Farrar, Straus and Giroux
What if Wednesday Addams had been sent away to boarding school when she was little? Would she remember all the secrets of her monstrous family? Would she remember why, of all of them, she was the one so dangerous that she had to be banished?
This is the best way to describe the premise of Rose Szabo s debut novel,
What Big Teeth though the Zarrin family is both much stranger and more dour than the affable Addamses.
Eleanor Zarrin hasn t been home to her family s ramshackle mansion in Maine since her grandmother, the matriarch, sent her away to boarding school as a punishment for some terrible mishap that Eleanor can t remember clearly. There are a lot of things that Eleanor can t quite remember, and many family secrets that she has never understood.
Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia. As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found. When they arrive in Australia, what seemed like a stable shore gives way to treacherous currents. Neighbors, classmates, and the government seek their own ends, indifferent to the family’s fate. For Firuzeh, her fantasy worlds provide some relief, but as her family and home splinter, she must surface from these imaginings and find a new way.
Camille Durbonne gambled everything she had to keep herself and her sister safe. But as the people of Paris starve and mobs riot, safety may no longer be possible… Not when Camille lives for the rebellion. In the pamphlets she prints, she tells the stories of girls living at society’s margins. But as her writings captivate the public, she begins to suspect a dark magic she can’t control lies at the heart of her success. Then Louis XVI declares magic a crime and all magicians traitors to France. As bonfires incinerate enchanted books and special police prowl the city, the time for magic and those who work it is running out. In this new Paris where allegiances shift and violence erupts, the answers Camille seeks set her on a perilous path, one that may cost her the boy she loves even her life. If she can discover who she truly is before vengeful forces unmask her, she may still win this deadly game of revolution.
Dracula is of course full of queer potential, but sadly, Lucy Westenra’s desire to have three husbands goes largely unexplored on the page. S.T. Gibson’s new novella,
A Dowry of Blood, responds to the latent queerness of the original with a page-turning, heartbreaking retelling of the lives of Dracula’s brides. Told from the perspective of Constanta, Dracula’s eldest wife, the book follows her journey through Europe at his side. Centuries pass in a blur in this haunting retelling that features queer romance, abuse, the ennui of undeath, and the ghosts of intergenerational trauma as Constanta’s immortal beloved becomes increasingly paranoid and controlling. If you liked Dracula for its own sake for the epistolary style, the obsession with train tables, the 19th century prose know that this book has a decidedly different feel to it. It’s not a book about humans confronting monsters; it’s about monsters reckoning with their own monstrousness. But if you love psychologica