Stop me if you've heard this one before. There's an odd little girl with an oppressive homelife who can talk to animals, and she is whisked away to a secret school of magic to become a witch of great power. And there's a bullied boy who turns to science to make the friends he can't make in real life, and he'll either save the world or destroy it. And they're maybe destined for each other, or maybe not.

Anders plays the tropes of YA fiction, schoolhouse fantasy, and pre-apocalyptic scifi with verve and a kind of post-modern self-awareness. My favorite part was the first third, with how comprehensively terribly everything about Patricia and Laurence's families and schools was. But then they hit puberty, the narrative skips a decade, and we catch up with them in San Francisco. Patricia is now a witch, and Laurence is a techie working on an anti-gravity wormhole for an Elon Musk figure. They navigate their own fraught 20s and the possible end of the world. The standard four horseman are already reaping billions, and both magic and science have doomsday devices in the wings to put an exclamation mark on the human experiment.

There's nothing that wholly novel here, but Anders uses old standbys with style, and she has a talent for wry humor and bruising psychological realism. Sure, things don't tie up entirely neatly, but that's life, that's how it is. I'm not sure if this is a four or five star book, but I've read a lot of dross lately, so Anders gets a boost, lucky her.