My late summer, early fall witchy reads: Witchcraft is nonfiction and tracks the history of witch trials and modern versions of them up through Stormy Daniels. Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos is a historical fantasy set in 19th c. Nashville. I’m a huge fan of the All Souls Trilogy and will read anything Harkness writes! The Familiar is my first Bardugo book, although she is very prolific. I chose this because, well, witches and historical fantasy. And Giddings’s 2022 novel is set in a dystopic, patriarchal society where men control women’s bodies and the historical narrative. Favorite worlds: Harkness’s and Bardugo’s. But Giddings’s theme/message is impossible to ignore.
Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Gabriella Houston’s The Bone Roots ✔️✔️
If you devour tales with fickle characters like faerie kings (Maas) or Slavic witches/vedma (Houston), you might enjoy both of these, but also Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries. Favorite lines, the wedding vows in The Bone…
What can you say about a book this beautiful? It is about everything life is—love, loss, longing, the paradox of human being. This novel reads like poetry and philosophy but traces generations, evokes places, makes real…
An ambitious historical fantasy addressing colonialism in the 19th century. Favorite aspect: How Kuang takes translation theory and turns it into a magical system.…
The jacket cover says it best—”a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history.” A fascinating and detailed account of the research required to finally identify Hannah Crafts as the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative,…
Idra Novey’s Take What You Need speaks to the teen in me who took welding in high school (metal shop was required) and is grieving the loss of a complicated person. Set in the Allegheny Mountains…
My grandmother used to say (frequently) that a day without learning something new is a day wasted. Raised in the foster care system, she left high school during World War II to work as a switchboard…
A short story collection in which the stories range widely in time and place but are gently linked. Displacement and diaspora. Whispers of places, textured (New York City, Russia, Japan, Korea). Belonging. Violence. Ann Patchett likens…
“Come commiserate with us” is one of the quips on the Poe Museum’s website. Despite 30º weather, Richmonders lined up to toast Poe on the anniversary of his birthday, January 19th! I just happened to be…
First start-to-finish novel of the new year. A not-too-heavy gothic fantasy continuing Alix Harrow’s penchant for portal fantasies, this time with a 26-year-old protagonist who sometimes sounds younger than her years. (We all know someone like…