Writing funny fiction isn’t easy; writing it with style, wit and great storytelling is even harder. Yet here is Caitlin Rozakis, who in 2024 not only published the New York Times bestseller Dreadful — about an evil wizard who accidentally gives himself amnesia and then rethinks the whole “evil” part of the job description — but also had another one of her novellas (“Leah’s Perfect Christmas,” written under the name Catherine Beck) turned into a Hallmark Channel Original Movie.

But Rozakis isn’t resting on her laurels — because this year she’s publishing her next funny fantasy, only this one’s taking place in the more contemporary (and far more terrifying) world of schools and PTAs: The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association.

Rozakis, who has gone through career changes over the years that include mechanical engineering, finance, and the American Museum of Natural History, is currently a marketing expert who lives in New Jersey with her husband and son. She’s also always game for an afternoon tea, as I’ve discovered while getting to know her. Here’s what we chatted about ahead of Grimoire‘s release!

Grimoire mixes magic and schools – a combination we’ve seen before but never seem to tire of. Why are these two institutions so frequently paired?

Caitlin Rozakis: I think it’s a combination of factors. The school frame, if nothing else, makes it very easy for the author to world-build–the reader learns about how the world and the magic system works alongside the protagonist. But I think school is one experience nearly all of us share, and for most of us, it was a high-drama experience. Adding magic not only gives a chance to see how the experience changes, it also takes the natural drama of young people figuring out their place in the world and heightens it. Not only is this test going to determine your grade, it will determine whether you are allowed to learn how to control the powers that threaten to destroy you. Not only is your extracurricular club the most important thing to you, it’s critical to saving the world.

The spin in The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association, though, is that we’re not focused on the students. I grew up, like many bookish kids, on Harry Potter (and have watched Rowling’s descent into hatefulness with horror). Lev Grossman’s The Magicians came out a few years after I graduated from college. The magical school trope is always about our desire to be told we’re special and whisked away to a secret place where everything really is as dramatic as life feels when you’re a teenager. So as I became an adult and then a parent, I started looking back on the whole trope with amused horror–how would I feel if it wasn’t me who got labeled as special and invited into a secret world, but my child? How would it feel to have all my assumptions about the world turned on its head but not get any fabulous magical powers out of it? Would I be willing to let my kid embrace their destiny when it involves trusting a school that regularly gets its students cursed, hexed, and murdered? And where exactly am I supposed to buy a ritual dagger, anyway?

How did you want to avoid (or embrace) the tropes we often see when these two worlds collide?

Grimoire is satire, so as far as I’m concerned, every trope is an invitation. Similar to my debut novel Dreadful, I mock because I love–I think the tropes are beloved for a reason, but they’re also strong enough to take some teasing. The rhythms of the magic school novel depend on the rhythms of normal school life. We have the pre-school shopping trip, the exciting sports event, the high stakes test, the politics of dealing with the popular kid. In a typical magic school novel, adding magic to each of these rituals makes them more dramatic. But it also makes them more inherently ridiculous.

At the same time, the rituals of the modern mundane school are also ridiculous. The scramble for extracurricular signups is cutthroat; I’ve set alarms because if you don’t get into that coveted robotics class in the first five minutes, your child is out of luck. So what happens when you have that kind of pressure on people who can cast time stops and memory spells and fireballs?

How magical (or not) was your own school career?

I went to a well-regarded public school; I’m pretty sure my school career was the definition of mundane. I did go to Princeton, and some of those buildings are pretty romantic, but I got assigned to the dorm that was an ’80s architectural mistake (and subsequently bulldozed, to great rejoicing). There’s a certain lack of glamour when the fake wood tile keeps peeling up when it sticks to your bare feet.

Do you recall a particular fictional or magical school that particularly appealed to you?

I feel like one of the tropes is always discovering that the school has dark secrets that makes it somewhat less attractive as you discover them. The Unseen University from Discworld feels like it’s one of the more benign options out there–all it’s really hiding are squabbling academics and a few terrible design decisions, courtesy of the renowned architect Bloody Stupid Johnson.

You’re a mom. How much of your experience with motherhood and PTAs and in-school parental politics is reflected in Grimoire?

I’ve been joking that this book was therapy. For the record, my child’s school is generally awesome, and they’ve done very well by him. Most of the parents I’ve worked with in my years on the PTA have been fantastic people, and I’ve made a number of good friends over the years. That said, parenthood is rough in general, and it has not been easy to be a parent particularly over the last decade. You do get cliques, just like in any group of people, and there were definitely some parents I did not get along with well. Plus, you never know what you’re going to get when you walk into a PTA meeting. In some, we’ve had arguments that were far too drawn out about stuff like homework (too much! too little!), collecting for teacher gifts (too much! too little!), and even whether the kids are allowed to take their jackets off during recess. In others, we’ve had some genuinely harrowing conversations about active shooter protocols, security needs in an urban school, COVID precautions, and how to handle some horrific tragedies in our school community. Is today going to be about fundraising gala themes or shelter in place drills? And these days, the discussion doesn’t end after the meeting. I’ve had days where I swear my blood pressure has ticked up two points every time my phone has made the WhatsApp notification sound.

In the book, for example, there is a major security incident on campus. The parents are all too aware what’s going on, but can’t do anything with the campus in lockdown, and all that energy has nowhere to go but the WhatsApp group. I’ll be honest, as high drama as it is in the book, it’s still probably not as high drama as the actual WhatsApp group was the day that there was an actual shootout not far from our school, which went into actual lockdown. The book’s incident is tense but funny. (Spoilers, no children are seriously harmed in this book. Can’t say that for most magic school books, actually.) In real life, I think I owe at least three gray hairs to that WhatsApp conversation.

What’s the best thing to make for the PTA bake sale – in real life and in the book? Want to share a recipe?

In real life? Chocolate chip/brownie double-deckers. It’s a bar cookie with a brownie layer, topped with a browned-butter chocolate chip cookie layer. No one can ever decide if they want brownies or chocolate chip cookies, and now they can have both.

But as Vivian in the book learns, since dogs can’t have chocolate, they’re not the best choice if there are werewolves in the school population. I have all the sympathy — when my kid was in kindergarten, he was allergic to dairy, eggs, almonds, and tree nuts. No one wanted to eat the nut-free vegan things I had to bake for him, and I’d end up making two different recipes all the time so that he could have something but I still had an offering other people would eat. (Luckily, he’s grown out of all the allergies since!)

Did the success of Dreadful take you by surprise? What do you think appealed to readers about it most – and what did you hear back from folks?

My first book, Dreadful, was so much more of a success than I’d expected that I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it all means. I went through a major crisis of nerves writing the book that’s going to be coming out after Grimoire (fortunately for me, I’d already turned in Grimoire when Dreadful hit). The imposter syndrome is real.

One of the things that surprised me about Dreadful is how many people have reached out to say that they’re not usually fantasy readers; a surprisingly large number confess that it’s been years since they’ve read anything at all. I kind of expected to make a small splash in the fantasy community, but instead, something about it has inspired a lot of folks to take a chance. I think the humor has given it a broader appeal than I’d expected. (Plus the amazing cover art by Natasha Mackenzie.) It’s humbling and delightful.

How do you write fantasy that has funny elements without making fun of fantasy itself? Does humor best come from people who both know and love the genre?

I think the key to humor that doesn’t punch down is that it should never be “look at those people over there, they’re ridiculous” but rather “look at us, we’re ridiculous”. Much of the humor in both Dreadful and Grimoire is less even about fantasy tropes being funny; it’s about how fantasy tropes reveal that humans themselves are funny. Humans are marvelous, awful, incredibly ignorant and incredibly wise, obsessed with the stupidest details imaginable and completely oblivious of the biggest truths. We try so hard and we mess up so badly. Adding magic to that just makes it even more obvious.

What (and/or who) makes you laugh? How do you weave your sense of humor into your stories?

I think it’s pretty obvious that Terry Pratchett was a major influence. Most recently, I’ve been catching up on Lower Decks. I love wit, satire, deep references, and affectionate mocking. I cannot stand cringe humor–watching people embarrass themselves will leave me physically hiding behind the couch. I don’t find people in pain to be particularly funny, and I don’t like seeing people ridiculed for sincerity. I try hard to keep a spirit of compassion for my characters; I tend to build humor out of escalating situations, clever observation, and relatability. The funniest things are funny because they’re true, not for that dude over there, but for everyone but especially for me.

What was the first story you wrote, and what became of it?

I have a history of early success that makes my career sound a lot easier than it’s actually been. My very first published story was in elementary school, when I won the local newspaper’s kids short story contest. (I still have the clippings!) Then I failed to get into any of the creative writing classes I applied to, for years. The first short story I sent out on submission as an adult was bought by the first magazine I sent it to, a magazine called From the Asylum which folded a year or two later. Then I had years more of submissions before anything else got bought. I wrote three books before Dreadful, which never went anywhere, and then Dreadful hit the NY Times bestseller list.

If you could send one of your books to someone you truly admire, who would it be – and which book would you send? Why?

I was incredibly fortunate — the Titan Books team got some amazing blurbs for Dreadful. The idea that Jim Hines and Tom Holt and Sarah Beth Durst all not only read it but liked it and had kind things to say kept me floating around the living room for days. So I kind of feel like I’ve had more than my fair share of people whose writing I respect interacting with my work.

I suppose if I could go back in time, I’d want to sent a copy to Terry Pratchett. Honestly, I’d still probably be too intimidated, even if that were a possibility.

I’m incredibly proud of Grimoire, even more than Dreadful. I guess we’ll find out soon enough if people agree!

Read an excerpt from Grimoire here, and get your copy here.

Randee Dawn writes books, too!

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