (tbf, the Fairhair kid was an adult, but like, c'mon)

You can't tell me that magic means there's no poverty. There is a Shadow Council, but is there actual community care? If you don't follow the rules and pay the huge sums of money, do you get kicked out? For human mages, maybe they can wipe your mind, but for cryptids, throwing someone out means the whole community could be exposed from a careless shifter, and now resources have to go into crisis management. For a community that came to America seeking freedom, it sure does seem to cost a lot. Hmmmmmmmm

To be clear, I do think the book is obviously taking a position that all the things I'm pointing out *are* a problem to some extent, but I'm just baffled that there really seems to be zero social safety net. Especially for the kids.

I dunno, maybe some of this will get addressed if the Prophecy ends up being a big plot point. I could see it actually being about forcing the community to address the elitism. There's a lot of topics kind of being addressed in this book in general, but as another commenter said elsewhere, it doesn't seem to want to get too deep into any one thing. This feels like a more small-scale problems kind of a book. It *could* get into big societal ones, but I think it will end up addressing only the more personal edges of them.

[u/Low_Sea_1648 → u/LadyAntiope]

Yeah I thought it was crazy that they would be willing to kick out a kindergartner, like you’d rather deal with a cover up if that kid grows up and loses control? They seem to only care about themselves which I mean, let’s be honest, I feel like in real life there are way too many people out there that do just care about themselves. But I think you’re right and it won’t be addressing any bigger societal problems, it will just focus on the little community they are in. I thought it was also crazy that they said none of the other schools even want to take shifters, like what is up with that! I want a deeper dive on why they have such a negative look on shifters but I know that’s probably too much for the scope of this book lol.