INTERVIEW: BETH CATO

Today, I’m chatting with author Beth Cato. Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in Red Wing, Minnesota. She usually has one or two cats in close orbit. A 2015 Nebula finalist, she is the author of the cozy mystery CHEDDAR LUCK NEXT TIME as well as fantasy like A THOUSAND RECIPES FOR REVENGE. Her short stories can be found in publications ranging from Beneath Ceaseless Skies to Uncanny Magazine. In 2019 and 2022, she won the Rhysling Award for short speculative poetry. Her website BethCato.com includes not only a vast bibliography, but a treasure trove of recipes for delectable goodies. Find her on BlueSky as @BethCato and Instagram as @catocatsandcheese.

Photo Credit: Corey Ralston Photography (2013)

ANTHONY: Hi Beth! Thanks for taking some time to chat. Your latest release, which was an Amazon First Reads pick for September, is A House Between Sea and Sky. Tell us a bit about the plot.

BETH: It’s a cozy standalone set in 1926 Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. A grieving writer and a secretive silent film star are adopted by a sentient cottage with a dark past.

What inspired you to write A House Between Sea and Sky?

After I wrapped up my Chefs of the Five Gods series, I asked my then-editor what she’d like to see next. She said she wanted historical fantasy set in the real world. From there, I started mulling. I’m a native Californian, so exploring that setting feels right.

House is historical fantasy, much like your Blood of Earth trilogy. How much research did you have to do into the time period this book takes place in, and how did you go about that? (I loved all the details you incorporated about the Silent Film industry of the time, even the unsavory aspects of it.)

I spent a solid three months on research before I could even finish a synopsis, and then I kept researching through the writing and revision process. For me, worldbuilding really needs to come before fleshed-our characters or plot. Our world shapes everything. I was truly blessed to find a wealth of scanned Carmel 1920s newspapers on Archive.org, plus a tourism book that was published in 1925. There is a very special famous person cameo appearance in the book, and that person’s involvement determined the exact days of the plot. As for the silent film elements... I actually have a trunked novel I wrote a few years ago that I think is one of the best things I’ve ever written, but my agent wasn’t able to sell it. My main character in that book was a scenarist in 1923 Hollywood. I had kept the most interesting research books and had tons of information on my computer, so I was able to repurpose that material, which felt wonderful!

I would love to see that trunked novel be published some day! Without spoiling anything, I think it’s safe to say that Russian folklore plays a large role in the book. Was this folklore that you grew up with?

In my teens, I collected a number of century-old Andrew Lang Color Fairy Tale books and other mythology tomes that were discarded from my local library. (There’s a reason those Lang books get a mention in A House Between Sea and Sky!) I still have them all, too. That’s really the first place I encountered a broader variety of stories that were identified with their places of origin, and I was then able to connect creatures and elements to the AD&D books I was also reading at the time.

While I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated in the text, I got the very strong feeling that Fayette is asexual/aromantic (although those terms probably didn’t exist in the 1920s), and thus her relationship with Rex is one of mutual respect and quickly-developing friendship, but nothing more. I think we still don’t see enough of this in historical fantasy (the lack of a romance between leads). I’m not sure I have a question here, other than “is my understanding of the character correct?” But would you like to talk a bit about how you approach representation in your books (which always have diverse casts)?

You’re 100% right. I wrote Fayette to be ace. I love a good main character romance, but I don’t think that should be a requirement even if it appeals to the big trend. People CAN just be friends. I want my books to be realistic, and for me, that means diversity is natural. That includes a spectrum of queer rep as well as different skin tones and ethnic backgrounds. By the way, the racism shown in this book was directly inspired by reading Jack London’s book The Valley of the Moon, which is partly set in Carmel, and is also horrendously racist with very particular ideas on who is a “real American.” So I guess my approach to representation is sometimes inspired by active defiance against a book that is over 100 years old!

I would love to know what your writing process is like, and if it varies when you delve into different genres (you know how much I loved your foray into cozy mystery/thriller territory, Cheddar Luck Next Time) or different story lengths (novels vs. novellas vs. short stories for instance).

I’m a hardcore outliner and researcher. Even for a flash fic, which is normally about a thousand words, it’s not uncommon for me to have a few sentences of outline to guide me! Poetry is the only thing I write spontaneously. So many of my recent fantasy books have been historical, and the research has been immersive. A Feast for Starving Stone had a 25,000-word outline, but that was also long because my characters were talking a lot in my head, and that dialogue was sketched in. Cheddar Luck Next Time was nowhere near as intense, but I still had to research details on running a cheese board business. The details on the many cheeses included were largely drawn from my own personal cheese log, which is over 200,000 words and is nearing 2,000 cheeses. Bird’s taste note on cheese are pulled from my own experiences.

Speaking of Cheddar Luck Next Time (which I reviewed HERE … is there any word on whether we’ll get to see more adventures of Bird and company?

I hate to be a tease, but I hope to be able to talk more about that soon!

I’ll take whatever teases I can get! What do you have in the pipeline/coming out next?

I do have one contract signed that I can’t talk about yet, and I’m in a very early research stage for something else. I’ve been very busy recently!

And my traditional final question … what is your all-time favorite book?

There is one recent stand-out for me, and that is The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer. It’s really a suspenseful love letter to the power of children’s fantasy novels and how they can save lives. I recently read it again because I proposed it to a local book club, and the other members loved it so much that they all immediately picked up her second book, The Lost Story, which is also excellent. It’s a queer take on Narnia-style portal fantasies. Really, you can’t go wrong with Meg Shaffer’s books! Her third one will be out next year, and I can’t wait.

I am adding Meg Shaffer to my To Be Read list as soon as I finish posting this interview. Thanks again Beth!

Book Review: SAINT DEATH'S HERALD

TITLE: Saint Death’s Herald (Book Two of the Saint Death Trilogy)

AUTHOR: C.S.E. Cooney

430 pages, Solaris Books, ISBN 9781837864492 (paperback, e-book, audiobook)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

C.S.E. Cooney’s Saint Death’s Herald, the sequel to her 2023 World Fantasy Award winning novel Saint Death’s Daughter, is an action-packed, fast-paced, often dark but always hopeful, fantasy adventure. Despite the difference in focus from its predecessor (Saint Death’s Daughter is more coming-of-age novel than adventure story, but no less exciting for that), the tone of the first book carries over. No matter the pace of the story, Cooney’s prose is always lushly gorgeous, her wordplay intricate yet accessible, poetic phrases side by side with everyday speech. Cooney is one of those writers who make me want to linger over individual sentences, to reread aloud, to feel the words physically and emotionally. Even her character names are joys to speak aloud (Cracchen Skrathmandan! Ynyssyll Brackenwild! Tanaliin idden Fa’nim’wai! Duantri! Makkovian! Sacred Datura Stones!). Cooney makes me laugh, cry, and gasp in equal measure. Saint Death’s Herald had me doing all of those. Repeatedly.

This is a story of possession and possessiveness, of control and of giving up control (willingly and unwillingly), of understanding history (both the personal and the societal) and breaking the cycles of trauma that are caused by both. It starts with a man possessed by a ghost being run to ruin, the ghost intentionally heedless of the cost inflicted on the still-living man he’s taken over. And throughout the book, Cooney revisits this concept of the powerful ignoring the cost to the powerless. We see it at the personal level (with the man and the ghost), we see it at a governmental level (in the past history of Skakmaht). And we also see what it costs someone like Miscellaneous Stones, our main character, to care enough to try to make a change.

Miscellaneous Stones, as established in Saint Death’s Daughter, is the latest in a lengthy line of necromancers who have served the rulers of Liriat for generations. But Lanie is also unlike her familial predecessors, in that she is allergic to violence; she literally cannot cause injury without experiencing it herself. This makes her mission (tracking down the ghost of her genocidal great-grandfather Radamanthes Stones and preventing him from further genocide) all the harder. Watching the creative (and sometimes whimsical) ways she finds to defend herself is one of the great joys of the book, along with how she willingly puts herself in harm’s way to do battle when she absolutely must, regardless of the cost. Lanie, as her friends call her, has come a long way since the start of the first book in understanding just how far she can push herself in these situations as well as how far she’s willing to go to protect others.

I would be remiss if I did not mention just how chock-full this book is of representation: queer characters from across the spectrum abound, as do characters with pretty much every skin tone imaginable. Cooney’s fantasy world, Ayth, which appears not just in these two books but in almost everything she’s written (see: my reviews of Dark Breakers; Desdemona and the Deep; The Twice-Drowned Saint, and more), is one of the most diverse and enjoyable fantasy worlds I’ve ever been immersed in. (I would also be remiss if I did not mention that I have an especial fictional character crush on the aforementioned Makkovian. My Catastrophic Attraction Complex to redheads strikes again!)

Final thoughts: Saint Death’s Herald is certainly a complete novel unto itself. You could jump right in without having read Saint Death’s Daughter and you’d be able to follow along pretty easily. But reading the books in order will absolutely enhance your understanding of not just Lanie, Cracchen, Grandpa Rad, and Duantri, but also Makkovian, Datu, and a host of other characters who were vital to book one but play a more supporting role in book two. And here’s hoping we don’t have to wait too long for the final book in the trilogy (Please, Solaris, make it happen!).

NOTE: C.S.E. Cooney will be appearing at Kew & Willow Books on July 12th, to discuss the Saint Death’s books, and other interesting topics, in conversation with author Mike Allen. I’ll be there as well!

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley well before publication date in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The book released in April 2025.

Sunday Shorts: Two From Women in Practical Armor

In 2016, Ed Greenwood and Gabrielle Harbowy edited Women in Practical Armor, an anthology of fantasy short stories focused on female warriors while avoiding the trope of skimpy armor. Here are my thoughts on a couple of the stories contained therein.

cover image by Nneirda, design by Eloise Knapp

“No Better Armor, No Heavier Burden” by Wunji Lau

Rose, an older woman with a mysterious past, has settled quietly in a small town in the shadow of a mountain with strange properties called the Blacktooth, where weather does not work the way it does in the rest of Ara. Only one person in town knows anything of her past at all, including that she has two estranged adult sons. The story begins with Rose running towards the town Inn because she’s heard there’s trouble, and only upon arrival does she discover one of her sons, Zaian, being held at swordpoint by Leian (a nearby country) soldiers. From there, the story gains complexity as an excellently written fight scene reveals what Rose and her opponents are capable of along with some of Rose’s secrets (and her son’s). But it’s not all non-stop fighting; the conflict between Rose and the people who want to take Zaian in for a crime he possibly didn’t commit also becomes something of a battle of personality and will. I loved Rose’s personality (take charge, take no bullshit, take chances). Her first-person narrative voice is personable and irascible; her relationship with Zaian is not smooth but still loving as she struggles with why he’s been estranged and why he’s lying to her now. The world building surrounding the characters is really great: the Blacktooth is home to weird energy fluctuations that affect not just the weather but the way magic works. I really want to know more about Rose, Zaian, and the countries of Ara and Lei and the religion of the Steersman.

“The Bound Man” by Mary Robinette Kowal

In Li Reiko’s society, women are the warriors and leaders, while men are the homemakers and scribes. Li Reiko herself is a noted leader and warrior, with two young children: a daughter who will someday be a warrior as well, and a son whose interest in martial arts needs to be dissuaded because it distracts him from honing the skills he’ll need to keep the Histories. Despite her society’s dictates, Li Reiko plays a version of hide-and-seek with her kids that fosters both children’s abilities and awareness. Elsewhere, Halldór, a warrior-priest, struggles to bring the sword of the Chooser of the Slain back to his people’s Parliament while his Duke and the rest of the party that found the legendary sword fall to a bandit raiding party. Halldór chants a rune of power that will bring the Chooser of the Slain from the realm of the gods to the world of men … and Li Reiko is torn from her children and thrust into a world she doesn’t recognize. “The Bound Man” explores the ideological conflict of matriarchal versus patriarchal societies alongside the notion of destiny. Li Reiko is stuck living out a legend/prophecy she had no hand in creating, and the story explores the effects of that on her children and on Halldór’s society. There are moments of this story that are so heartbreaking, and Kowal doesn’t give her characters an uncomplicated way out (no rewriting history, for example). The heart of the story is Li Reiko’s relationship with her kids (the hide-and-seek scene is genuinely heartwarming) and Halldór’s unerring belief in the legend of the Chooser of the Slain and her ability to rescue his country from the Troll King.

I love short fiction in all its forms: from novellas to novelettes, short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles. Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it.

Book Review: THE CITY IN GLASS

TITLE: The City in Glass

AUTHOR: Nghi Vo

215 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250348272 (hardcover; also e-book and audio)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Nghi Vo has quickly become one of those handful of authors whose work I will buy without even reading a synopsis about the plot and whose new books I will usually read as soon as I purchase (See also: Seanan McGuire, ‘Nathan Burgoine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia), even if I’m a bit slow when it comes to posting the reviews.

The City in Glass, Vo’s latest novel, is a stunning portrait of responding to grief, recovering from trauma, and finding common ground. The demon Vitrine has been the largely unseen patron of the city of Azril for hundreds of years. Very few of the citizenry know her as more than a legend, and the few that do know she’s real tread a careful path with her. She has loved the city since she first arrived from another continent and has guided it to its current glory. And then a group of angels arrive, declare the city sinful, and destroy it. The angels begin to depart to their higher realm once their “work” is done, but Vitrine manages to curse one of them who then must be left behind. This all happens in the first chapter of the book and is the impetus for the rest of the action, so I’m not really spoiling anything. This first chapter is a master class in how to set a reader up, going from joyful immersion in a new setting to the complete destruction of that setting in a few short pages. Again, since I hadn’t read the front cover flap synopsis, I had no idea what was coming, and I was as devastated as Vitrine.

Vitrine, being immortal, does not have to move on from the ruins of her beloved city to find life and sustenance elsewhere. And so she begins the slow process of watching the land heal and foster new life – and thus, eventually after hundreds of years, a new settlement for her to watch over. We watch Vitrine move through various stages of grief for the loss of not just so many loved ones (both human and animal) but for the mementos and landmarks of the city’s long history. (I cannot help, in retrospect, compare Vitrine’s reactions to what I’ve watched friends in North Carolina go through thanks to last fall’s hurricane, or what I imagine the people of Los Angeles will be going through as they strive to move on from the current fires of winter 2025.) Vitrine cycles through sadness, anger, depression, and excitement for what develops – but Vo makes it clear that these emotions are not compartmentalized or managed on a straight timeline. They overlap, they recur. Setbacks for the city inspire setbacks in Vitrine’s mental and emotional state.

And the presence of the angel she cursed, the being she holds partly responsible (not fully, because the blame lies with the angel’s cohort as well, but they are beyond Vitrine’s reach), does not help her recovery and in fact hinders it for quite some time. Thanks to her curse, the angel is tied to the land that once held Azril and thus is tied to Vitrine. He also goes through a cycle of defiance (that he did anything wrong), regret (at what’s he’s done), and hope (that he can be part of healing the damage to Vitrine’s heart). It is never easy to heal from trauma when the cause of your trauma is still present and a part of your life, and Vo explores that emotional territory beautifully and without attempting to provide any kind of easy “one size fits all” answer to how to navigate the situation.

I also loved the time-lapse “development of a civilization from small settlement to world power” aspect of the book. Vo takes the new city through the stages of agriculture-based to commerce-based and gives it threats domestic, foreign, human, and natural (including a plague). This could have been a much longer, much more detailed novel about the city’s history alone, but viewing the highlights (and low points) of that history through the eyes of an immortal felt more appropriate. This story really is Vitrine’s, and so much can change in the relative blink of an immortal’s eyes.

I cannot recommend The City in Glass highly enough, especially to readers who enjoy deep character studies accompanied by intriguing worldbuilding.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. The City in Glass was published in October 2024, so this review is a bit late.

Sunday Shorts: Two from Knaves

In Knaves: A Blackguards Anthology (Outland Entertainment, 2018), Editors Melanie R. Meadors and Alana Joli Abbott brought together 14 stories about anti-heroes, heroes discovering the darker sides of themselves, and villains discovering their nobler aspects. Here are my thoughts on two of the stories contained in an anthology that covers a variety of genres.

cover art by Daniel Rempel

“Daughter of Sorrow” by Maurice Broaddus

“Our kind is never alone.” I really wasn’t sure, thanks to that opening sentence, what genre of story I was in for. “Our kind” meaning … vampires? Clandestine super-humans? Aliens living among us? So many possibilities, and any of them would have been interesting in Broaddus’ hands. What we get is the tale of Rianna, a teenage girl whose family is part of a secret society that runs the world. Rianna’s father is missing and presumed dead, which leaves her adrift and in harm’s way thanks to the society’s rules. Broaddus reveals the danger she’s in through a series of encounters with classmates and doles out the details of her relationship with her father via flashbacks. The alternating scenes build the suspense of both storylines effectively up to the moment they come together. The story is complete unto itself but did leave me wanting more of both Rianna and the Grendel Society.

The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox by Sabrina Vourvoulias

“The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox” is a story about a classic trickster personality, about community, and about doing the right thing even when it’s not the easy thing.

One of the many things I love about this story is what I can only describe as the “street corner urban legend” style of the narration. Imagine walking through a Philadelphia neighborhood, stopping into a bodega for a bottle of water or soda while you’re in the middle of telling your companion a local legend you’ve heard, and having someone say, “I am here to tell you the truth about the Johnny the Fox.” That first sentence sets that tone, and the rest of the story delivers on it.

Every Sabrina Vourvoulias story has an undeniable rhythm, a musicality that drives it. “The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox” is no exception. There’s the beat of the narration, a very particular style of storytelling that sweeps you up and carries you along. But music, singing especially, also plays a part in the main action of the story as Johnny returns to Puerto Rico at a particularly dangerous time for the island, to try to do what he does best: convince someone not to do the terrible thing they’re about to do. But even the most charismatic people stumble sometimes, and how Johnny recovers from that with the help of a community that loves him (even if they don’t always like him) is just as important as whether he succeeds.

Book Review: TIDAL CREATURES

TITLE: Tidal Creatures (Alchemical Journeys #3)

AUTHOR: Seanan McGuire

453 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250333551 (hardcover; also e-book and audiobook)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

Tidal Creatures continues to build out the world Seanan McGuire introduced us to in Middlegame and deepened in Seasonal Fears. Like Seasonal Fears, it starts off by introducing us to a new batch of characters that personify/anthropomorphize a new set of universal concepts. In this case, embodiments of the Moon in all the forms such embodiments have taken throughout all the world’s mythologies. Unlike the main characters of Middlegame (who are forced to become the embodiment of the Doctrine of Ethos by their Maker) and Seasonal Fears (who become embodiments only after winning a competition), the human embodiments of the Moon are chosen by the Moon gods/goddesses themselves and the situation is less “embodiment” and more “time-share.” The human avatars of the Moon are able to go about their lives as essentially human, except when the Moon needs to shine through them and the resident Moon god/dess must take full control. I loved this idea that in a universe where almost every natural concept/constant is embodied, the ways the embodiments function can be so varied.

Where Seasonal Fears was a road-trip novel, Tidal Creatures is a murder-mystery. (It’s been long enough since I’ve read Middlegame that I’m not sure what classic genre I’d place it in (I really need to do a re-read), but at this point I’m almost positive part of McGuire’s plan for this series is to use the trappings of a different classic genre for each entry.) Someone is killing the moon gods of the San Francisco area. Which is a problem because part of the job of the Moon gods is to cross the sky above the Impossible City (the heart of all creation, thanks to the alchemy of an author named A. Deborah Baker). The moon gods who notice what’s happening must figure out who is doing it before they can wrest control of the Impossible City (and thus, the universe) for themselves. This is a very “fair play” mystery – meaning all the clues are there for the reader to figure out the who, why, and how (because how the murder that start the book was even possible, given the victim was the living embodiment of the moon and fully empowered when it happened, is part of the mystery). Readers who enjoy having a juicy mystery in the middle of their fantasy/horror hybrid novel will not be disappointed and will probably enjoy the challenge of figuring it all out before the characters do.

Several of the main characters of the novel are the local embodiments of three moon goddesses and a moon god: Judy (Chang’e), Anna (Artemis), Professor Williams (Diana), and David (Máni). They are more like co-workers than friends, and even though they are all embodiments of the Moon, they are embodiments of different Moon deities, with different mindsets and histories, so they are not automatically best friends and comrades. I really appreciated that while two of these moon deities are familiar to just about anyone who experienced a public-school education in the United States, McGuire went out of her way to make the other two deities from non-Eastern-European traditions, and to give us a deep sense of what those deities were like in those traditions. She made me want to learn more about Chang’e and her peaches of immortality, Máni, and others who are mentioned but play less significant roles in the way the story plays out (Losna, Aske).

The moon deities are not the only main characters. There’s also Kelpie, a woman who thought her current unusual body type (mostly human, but with orange skin and legs that end in hooves and a few more subtle differences) was the result of a horrible lab accident that also wiped her memory. She learns what she really is and goes on the run from her employers, the Alchemical Congress of the United States, after her friend and mentor is killed for seemingly failing in a project designed to get the Congress access to the Impossible City before it is claimed by its rightful rulers. She encounters a boy name Luis and his mother, Isabella, who is an hechicera (a type of sorceress), who join her in her quest to find someone who can help her understand herself and help stop the man pursuing her.

In Kelpie, we have one of the most stunning portrayals of a person escaping and overcoming the trauma of gaslighting that I think I’ve ever read – a woman whose whole sense of self and purpose gets uprooted and who still finds ways to stay strong, move forward, and come to terms with what she really is. In Isabella, we get a stark indictment of the ways in which European colonization practically (and in some cases, totally) eradicated other belief systems (by absorption or by destruction).

I found aspects of each of the main characters relatable, and I came to care for all of them as much as I did the main characters of Middlegame and Seasonal Fears. And for those wondering, I can say without spoilers that while the MCs of Seasonal Fears only get a few passing mentions, the MCs of Middlegame enter the story much earlier, and play a much bigger role, than they did in Season Fears.

Fans of Seanan McGuire, fans of mystery-fantasy-horror hybrids, fans of tales of moon deities: you’ll find something to love about this book. BUT – you should probably at least read Middlegame if not Seasonal Fears before Tidal Creatures, to understand the alchemical underpinnings of the world and the history of the Alchemical Congress.

I received an advance reading pdf of this book for free via NetGalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I received and read the ARC well before publication date but dropped the ball on posting the review until now. Tidal Creatures is currently available wherever books are sold.

You can read my review of book two in the series, Seasonal Fears, HERE. Somehow, I never posted a review of Middlegame. I’ll have to reread it and fix that one of these days.

Book Review: THE BRIDES OF HIGH HILL

TITLE: The Brides of High Hill (The Singing Hills Cycle, Book 5)

AUTHOR: Nghi Vo

115 pages, TorDotCom, ISBN 9781250851444 (hardcover, e-book, audio)

MY RATING:  4 stars out of 5

At the start of The Brides of High Hill, the fifth book in Nghi Vo’s wonderful Singing Hills Cycle of novellas, Cleric Chih is in the process of accompanying a family to the titular estate, where the daughter will be married to the lord of the manor. Chih quickly discovers that not all is as it seems: the Lord has a history of short-lived marriages with tragic ends and a strangely ill son from one of those previous marriages; the Bride-to-Be’s family has secrets of their own; and why can’t Chih remember how they parted ways with Almost Brilliant, the neixin who usually accompanies them, and came to be traveling with the family?

Vo packs a lot into each Singing Hills novella, and The Brides of High Hill is no exception. What at first seems like a simple tweak to the legend of Bluebeard morphs into an Asian-inflected gothic suspense novel with a possibly haunted estate and then morphs again into a rumination on colonialism and on revenge as an unending cycle.

Chih of course finds themself at the center of all of this, not only as chronicler but also as the person who must try to find a solution that satisfies all the parties involved. This is not the first time we’ve seen Chih operate without Almost Brilliant at their side – but is the first time we’ve seen Chih unsure of where Almost Brilliant is. And that makes a difference in Chih’s confidence in their ability to recall details about Lord Gao’s family and the bride-to-be’s. It’s a side of Chih I feel like we haven’t seen before and continues the character growth we’ve seen in the preceding four novellas.

Vo does a wonderful job setting the mood of High Hills with details about the architecture, the smells, and the distinct differences noticeable between daylight hours and the nighttime. I understood Chih’s sense of disorientation, shared their discomfort at not being able to put their finger on exactly what was creating the sense of wrongness, felt like I was there in the misty, uncomfortable dark.

I can’t speak too much on the aspects of the book that touch on the ravages of colonialism and cycles of revenge (and how we break them), or on the parts that involve gaslighting, without spoiling major plot points that are best left discovered as they unfold. I can say that when I realized what was going on, I found Vo’s handling of the gaslighting in particular to be expertly done, with great care and understanding of the victim’s questioning of how to trust their feelings in the future. Likewise with the “how do we break violent cycles” issue.

I think I say this in every review of a Singing Hills Cycle installment, but these books truly can be read in any order; you do not have to know anything about what transpired in books one through four to enjoy The Brides of High Hill. I highly recommend picking it up – or picking up the first book in the series, Empress of Salt and Fortune, and savoring each novella in turn.

I received an electronic advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. I did receive the e-ARC well before publication date but never posted the review. The Brides of High Hill is available now wherever books are sold.

Book Review: MAMMOTHS AT THE GATES

TITLE: Mammoths at the Gates (Singing Hills Cycle #4)

AUTHOR: Nghi Vo

128 pages, TorDotCom Publishing, ISBN 9781250851437 (hardcover, also e-book and audio)

MY RATING:  5 stars out of 5

Mammoths at the Gates, the fourth novella in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle, finally introduces readers to Cleric Chih’s home monastery. Chih’s return to Singing Hills is not as joyous as it should be. Chih’s mentor, Cleric Thien, has passed away. Most of the monastery inhabitants are away studying a recently uncovered flooded city. And Singing Hills is being threatened by the granddaughters of Cleric Thien, who want their grandfather’s remains to lie in state, because of his high status as clan head before becoming a Cleric and be buried alongside their recently deceased grandmother. Chih must find a way to help the acting head of the monastery, who also happens to be Chih’s childhood best friend Ru, deal with the granddaughters while honoring Thien’s memory and teachings under the traditions of Singing Hills.

Mammoths at the Gates is one of several books I’ve read recently that delve into the myriad ways in which we process grief and loss. Both Chih and Ru exhibit behaviors I found very familiar as they process their loss: the great outpouring of emotion only when alone or with the closest of friends, and the using of work, even if it’s just “busy work,” to blunt the raw emotions enough to get through the days/weeks that follow the loss. But while for Chih keeping busy is a choice, for Ru it is a requirement; as acting head of Singing Hills Ru must attend to the visitors at the gates as well as the day-to-day operations of the monastery. Vo also expertly addresses the swings that happen from recalling happy memories to recognizing the reality that the person is truly gone, including those moments when we “hear” the person, or “see” them out of the corner of our eye and think for a moment that maybe news of their passing was incorrect … or those moments when we simply forget the person is gone.

By contrast, there is Thien’s avian companion Many Virtues. In the Singing Hills Cycle, Cleric are accompanied by neixin, birds with infallible memory – they recall everything they see and hear, which makes them amazing repositories of world history, legend, and the details of an individual’s life. The bond between Cleric and neixin is indelible and deep. Through Many Virtues, Vo explores what happens when our sense of loss is so profound we cannot imagine continuing to live without the one we’ve lost, and how sometimes that leads to self-harm (off-screen, in this case).

Through Thien’s granddaughters, Vo also looks at the way we sometimes mourn an idea rather than a real person. These granddaughters didn’t actually know their grandfather. But they were brought up on stories of his career and they say the palpable love their grandmother held for their grandfather even after he’d become a Cleric. But they still mourn the loss as though they knew him directly, mirroring the way in our world we mourn the passing of celebrities we’ve never actually met as though we knew them intimately.

Vo also comments on the cultural/societal ways in which we “say goodbye,” the rituals that are attached to acknowledging a person’s passing and the impact they had on our lives. I found Singing Hills’ ceremony, one of storytelling about the deceased with a touch of ritual rather than one focused more on the ritual than the person, to be sweet and ideal, providing some of the most poignant moments of the book.

Chih also must navigate the changes in their relationship with Run. As a traveling Cleric, Chih has been away from the monastery more than they have been present, while for reasons of health Ru has not been able to travel and has had to forge a life in the absence of their best friend. Watching Chih reconcile the past with the present was a bit uncomfortable at times but was important for both characters.

Even though this is the fourth book in the series, the Singing Hills novellas are all stand-alone. So even if you haven’t read the preceding three books you can pick up Mammoths at the Gates and quickly understand Cleric Chih and their world. For those that have read the earlier novellas, there are oblique references to those events that will tantalize without making new readers feel like they are missing vital information. (And the fifth Singing Hills Cycle entry, The Brides of High Hall, comes out on May 7, 2024!)

 I previously reviewed book three in the Singing Hills Cycle, Into the Riverlands, as well as Nghi Vo’s standalone novel The Chosen and the Beautiful.

I received an advance reading copy of this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Sunday Shorts: Two by Sharang Biswas

Sharang Biswas is a game designer, writer, and artist based in New York City whose stories and poetry have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Baffling Magazine, Sana Stories, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Look him up on his website. Today, I’m going to look at his two most recent stories that appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams. Lightspeed Magazine contents are free to read on the website and e-book subscriptions are also available.

“Real Magic” (Lightspeed Magazine #153, February 2023)

Three townspeople visit the Witch in the Woods to ask for help with their problems. She extracts a different price from each, something either cherished or endemic to the person’s sense of self. Each visitor ultimately finds what they are searching for (or searching for relief from), but not in the way they or the reader expects. The witch uses their ingredients to do real magic. This is a beautifully told story, a fairy tale in style but cloaked in Biswas’ beautiful sense of character and community. Biswas uses the needs of the visitors (and their resolutions) to show that every individual action has an effect outside the moment in which that action is taken or that choice is made. Nothing happens in a vacuum, no one person’s fate is theirs alone. What one person discards (willingly or not) may be picked up by another (who may or may not benefit from it). I also loved how Biswas doesn’t spoon-fed the connections between the villagers’ stories but lets them come out organically and not all at once.

“Season of Weddings” (Lightspeed Magazine #166, March 2024, story goes live on the website March 28th)

Nate receives seven wedding invitations in one year. Okay, two of them are for his job, which is maybe a little less fun than attending as a guest. Especially because it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Nate is Thanatos, god of death. Sometimes, people die at weddings. Still reeling from his most recent relationship break-up (with Thor, who has moved on to loving a mortal woman), Nate must navigate these weddings, new singlehood, his job, his perhaps too-pushy best friend, and a cute guy he keeps bumping into at the weddings. This story is so sweet, so romantic and wistful. I recognized some of myself in Nate’s self-esteem issues around romance and relationships, which made me connect to the work even more. The world-building is also wonderful, bringing together characters from all sorts of world mythologies and religions but tweaking them in new and interesting ways (for instance, the Thor is this story is neither the “drunken jock” we often see nor the blond-tressed super-hero). I won’t spoil who all shows up, because part of the fun of the story is the reveals of Nate’s friends’ circle. I’m a sucker for “deities and personifications of human concepts walk among us and act like every-day people” types of stories (think the classic issue number eight of Neil Gaiman’s the Sandman, illustrated by Mike Dringenberg, among others), and this one fits the description very well. It also fits very well as a paranormal romance, and I love it when authors blend and blur genres.

I love short fiction, and Sunday Shorts is the feature where I get to blog about it. I’ve considered promising to review a short story every day, but that’s a lot of pressure. And while no one will fault me if I miss days, I’ll feel guilty, which will lead to not posting at all. So better to stick to a weekly post highlighting a couple/three stories, as I’ve done in the past. Click on the Sunday Shorts tab at the bottom of this post to find earlier entries in the series!

Series Saturday: CHEFS OF THE FIVE GODS

This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics.

cover designs by Philip Pascuzzo

Chefs of the Five Gods duology

Written by Beth Cato

published by 47 North (2023 – 2024)

Titles:

·       A Thousand Recipes for Revenge (2023)

·       A Feast for Starving Stone (2024)

“Chefs of the Five Gods,” Beth Cato’s recent fantasy duology, features intriguing world-building, complicated characters, and strong commentary on how something being a cultural norm or tradition doesn’t necessarily mean it’s morally correct.

The world itself is politically and geographically based on Western Europe in the pre-Colonial period. At the start of book one, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, Solenn, a princess of Braiz (essentially coastal northern France as its own country) has been promised in marriage to a prince of Verdania (the larger, more landlocked portion of France). Thanks to recent events (including the virtual destruction of Braiz’s once powerful navy), Verdania is a more politically and militarily powerful nation than Braiz. Braiz needs the ally, given its geographic position between Verdania and the equally powerful and antagonistic island nation of Albion, a constant threat. Accompanied to Verdania’s capitol city by only a small handful of musketeers led by her father’s closest friend and her mentor, Erwan Corre, Solenn must navigate the politics of a foreign nation and the burgeoning of a power she didn’t know she had: she’s a Chef.

In this world, ingredients called epicurea, derived from certain animals and plants, hold magic. Foods cooked with epicurea do everything from enhancing stamina and erasing wrinkles to making voices louder and more sonorous … and being used as sometimes-undetectable poisons. People who can empathically sense epicurea are called Chefs, and in Verdania and Albion they are conscripted into service of the government. Especially empathetic Chefs can even sense the aromas and flavors of ordinary ingredients and can perfectly pair epicurean and non-epicurean ingredients to create unforgettable meals. Ada Garland is a rogue Chef, on the run from service to Verdania’s ruthless king and separated from the love of her life, a Braizian musketeer named Erwan Corre. When Ada is attacked by employees of a man she sent to prison many years earlier, she is put on a path that will inevitably lead her to the daughter she sent away with Erwan for safety’s sake: Solenn.

The combination of a volatile political situation and a magic that only certain people can wield is a potent one. Throw in two strong female leads and a diverse supporting cast, all with their own secrets, and you have a fast-moving, often surprising pair of books that I highly recommend.

Solenn has no idea that Erwan and Ada are her parents, so learning she’s a Chef (as she senses poison in a meal being served to her soon-to-be husband) is a shock that leads to the reveal of her parentage. These early scenes with Solenn establish who she is so clearly: strong-willed, intelligent, but still afraid of being alone once she’s married in a court of enemies. She is not happy about being a political tool, but she loves her country too much to shirk what she perceives as her duty. Learning that she is in fact not the child of the parents who raised her, learning that she is in fact “gifted” with a talent she’s only seen others possess, learning that there’s a plot to kill her betrothed … all of this turns her world upside down, but doesn’t deter her from doing what she knows is the right thing.

Solenn’s scenes alternate with Ada’s which almost from the start are more action-packed (arrests, chases, and attacks) but are equally informative about who Ada is: strong-willed, intelligent, well-trained in sword and gun and hand-to-hand combat, afraid of the toll being on the run has taken on her beloved grandmother, also a rogue Chef. She loves the ability she possesses, hates having to create less-than-perfect meals to serve customers at the Inn where she works so that no one will suspect she’s a rogue Chef. She is devoted to her grandmother, to the friends she served with, to the memory of her marriage to Erwan Corre, annulled by edict of Verdania’s king (which forced her to send her infant daughter away). Both women would do anything, risk anything, for the people they love – and throughout the duology they do just that.

Mother and Daughter’s paths slowly converge over the course of the first book, as the true magical origins of epicurea add another layer of intrigue and several of the Five Gods become personally involved in the events. A Thousand Recipes for Revenge wraps up its major plot points before the book’s denouement, but not everyone emerges completely unscathed … and everything escalates in book two, A Feast for Starving Stone. Albionish machinations in book one lead to outright war in book two as Solenn finds herself in a new role, creating an alliance between Braiz and the previously unknown magical world to save Braiz from being overwhelmed by larger and more powerful enemies attacking from both sides.

A large portion of A Thousand Recipes for Revenge is devoted to the political intrigues surrounding Solenn and the revelations of why Ada went rogue (and how that reason is coming back to threaten her), making the book a delightful slow boil of alternating viewpoints, keeping the reader wondering how and when Ada’s and Solenn’s stories will converge. The reveal of the mother-daughter connection comes early, which enabled me to enjoy picking out how similar, and how different, the two women are without too much time spent on wondering why they are so similar. (I should admit here that I received a print ARC of the book and because I’m such a Beth Cato fan, I dove right in without reading the back cover copy, where the relationship is revealed in the first paragraph.) As noted above, they are both strong women who love their families and would do anything to protect the people they love – even if that means facing fatal danger. But where Solenn also loved her country, Ada is jaded and embittered against hers (for good reason), and this difference in political fealty affects the decisions each makes, which in turn propels the narrative. I hope you can tell how much I love, and feel for, both characters.

I also really enjoyed the supporting cast. Not just Erwan Corre, who is a wonderfully relaxed yet dangerous man, but also the sweet but mysterious Aveyron Silvacane and his father Brillat; Ada’s beloved Grand-Mere, suffering from dementia; Ada’s friend and former fellow soldier Emone and her wife Claudette; and others I loath to identify in fear of spoiling some major plot twists/reveals.

While Thousand Recipes focuses very much on behind-the-scenes political machinations and spycraft before moving into a deadly battle, A Feast for Starving Stone’s opening chapter makes it clear that war is no longer imminent, it is here – and Braiz is caught in a pincer between Albion and Verdania. Solenn and Ada again find themselves on separate quests to protect the people they love, again at great personal peril, and again caught up in the games several of the Five Gods seem to be playing with humanity and with each other. Starving Stone is a much faster paced, blatantly action filled than Thousand Recipes, which puts the books in interesting counterpoint to each other, just as Solenn and Ada counterpoint but complement each other. There is much more bloodshed in Starving Stone but there is also emotional healing and bonding. The book has a lot to say about how we heal from trauma, and how we sometimes come to forgiveness and understanding for those who have harmed us. (Solenn in particular has a painfully beautiful arc regarding this.)

Throughout both books, it is clear that all of these countries regard epicurea as a tool, drawn from animals who are not as important as the humans in control of the world. Many of these animals are hunted to near extinction or bred in horrible circumstances, the plants overharvested. While I am not a vegetarian or vegan, I recognize the parallels between the epicurea of Cato’s world and the hunting, cruel breeding/raising, and overharvesting that happens in our own. As mentioned earlier, Cato makes a persuasive case that just because something is an ingrained cultural institution doesn’t mean it is the morally correct or empathetic thing to do. But we’ve all seen in our own world how hard it is to get people to change from “the way it’s always been” to “a way that is more caring,” and the characters in this duology struggle with what will be a massive cultural shift.

“Chefs of the Five Gods” is currently billed as a duology, and the second book ends on a satisfying note with all the major plotlines tied up, but I really hope Cato will return to this world. It feels like there’s still plenty to explore both in where the characters will go (I totally ship Solenn and Aveyron, by the way. If I wrote fanfiction…) and in the shifts in politics and culture that the reveal of the truth about epicurea should bring about. Still, for now the story is done and I cannot recommend highly enough that fantasy fans seek out A Thousand Recipes for Revenge and A Feast for Starving Stone.

I’ve also featured Beth Cato’s Blood of Earth trilogy on Series Saturday. You can find that post HERE. And I’ve reviewed several of her short stories. Those reviews can be found HERE.