Vivian has always been desperate to please, to be appropriate, to be perfect, and she’s about to face her biggest challenges yet in Caitlin Rozakis’s hilarious and moving novel, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. Vivian’s whole family has relocated so that her daughter, Aria, can attend the prestigious school. The twist? The Grimoire Grammar School exists to teach young mages, werewolves, elementals, and other magical young’uns. Vivian is so out of her depth.
If I were in Vivian’s shoes, I would be just as intimidated as she is during her first (unfortunately inauspicious) meeting with the parents of the Grimoire Grammar School students. They’re all glamorous, powerful people, and no one gave Vivian the Emily Post for this new world. Vivian does her best to make a good impression, but thing go awry after an invisibility spell and a batch of brownies end up in the wrong hands. Something always seems to go wrong whenever Vivian meets up with the other parents, no matter how much she tries to prepare or how many thankless tasks she volunteers for.
Rozakis lets Vivian’s story unfold slowly, before kicking things into high gear later in the school year. As the weeks pass, we learn how Aria became a werewolf and how much Vivian still beats herself up over it. We also learn, along with Vivian, that not all is as orderly at the grammar school as everyone would have Vivian believe. For one thing, the funds the PTA have raised don’t add up no matter what Vivian does. No one will tell her why. Then there are the disasters that strike every time the students are tested on their control over their powers and knowledge, disasters that could be deadly if Vivian didn’t keep throwing herself into the middle of the chaos to protect her daughter. Something is clearly rotten at the Grimoire Grammar School.
I had a great time reading The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. I laughed out loud more than once, and found myself deeply affected by the way Vivian wrestles with her low self-esteem and begins to overcome her self-imposed limitations. Being a socially anxious person myself, I sympathized deeply with Vivian. That said, I was very much charmed by the setting and world Rozakis created for her characters. Like she did with Dreadful, Rozakis spins genre tropes with universal human woes, then punctuates the pathos with a delightfully silly sense of humor.