Read, See, Hear, Know

A week and a half of awesome things I absolutely need you to know

Things I’ve Read and Loved

Oh, my gosh. In the few weeks I’ve been off deadline, I have been READING! O happy fortnights! O joyous month! O well re-filled!

Here are three tastes that will taste great together. I’ll give a bit of a sommelier’s description of them, but mostly just let you revel in the colors of the covers and know that none of these writers will lead you astray.

In order of having just read them, then:

The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst. This one has been on my library wait-list for months, but I recently attended a panel at The Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn on “Romantasy” and Sarah Beth was one of the authors. So was Amal! (And so was Sara Raasch and Carissa Broadbent, whose oeuvres I am not yet familiar with, but I was so glad to be introduced to their work!) So I took the opportunity to support an indie bookstore and bought it. (I also bought Raasch’s The Nightmare Before Kissmas, because it looked super cute.)

I was afraid The Spellshop might be too, hmn, sentimental or treacly for me? Instead, it carried notes of Howl’s Moving Castle-levels of novelty, combined with the tartness of raspberries, and a brisk salt-sea wind. Delightful. I shall be re-reading it, and the next one, and the next.

After I finished with that, I dove right into C. M. Waggoner’s new book. I’m some kind of die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying member of Waggoner’s fan club. Never met the woman. Adore her work. Adore it.

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society is like if Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books met Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books at a library book club, and they had a secret affair, which may or may not have resulted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Sort of? The coziness is mostly a facade, until it isn’t. It’s definitely a huggable book, and an occasionally spiky one, and I loved it.

I just finished, just now, this morning, Cassandra Khaw’s What Doesn’t Break, their contribution to Critical Role’s Bells Hells origin story canon.

Again, I do think this was a great finish to the first two books, as we progress from light to dark—yet much there is that’s cozy at its core. Laudna’s a domestic character. Sure, she’s feral, damaged, occasionally deranged, and undead, but her instincts are for warmth, tea, friendship, crafting, and beauty.

So. This book is not for the faint of stomach. But it is luminous. And tender. And very funny. And, yes, also full of viscera.

Things I’ve Seen and Loved

Oh, New York. I had such a New York week. SUCH A NEW YORK WEEK. I have seen so many things this week. I want to share it ALL with you.

• Suffs the Musical

  Oh, my friends. Oh, friends! I am still thrumming with it. Fiery, and funny, and awful, and energetic, and brilliant. Brilliantly clever. I have this great need to study it, peel it apart, understand how the hell Shaina Taub did that thing. I can’t wait to get to know it better. I went in knowing only that it was about the suffragist movement of the early 20th century: a subject I know a little about from narrating the non-fiction book Gilded Suffragists, and also from researching for my novella Desdemona and the Deep.

  Oh, but how could I have known? What could have prepared me? (Well, maybe listening to the soundtrack, which IS available in its original cast recording on Spotify and elsewhere. May I suggest, to whet your whistle, listening to the song “Great American Bitch” and see if that’s your thing?)

• Marianne Soliven’s Quintet at Smalls

  The woman must be some kind of goddess. She has an incredible band of musicians, has been singing jazz with the greats for, I think, decades, and (from what my friend Carla Kissane, one of her students, tells me) is one of the great jazz voice teachers of our age. She began the night with saying, “I need you, the audience. And you need me. You don’t know it yet, but I’ve got what you need.” And she was right!

• Speakeasy Magick at the Overlook Bar

  I can’t tell you much about this, because what if my husband Carlos reads this? We are going to SPRING THIS ON HIM as a surprise one of these days when he LEAST expects it. Because that’s how awesome it is. It is some of the best of its kind I’ve ever seen. A great date night, or night out with friends. I went with Jessica Wick and Cassandra Khaw, and was in ABSOLUTE AWE.

• Murder Ballads the Musical

  I saw in passing that something called Murder Ballads the Musical by the Brokeneck Girls had won Best Musical at the Frigid Fringe Festival in New York, and was sad I missed it. Then I saw that they were returning for the Day of the Dead Theatre Festival at Under St. Marks Theatre, so I got a group of friends together, and we all saw this nascent and ambitious piece of theatre, before most of us ended up eating at this amazing vegan restaurant called Caravan of Dreams.

Things You Might Want to Know

Starting tomorrow and ongoing until November 4th, my publishers at Solaris Books are having a very special “HallowEEK!” sale, STARTING TOMORROW OCTOBER 26, and my book Saint Death’s Daughter is but one victual among the haunted cornucopia provided!