Hugo nominated novelette "The Millay Illusion" is really engaging and well written. On the surface it’s about stage magic in the early 1900s; underneath it’s about gender, power, and how a system can erase a woman even while applauding her tricks. The style reminded me modern period stories about women who are navigating complex social structures that don't benefit or recognize them (such as "Tipping the Velvet). As a reader, I was pulled into our narrator's story and felt like I was led off a bit of a cliff at the end. There's a lot of ambiguity that may polarize readers into "loved it" or "hated it."
The narrator, "Lottie," accepts the roles that men put her into - whether it's her father deciding she travel as "Julius" or her uncle deciding within minutes of meeting her she'll be "Johnny Chess." She is trained to notice details to predict behavior and manipulate her audience. Then she meets Susanna who joins the troupe at age 15.
Susanna the only person in the story doing anything genuinely new, and of course she’s the one the men dismiss, steal from, and eventually push out. Our narrator — a mentalist who prides herself on noticing everything — misses the actual point entirely. She can read a stranger’s tells but can’t recognize patriarchy even when she’s lugging buckets for it. She inherits Susanna’s act without inheriting any of her courage, which is the saddest part of the whole thing.
As for the Hugo nomination: this is exactly the kind of story the Hugos love. It’s not about the magic tricks; it’s about the system around them. It’s about how women disappear from history while someone else performs their work “the proper way.” It’s subtle, it’s sharp, and it’s doing more than it looks like at first glance.
If you like stories where the narrator is competent in all the wrong ways, this one’s worth the read - you can find it on the Uncanny Magazine website here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-millay-illusion/
REVIEW: "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker
RATING: 3-stars
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