Nothing is comfortable in these essays, which labor through the muddy waters of intergenerational trauma, imperialism, capitalism and misogyny, using popular culture ... But this book is not about despair; it’s about sifting through the broken shards of culture, looking for messages to restore one’s spirit ... Instagram psychologists encourage people to take active ownership of their problems, but White Magic rightly recognizes the weight of historical trauma on those living today — violence that is embedded, like a poison, in bodies and land ... Though White Magic is a book of essays, it reads like a single piece, as circuitous and ambiguous as special agent Dale Cooper’s journey through the Black Lodge ... Washuta is capable of something more powerful: making sense of hard realities through deep rumination — a sort of magic ... In consumer culture, where alcohol abuse is not only accepted but also actively encouraged, Washuta’s recovery is deeply powerful ... With that knowledge and power behind her, it will be exciting to see what this talented writer turns her attention to next.

In this powerful collection of interlinked essays, Cowlitz writer Washuta (My Body Is a Book of Rules, 2014) explores the inescapable presence of colonization and other traumas as they circle through and around her romantic relationships, her Native identity, and even the pop culture she consumes ... Washuta’s essays refuse the mandate of a tidy resolution ... White Magic is an insightful, surprising, and eloquent record of stories of magic and the magic in stories.

In the case of Elissa Washuta's White Magic, a better comparison is to a hand-rolled cigar — because there was clearly a deliberate layering after a series of violent events and a lot of pressure involved in the process ... White Magic is three books in one. The first is a critique of cheap, modern facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult practices ... The second book is a biography in which Washuta openly discusses the abusive men in her life, how a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder lead to years on useless pills that didn't help, her identity and heritage as a Cowlitz ... Finally, the third book is a sort of fragmented encyclopedia of facts, stories, history, and even etymology ... This is a collection of mostly biographical intertwined essays, which makes it nonfiction, but other than that, this book is hard to categorize. To name all the things Washuta discusses here would be impossible because of word count constraints, but she brings it all together beautifully ... White Magic is a survival story, but one that's hard to read. Washuta's writing makes reading her a superb experience, but this is the type of book that runs toward darkness ... necessary and magical.

To understand her experience, she uses ideas from witchcraft, tarot, astrology, and even Twitter discourse as resources. With this, she creates a beautifully-rendered piece of art that isn’t easily labeled ... To read about the Seattle that Washuta lived in for a decade as it grew into the tech ogre it is, and inhabit those same spaces through her writing, is a gift for any reader interested in the real history of the United States ... Washuta intertwines her own experience alongside history’s violence. This serves to place the reader into Washuta’s creative process while also highlighting the reverberative effects of occupation ... She writes of colonization but is quick to dismiss the violence inflicted on her body, such as rape and ensuing trauma, as a metaphor for it. She is colonized, yes—which helped perpetuate this violence as a central facet of the American experience—but that is only some of the story. Washuta utilizes this approach skillfully ... her writing shows the nonlinearity of healing.

White Magic is a delight and a challenge ... Elissa Washuta is a refreshing narrator, her prose poetic and sparse ... Such open admissions of confusion and searching cultivate an intimacy throughout the text, evoking the sense of peeling open a letter from an estranged friend; Washuta’s voice haunts by admitting to being haunted ... A poignant work by a rising essayist, White Magic speaks to the ongoing work of recovery that is anything but magic.

White Magic is divine, incantatory, a riddle, an illusion. In Elissa Washuta’s hands, this collection becomes more than the sum of its parts. The subjects of these essays are parts of a bigger story—like a spell with the intention to make whole what has been wounded ... Some of the best essays in White Magic are the most intimate, especially the ones that wrestle with the piercing sorrow of romantic attachment ... These subjects might sound disparate, but Washuta’s gift for weaving metaphorical strands across essays creates a strikingly harmonious narrative whole.

White Magic touches on both addiction and trauma narratives as part of her descent. But it doesn’t live in them. Nor does it live in the critique of cultural appropriation that leads the book’s back cover copy. Instead, Washuta breaks down and reassembles these threads in a series of connected essays, interweaving them with history as well as pop culture artifacts ... That second part is accomplished through a bit of sleight of hand. Although she does describe a handful of candle spells and one useful four-card tarot spread—all love magic, of course—White Magic is not a how-to manual. It’s too liminal for that ... This sense of place and connection to the natural world comes across vividly in White Magic, whether Washuta is describing the verdant forests of the Pacific Northwest or the dust-choked air in Pennsylvania coal country ... But perhaps her most cunning witchery comes in the way Washuta exposes the bones of her writing, teasing the reader with coy notes about the importance of rising action and denouement in the opening paragraphs of essays that subvert those same rules. There’s also the startling clarity of her prose.

The most eloquent section highlights her grief moving through a world built on violence toward Native peoples ... Her prose is crisp and precise, and the references hit spot-on ... Fans of the personal essay are in for a treat.

The book breaks from traditional memoir in intriguing ways, including footnotes that speak directly to readers and an essay that begins by focusing on Twin Peaks and then slowly begins to emulate it ... A fascinating magic trick of a memoir that illuminates a woman's search for meaning.