musicals

Catching up with Hamilton

Now that I’ve finished the movie portion of my Marvel catch-up project, I’ve turned to other things I need to catch up on, and last weekend I finally caught up with the rest of the world and watched Hamilton.

It’s a little odd that I haven’t seen it yet or even heard the cast album, given that I’m a big musical theater fan. I used to have season tickets to the touring production series, and I usually try to see a show on every trip to New York. I grew up listening to cast albums of shows I hadn’t seen. But I haven’t had the budget for live theater for the past few years, so I haven’t had those season tickets in ages, and I haven’t been to New York in a long time (not that I’d have been able to get tickets to that show). I think I was also wary of the hype, and I had a mistaken impression of what the show was. I tend to like the semi-operatic shows (Les Miserables is my favorite), and I thought this was more of a very modern hip-hop/rap thing.

But the show’s on Disney+, and I figured I needed to see it to have any musical theater nerd credibility — and I learned that I’ve been totally wrong about the show. It actually reminds me more of Les Mis than just about any other show. There are rap and hip-hop elements, but they mostly seem to function in the same way the recitative bits in Les Mis (or other semi-operatic, sung-through shows) do, as a replacement for dialogue. The staging reminds me a lot of Les Mis, with the fairly bare stage with some architecture that serves a variety of functions, then there’s the turntable, comic relief numbers mixed in with the serious dramatic monologue type songs, a basis in history, and an ending that’s tragic but with a hopeful spin.

I absolutely loved this show. I’m going to have to watch it again with subtitles to catch all the clever wordplay. The words come fast and furious at times, packing so much information in and doing it somehow with rhyme and meter. The cast album is on Prime Music, so I listened to it the next day. Supposedly, it would be my background music for housework, but I ended up just standing there and listening.

Oddly enough, of all the big, dramatic songs that I loved, the one that’s stuck in my head on a loop is King George’s song. I’m walking around the house singing that one to myself.

Anyway, I love that they have a staged version of the original cast on film like this. I wish we could have had this sort of thing for the original cast of Les Mis. Some of these shows work better in the more abstract world of the stage than they do in a more “realistic” framework as most movies are done.

So, I’m late to the game, but I did eventually make it, and it reminds me of how much I love musical theater. It may be a while before I can go to live shows (they are expensive), and it’s nice to be able to get the experience at home.

Books

Revisiting Some Old-School Fantasy

Apologies for the delayed post. My web server was having issues yesterday and wouldn’t let me post anything. All seems to be fixed today!

Earlier this year when I was looking for examples of that journey/quest that starts with bickering but turns romantic trope, I dug up some old fantasy novels I read during my college days that I thought might have been how that trope got into my brain. The first one did involve a quest and it turned romantic, so I figured I’d re-read it. It turned out not to fit, but it started a pleasant journey down memory lane of what I think of as Old School Fantasy.

The first book in this trilogy is called The Ring of Allaire, by Susan Dexter, and it has all those fantasy elements that make this book a “comfort food” sort of book. We have the somewhat inept wizard’s apprentice, the lost heir, the offstage powerful villain, the rescued damsel, and the spunky servant girl, plus a twist or two. I suppose now it might be considered a bit trite, but the first book was published in the early 80s, so all those elements weren’t quite as familiar then, and I think they’re executed well enough that I enjoyed the re-read even now, with all the books I’ve read and written. It’s fun to re-read a book when it’s been so long since you last read it that you don’t remember much about it. I did remember more of the plot elements of the first one, including the big twists, but with the second and third books in the series, I remembered just enough to be sure I’d read them before, but otherwise it was like reading a new book. In some cases, I still remembered my mental imagery of scenes from when I originally read them, but I got different mental images this time around, and I was holding both in my head at the same time. I discovered the first book in the series at the library, on one of those paperback spinner racks, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. The library didn’t have the rest of the trilogy, so I tracked them down and bought them, along with the first one.

The story is your basic fantasy plot about the offstage super-powerful magical being whose influence is spreading throughout the land, bringing earlier and harsher winters. The wizard who might have the knowledge to fight him gets killed, leaving his not very adept young apprentice to follow his instructions and finish his mission. He has to find a lost magical stallion and the heir to a long-empty throne to go on a quest to the villain’s stronghold to retrieve the imprisoned princess whose magical rings hold the power to fight the villain.

While this plot may be standard-issue by now, the characters are utterly endearing. Our young apprentice is competent enough in a lot of areas that his sometime ineptitude when it comes to magic isn’t that annoying. He’s an adept fencer, and while he fumbles some spells, he’s also capable of magical improvisation. He’s also kind, brave, and resourceful. Then there’s his “familiar,” a cat whose thoughts he can hear in his head, and his sidekick, a little canary whose bravery is much bigger than his body. We’ve also got a blustery knight who might be the lost heir and a “damsel in distress” who’s got more gumption than you’d expect.

It’s a fun read that’s got enough familiarity to be comforting while still feeling fresh enough to be entertaining. The sequels get a little more serious and intense as they have to solidify the victory of the first book and then take the fight to the villain. I can’t say too much more about them without spoiling the first book.

I think my readers might enjoy these. They’re character-centered fantasy without the grimdark nastiness. It looks like the author has got the rights back and has reissued her own editions, so you can still find them online. I’d love to find more books like these.

writing life

Productivity

I’ve been ridiculously productive this week. I’ve passed the halfway point on Lucky Lexie 4 and have done a ton of work developing another project. I’ve done a lot of things that have probably helped with productivity. Now I’ll need to figure out which ones of them have been the cause — or possibly all of them.

I’m still working in my office, and I do think it helps because I’m in “work” mode when I’m in here and seem to waste less time. I do still take the laptop downstairs in the evenings and do some work, but it’s more “fun” work, not actual writing.

I also made up a new rule. We’ve been having a rainy spell, with it raining at least a little bit every day, so I declared that when it’s raining, I get to have a change of pace, stop working on the current manuscript, and spend time developing another project. That feels like play, and it means my “break” time is still productive work time. I did a lot of work on the main characters this week. Next I’m going to work on figuring out my villains. I may have to figure out a different trigger for these breaks once the rainy spell ends. It needs to be something that can happen at any time during the day and that won’t likely last much longer than an hour or so. I’ve thought about designating certain composers for breaks since I keep the classical radio station on all day. Depending on the work, that can go from five minutes to half an hour. They publish a playlist that lets me know ahead of time when a work is coming up, so doesn’t have that “oh, hey, it’s raining, break!” moment of surprise, but it’s still something I don’t control, so it might work. Or I could attempt to be an adult with self-control and allow myself to take breaks to work on something else for a little while instead of scrolling Twitter, but not abuse it and take breaks when I feel stuck instead of working through the problem.

The other thing I did was make an alteration in my routine. It sometimes takes me forever to actually get to my desk and start working in the morning. I dawdle over my morning tea as I read the newspaper, do some journal writing, and then get sidetracked. I wasn’t sure if I was avoiding work or just lingering over my tea. My normal routine is to finish my tea, then go brush my teeth, get dressed for the day, and then go to work. This week, I got dressed when I got up, then after breakfast if I was still drinking my tea, I took the tea to my desk and worked until I finished my tea, and then went and brushed my teeth and tidied the bedroom and bathroom before going back to work. I ended up getting to my desk about half an hour earlier than usual and got a head start on my work. It seems I wasn’t putting off getting to work. I just was reluctant to stop sipping my tea. This may not apply on the days when it’s nice enough to have my tea on the patio and get some outdoor time, but I can do some planning and outlining out there.

Since I’m making good progress on the book, I don’t think I’m going to take the Memorial Day holiday. I need to keep moving forward. First, though, I’m going to have to figure out how the book is actually going to end. I had something in mind, but now that I’m halfway through the book, I’m less keen on it and may need to rethink it, and I need to come up with the specifics. I sort of know what’s going to happen, but I’m not exactly sure how it will happen.

movies

Wrapping up the Avengers

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been watching all (well, most of) the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and I’ve found myself oddly captivated. They’re really eating into my brain. I watched Avengers: Endgame Monday night, so I’m pretty much done with that arc. While I’ve enjoyed these films, I have to say that I think I’m more intrigued by the possibilities for these stories than I am by the actual movies.

These are great characters, and they’re perfectly cast, with the actors truly embodying the characters. I haven’t read the comic books, so I don’t know how well they compare to that. But they just seem right to me, with what we see on the screen mostly matching what the movies tell us about them. But my frustration is that the really good stuff (at least, the stuff I was interested in) seemed to mostly happen offscreen. In that last movie, we finally got a lot of good, emotional character moments, with the characters on their own and dealing with things or interacting with each other when it wasn’t a life-or-death manner. That was the sort of thing we needed more of along the way because we needed to establish those relationships for the stuff that happened in the last two movies to really have impact.

One thing I feel like they skipped was Steve Rogers (Captain America) adapting to modern times. We went straight from him realizing he was in the 21st century, having skipped straight from World War II at the end of his first movie, to having been around for a bit at the beginning of the first Avengers movie. There were a couple of lines referring to him being more old-fashioned or straitlaced, then a joke about him actually getting a pop culture reference, and then they practically forgot he was from the 1940s.

I also felt like they skipped over the team building process for the Avengers. We had some contrived conflict when they first came together, then they had to work together to save the day, and the next time we see them, they’re a well-oiled machine. Characters who’d barely interacted were acting like best friends and working seamlessly together. That’s the part that would have been fun to see. How did Thor and Captain America become good friends and an effective fighting team? If we’d seen a little more about how that relationship developed, one of the big moments in Endgame would have had a lot more impact.

In some cases, I wasn’t sure what the relationship was supposed to be. I saw some commentaries on Civil War about how terrible it was that Tony and Steve were at odds because it destroyed their wonderful friendship. I hadn’t realized they were supposed to have been friends. It would have helped if we’d seen some development of their relationship and where their points of conflict were because there was a lot of potential material there. As it was, I was on Team Steve and felt like the others had all forgotten what they knew about him, but I didn’t feel any great loss for whatever relationship there was between Tony and Steve.

I really feel robbed that we didn’t get the story of what came after Civil War, when Steve, Natasha, Sam, and Wanda were apparently rogue and on the run. That would have made an amazing movie. I guess they were impatient to get to Infinity War and had a packed schedule, but I wish they’d managed to squeeze that one in—just a good adventure movie about trying to deal with the things the other heroes weren’t able to deal with while avoiding getting caught.

Unfortunately, when my brain feels like something is incomplete, it wants to complete it, so even though I don’t know enough about this universe to really write something, my brain is trying to mentally write the stuff we didn’t get to see while also rewriting what we did see. I can’t afford to use up that much mental energy on something like this! Maybe it’ll find a way to pull out the elements I like and rework it into my own story, but I’m not sure I could pull off rewriting the Avengers but filing off the serial numbers and putting it into my own universe to make my own story that covers the stuff I wanted to see.

Now that I’m more or less caught up (there’s still a Spider-Man movie, but it’s not urgent), I can start on the new Disney Plus series. I watched the first WandaVision last night, and the sitcom format may be too much for me. While other kids hid behind the sofa for things like Daleks, it was things like I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island that sent me behind the sofa, unable to bear the cringeworthy embarrassment of the sitcom misunderstandings and other idiot plotting. I know there’s more going on, so I’ll stick with it, but it may be more tense for me than all those invincible villains.

writing

Fitting in Niches

Because I really need to sell more books, I’ve been reading a lot about the business of publishing. And it seems that I’ve been doing one thing wrong if I want to make money. I’m apparently writing the wrong books.

My general way of deciding what books to write has started with the ideas I have, and that usually comes from me thinking of a kind of book I really want to read, trying to find it, not being able to find it, and then writing it myself. From a creative standpoint, that’s not a bad method. It means you love what you write, and it may mean you’re filling an unserved niche. I see people giving the advice to write the book you want to read but can’t find all the time.

From a sales and marketing standpoint, it doesn’t work so well. If you’re going the traditional publishing route, you run up against the problem of “comps” or comparable titles. When a publisher is trying to decide whether or not they want to publish a book, they want to get an idea of how well it might sell, and to do that, they look at other books that are similar. If there are no similar books, they can’t get the numbers to put in their spreadsheet. That’s when you get the “I love this but wouldn’t know how to market it” rejections. They have to really, really feel strongly about a book and have some other reason to think it might be successful to go for a book they can’t find comps for.

In independent publishing, all the advice is to look at the categories and make sure your book fits well within a category that sells well but that isn’t so crowded that your book will be lost. You try to find as narrow a category as possible, then hit all the expected tropes for that category and make sure that your cover makes it really obvious that it belongs in that category. There’s software to help you analyze the categories that tells you about how many books you need to sell a day to make the top ten of your category.

When you’re writing the book you want to read and can’t find, that gets difficult because your book doesn’t fit well in any one category, it doesn’t have the popular tropes readers are looking for, and the expected style of cover in that category doesn’t fit your book.

With that fantasy book I’ve been working on, the one with the journey that leads to romance, you’d think that would fit obviously into a category, but it doesn’t. The “fantasy—romantic” category isn’t really that thing at all. If I were to describe what’s there, I’d lure a lot of spambots (let’s just say there are a lot of covers with bare, sculpted male torsos). I kind of wish there were a separate category for books that aren’t quite as focused on the romance and that aren’t so steamy. I wouldn’t really consider it epic fantasy. It’s not based on fairy tales. It doesn’t have magical creatures (maybe I should throw in a dragon so I can go with that category). It’s got sorcery but no swords, so isn’t sword and sorcery. I’m not sure how they define “historical” fantasy. It’s secondary world and not based on any particular culture, period, or place in our world, though it does deal with the history of that world.

The problem for me is that I don’t seem to have story ideas in the obvious, strong categories. My ideas almost always come from the place of “I want to read this and I can’t find it.” I know there are a lot of other readers like me out there who want those books, too. The trick is finding them and making sure they can find my books. That’s where I have to rely on my readers telling other readers about them. That’s the best way for like-minded people to be able to find the books they want.

I do think that the Kindle Unlimited program skews the perception of the trends and tropes, though. Those are readers who are paying a set price per month for all the books they want to read, and I think when you’re not paying for each book individually but can read all you want of the sort of thing you like, you choose books differently. If you remove the KU books from the bestseller list, the remaining books look very different. The problem is that the KU books tend to fill the Amazon bestseller lists, so everything else gets buried. Maybe it looks different on other retailers, but their interfaces aren’t quite as easy to scroll through. This is part of why I keep my books on wide release instead of in KU. I don’t think I fit the niches that do well in KU, and I’d lose the readers who don’t buy books through Amazon.

Books

More Recent Reading: Witches and Portals

I really have been lax in discussing my reading. I’m finding books even farther back in my records that I haven’t mentioned. Today, I’ve got a book that I think might appeal to adult (and maybe older teen) readers who enjoyed Rebel Mechanics: The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.

This is an alternate history fantasy in a world where there really had been witches, before they were hunted down and burned. Their knowledge has survived in nursery rhymes and charms, seemingly harmless bits of magic, but there may be more out there. A trio of sisters who’ve been separated all find each other again when they move to a city where women are organizing to try to get the vote, and they realize that there’s other power they could reclaim, while they’re at it. But women with magic and the vote are very threatening to those who already have the power.

This book has a very dreamlike quality. I don’t so much remember reading it as I remember seeing the events play out, like the words in the book are merely a portal you travel through to enter the world of the story, and then you find yourself wondering if you really went there or if it was just a dream. That may be why I didn’t remember to discuss it. On the one hand, the story seems very grounded in actual history, reflecting the kind of cities that existed in the late 1800s, but on the other hand it’s a fantastical world where magic exists and there are shadowy threats. Our heroines are three very different sisters who fit the “strong female character” description without being what that cliché usually brings to mind. There are no Rambos in drag here, just intelligent, determined women who stand up against the things that are with the hope that they could be different.

Like Rebel Mechanics, this is an alternate history set in a different version of Victorian-era America with magic and a kind of revolution taking place, with an underground movement against the powers that be. It’s written for adults, so it’s a bit grittier than Rebel Mechanics with what might be called “mature themes,” but I do think a lot of my readers might like it. In some respects, it also reminds me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though in a different setting and time period—it’s got that element of magic being something forgotten and revived and a magical figure from the past playing a role. Plus that dreamlike quality that makes you wonder if you really read it or if all those events were just a dream.

I also recommend The Ten Thousand Doors of January by the same author. It’s sort of a portal fantasy, about a girl adopted by a mysterious man whose mansion is full of strange things. She finds a notebook that tells about intersections with other worlds. It’s also got that dreamlike quality that makes it hard for me to describe what the book’s actually about even as my mental images from reading it remain intensely vivid.

movies

Watching Superheroes

Over the past few months, I’ve been catching up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. I hadn’t seen any of them other than the first Guardians of the Galaxy at the theater. I was familiar with some of the characters from previous TV series and movies but am not a comics reader. It’s not a snob thing, it’s just that the comics style of storytelling doesn’t work well for me. I’m getting close to the end (so far, and then there are the follow-up TV series). This week’s movie is Black Panther. Then there are a couple more Avengers films.

I skipped the second and third Iron Man movies because I just don’t like that character. I can tolerate him somewhat in small doses in movies with other characters, but I don’t enjoy him as the focus. I’m more of a Captain America gal, and as of Civil War, that makes me even more firmly anti-Iron Man.

But that conflict between the characters is actually something that bugs me. Just about all of the movies in which there’s more than one superhero involve a fight between the heroes. It reminds me of the inevitable “who would win in a fight?” discussions that tend to come up in forums. What if Iron Man and Thor fought? How about Captain America and Thor? What about Iron Man vs. the Hulk? Hulk vs. Thor? Iron Man vs. Captain America? Maybe that’s something that comes up in the comic books, but all I can think is that they’re all supposed to be heroes and working together, so they’re wasting their time and energy fighting each other. The one time I’ll kind of accept it is Thor vs. Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok, since in that case Hulk wasn’t in his right mind and had been forced to fight. As soon as he came back to his senses, he worked with Thor. Otherwise, it just seems like self-indulgent “who could beat up whom?” fanboyism that wastes valuable screen time. There may also be some lazy writing in there, like they don’t know what to do about a midpoint action sequence that doesn’t defeat either the villains or the heroes, so they make it a hero vs. hero fight.

I think my favorite of the movies so far has been Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It played out more like a spy thriller, and there wasn’t really any hero vs. hero action, aside from the fact that Cap’s own organization seemed to be after him. But he wasn’t against any of the other Avengers. I also rather liked Doctor Strange, but that’s probably because it was more of a fantasy film than a “superhero” film. Ant Man was a lot of fun. I still tend to get bored during the big, climactic action sequences. I think they go a bit too over the top because they get so ridiculous that I don’t really care anymore. Maybe more focus on the people without all the crazy CGI would help.

Still, this has been a fun project, a good way to spend Friday nights. I make popcorn, curl up on the sofa, and pretend I’m at a movie theater, except I’m in my pajamas. I don’t know what I’ll do when I finish, but with the two follow-up series, I’ll have material to keep me going for ages. Maybe a rewatch of all the old Disney stuff.

writing life

Back to the Office

For the past week or so, I’ve been doing something unusual for me: I’ve been working in my office. I have a rather nice office space in my house. It’s the upstairs bedroom, which is kind of like a writer’s garret. It’s right under the sloping roof, so it has a high, sloping ceiling and a skylight. The window in the room is a sliding glass door that leads to a balcony. There’s plenty of natural light and I seldom have to turn on a lamp during daylight hours. When I first moved in to this house, this room was my bedroom and the office was in the downstairs bedroom. The idea was that I could come home from work and run in and out of my office to cook dinner, do laundry, etc., and get some writing done, and then at the end of the day I could go up to my bedroom and be away from it all.

Then I started working from home and that arrangement no longer made sense. The upstairs room gets pretty bright and stays light, thanks to that skylight, while the downstairs room has one small window in a corner. It’s not really a room you want to work in all day. So, I switched the rooms. I could go upstairs to work, then my living space would be all downstairs.

That worked for a few years, and then I started migrating around the house. My internet connection was at my desk, and I’d disconnect and sit elsewhere to write. Then I got wi-fi, and I started migrating for everything. I even got a little laptop desk to put in front of the sofa so I could use the computer more easily there. I wrote my last four or five books sitting mostly on my bed (yes, in the room that I found too unpleasant to work in when it was the office). Meanwhile, because the office was upstairs and out of the way, it became more of a storage space. If I needed to quickly clean the downstairs, I’d just toss things in the office and shut the door.

I started working to reclaim the office last year, and the area around my desk is getting close to the way I want it to be, so I gave working there a shot last week. This room can get warm in hot weather and the ceiling fan hasn’t been working, so I’d bought a small fan. Much to my surprise, when I turned on the ceiling fan last week, it worked. I also had to replace the pillow I use to adapt my desk chair to me. It seems to be designed for a much larger person, and the pillow I’d been using disintegrated. Now the place is more or less comfortable.

I still have work to do in the office to make it ideal, but I’m liking working in here. I feel more like I’m going to work in the morning when I go to a dedicated room than when I sit on my bed or the sofa, and I feel like I’m ending work at the end of the day. I do take the laptop to the living room because there are some things I like to read while I’m watching the news in the evening, and that’s where I do my Norwegian lessons, but that feels different from having worked there all day.

I may eventually need different office furniture, since what I have was bought for when I was telecommuting and had both a desktop computer and my work laptop. The desk may be more than I need now and takes up a lot of space, and I need a chair that fits me better. Redecorating isn’t a huge priority yet, though. I need to work in the office for more than a week to get a better sense of it, and I need to finish purging, organizing, and cleaning. I’m adding some plants and maybe some other decor to make it more “me,” but anything major will have to wait.

In the meantime, we’ll see if it makes me more productive to have an actual “work” space.

Books

Magical Regency

I have yet another recommended read. This one is for the Jane Austen (or Georgette Heyer, or Regency or Georgian romance in general) fans. If you love all those stories about the social season/marriage market and young women who desperately need to marry well in order to save their family fortunes, but you wish they had more magic in them, check out The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk.

In this world, once women are married, they’re stopped from being able to use magic. One young woman is determined not to have that happen to her. She wants to be a sorceress, but her family needs her to marry well. Things get complicated when she meets another young woman from a very wealthy family who also would rather pursue magic than marriage, but then there’s her handsome brother, who really likes our heroine. As handsome and kind as he is, is he worth losing magic for? Both young women are running out of time to make a decision and take action because their families are trying to arrange marriages for them.

I’m definitely in the “I love Jane Austen, but those books could use more magic” camp, so this book was right up my alley. It’s a secondary-world fantasy, so it’s an imaginary world, not Georgian England, but it still has all those things we like about stories set in that world, while also having a lot of other cultures, social rules, and magic. It’s a much richer world than in your typical Regency romance, and while some of the ways women are constrained seem harsh, they’re probably not any worse than the way women really were treated in our world. The characters are endearing and spirited, and speaking of spirits, there’s the luck spirit who gets summoned and enjoys the opportunity to live vicariously through her hostess. Seeing the spirit’s joy at so many simple pleasures made me think about taking opportunities to savor moments, to eat strawberries and run on the beach (or woods; I’m not really a beach person and there isn’t one handy).

While there’s a lot of romance in this book and the most obvious comparisons are to Regency romances, it’s not actually a romance. It’s mostly about the struggle to obtain all the magic they can get before they can be forced to marry and the way they’re trying to navigate in this challenging world that’s set up to go against them. Having everything they want will require them to change their world.

Books

Creeping in to New York

I obviously like New York stories, given how many of my books take place there. I suppose in a way New York was my fantasy world when I was growing up. I knew that was the place where Broadway was, which was where I wanted to be. Later, I thought of it as where the news networks were headquartered and as the setting for most of the romantic comedies, so it was where my fantasy adult life took place. That shows in my books, I think, because I write New York as a fantasy world that’s accurate in some respects (you could probably map the city based on my descriptions, and it takes the right amount of time to walk places) but is probably wildly inaccurate for the actual experience of living in the city.

If you want a probably more truthful view of the city but still with fantasy elements, check out The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. It’s kind of an updated Lovecraftian horror (without the racism) about the thing from the realm beyond that’s trying to make its way into our world, taking advantage of the moment when New York becomes a living city. Tapped to fight the battle for the city are people who become avatars of the boroughs, and they have to find the avatar of the city as a whole before the thing gets to him. Meanwhile, they have to find a way to deal with the inroads the thing is making, as it manifests in very real horrors, like alt.right trolls, gentrifying foundations that are backed by corporations, and “Karens” who call the police like they’re trying to speak to the manager.

This is a powerful, thought-provoking book that I could barely put down. It gave me a very different perspective on New York than my usual tourist point of view and made me think about the many different kinds of people who make up the city. The sense of place was so strong that it made me homesick for New York. It’s been far too long since my last visit. I was a little leery of the horror elements, but it’s not that scary. I think the more “realistic” horrors were more frightening. They may not be powered by eldritch horrors from another realm (or are they?) but “Karens” do exist. I’m less worried about giant tentacles from beyond. The characters really grew on me, getting under my skin so that I couldn’t help but emphasize with them, even though they were all very different from me.

I’d recommend this for those who like the Enchanted, Inc. books but are up for something grittier and scarier and who want to broaden their horizons about what New York is.