(SFF Bingo): The First Bright Thing, by J. R. Dawson

It doesn't take long to get a title drop in "The First Bright Thing." Here's page 3.

When she smiled, it seemed to the crowd like she was looking at the world for the first time. As if she had just caught her first glimpse of them, saw the brilliance of their hearts, and had known what great things they'd already done and would do. The smile was a genuine embrace, the first bright thing in this dark, dusty place.

"She" is the Ringmaster, aka Rin, the founder of a circus full of Sparks--people with magic. The year is 1926, and Rin's circus is a found family for people who might be marginalized by their sexuality, ethnicity, or disability in the outside world. Rin is conscientious enough not to use animals for performances since they can't give informed consent, but not to worry, the circus includes a shapeshifter who's a one-woman menagerie! (K. A. Applegate gets a shoutout in the acknowledgements for fostering Dawson's love of reading.) There's also a father-and-son team with wings, a man who can duplicate himself, and Odette--a magical healer, trapeze artist, and Rin's wife. (Not on paper, but they had their own unofficial ceremony with loved ones.) They teleport across the US, spreading joy, hope, and belonging with their performances.

But here's pages 8 and 9, from chapter 2, ten years earlier.

No one knows why the Spark came. But it came during the war.
Edward actually saw the beginning of the Sparks, because Edward was seventeen years old and stuck in the thick of the Western Front. He didn't know that's what he saw, because he didn't know anything about Sparks...
...some boy in a mask dug up a new part of the trench and hit something that sparked like a flint hitting a rock. Something small and soft (or was it small and sharp?) glinted like a flash of lightning. Then, as if it was the speck of a ghost rising from an uncovered grave, the light traveled upward and into the air of the world.
This was the Spark. Not that Edward knew that. No one knew that.

Edward is present at the beginning of the Sparks--or, metaphorically, "the first bright thing" that brings magic into the world! Edward's plotline--he miraculously escapes the trenches, but at first is unaware of his own Spark powers--is very compelling in a chilling, horrific way. (It doesn't take long to figure out how it ties in with Rin's story.)

So far, so good. One complication: Rin's teleportation powers don't just move through space, they go through time. And Mauve, the circus' third leader (along with Rin and Odette), can see through time even without jumping. So when Mauve realizes that there's a great evil a couple decades in the future, Rin tries to jump forward to fix it. The premise of "characters from our distant past have to travel into their future, which is our slightly-less-distant past, to fix it" is a relatively fresh take on time travel, so I'm open to it.

But time travel is still a hard trope to do well. In Atomic Anna, one of the "rules" Anna discovers is "you can only visit the same year twice," which seems to be a kludge more for Doylist reasons than Watsonian ones--if she could get as many attempts as she needed to visit 1985, it wouldn't be that difficult to prevent the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, Anna isn't able to prevent Chernobyl, but she is able to change her family's history for the better. So it's more than just "the real time travel is the found family we made along the way."

Rin's first idea is pretty amusing--she figures, hey, they're performers, their method of changing people's lives is the power of art. So she and her friends go to 1938 and convince Neville Chamberlain's wife to take her husband to the Scottish Play, hoping he will learn a lesson about standing up to tyrants. Points for originality.

"I'm seeing him in a plane, on his way to Munich to talk to the evil man. He looks down, he thinks about Birnam Wood in the play. He asks a man how many bombs would it take to kill London...how long it would be to kill a million people."
Rin knew the play well enough to know what had gone wrong. Chamberlain didn't see himself in Macduff. He saw himself in the hapless king who lived in fear, the tyrant who thought he was safe only to be duped by the witches' prophecies of moving forests. A man who did not look ahead and did not listen to his mortality.

As far as I know this never happened, but it's the kind of surreal detail that makes me believe it could have.

Okay, maybe they can try something else. Can they go back and prevent Archduke Ferdinand from being assassinated? No. In one of the future jumps, Rin sees her Spark friends dying in the war--according to legislation enacted in her timeline's 1921, the US government has to leave adult Sparks alone, but they'll come to the defense of the country if necessary. Okay, so maybe that's a clue--she needs to make a change in the present to overturn the law, so that even though World War II is still going to happen and it's still going to be terrible, at least magic people won't be drafted just because they're magic. Does anything ever come of this? No.

To make matters worse, sometimes, Rin has been able to make small shifts in the timeline to help people who might otherwise be forced into circus life against their will. In the backstory, a young man tries to sell his brother to the circus, but the brother doesn't want to go. Rin jumps back in time and saves their mother's life from an accident; in the altered present, she's still the breadwinner and the brothers are no longer desperate. So small tweaks in time are okay. But big ones are not. Except the difference between "small" and "big" just wavers back and forth depending on when it's convenient. Mauve is always glimpsing the future and finding someone who needs to be inspired by the circus, and then sort of but not really telling Rin who it is, because Rin needs to do it and figure it out for herself. But the "free will" argument doesn't really ring true.

Basically the repeating dynamic is that Rin sees the horrors of Nazi book-burning/the Holocaust/Hiroshima/one of her circus friends being killed by the bad guys, and decides We Must Stop It, no matter how much she burns herself out trying to fix the timeline. Then Odette preaches the virtues of self-care and reminds Rin that she's Enough and Valid and Worthwhile, uwu. And then a couple chapters later the roles have switched and Rin is the one patiently explaining to her honorary daughter figure (the circus' new illusionist) that they can't fix everything and we just have to take it day by day, uwu. There's a kernel of something in here about parenthood, and that even if you can't fix the trauma in your own life, you can still be inspired to fight for the next generation so that things can be a little better for them.

But, regardless of whether you're talking about the horrors of the mid-twentieth century or, IDK, twenty-first century climate despair, it's really really hard to strike the balance of "this is terrible and we must stop it" and "you're totally Valid, uwu."

"Do you know what happened in the summer of 1919?"
"That was when we started our circus," Rin said.
Mauve said, "Will Brown was murdered in Omaha. You know what happened in the summer of 1921? Tulsa. You know what's happened every single day since white people stepped foot on this continent? You know what happens across the world? Pain. The Great War? It was one blip. All that pain, all that loss, it was just a blip. So why did the Spark come then? Why not when the slaves rebelled in New Orleans? Why not at Wounded Knee? Why not in the summer of 1919?"
Rin shook her head. "I don't know," she said.

Ultimately, the villain gets a hoisted by their own petard moment that's satisfying and poignant. But overall, I feel like Dawson is trying to have her cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't work. 

Bingo: not quite Queernorm, probably using it for Published in 2023. Would also probably be a good fit for mundane (though not boring!) jobs.