Every so often, a friend and I wish for more books in a category I sometimes call “’90s coffeeshop fantasy.” There are too few books in this category. “Something like Charles de Lint, but not” my friend will say. “Like
Girl, but with magic,” I’ll suggest. “More books kind of like Pamela Dean’s
Tam Lin,” we agree. But it’s a space that’s hard to pin down and define elusive, magical, but like real life, too.
And then I read Michelle Ruiz Keil’s
Summer in the City of Roses, which is all of this and so much more. Lush, empathetic, strident, puckish, infused with a street-level punk-rock magic, it’s the kind of fairy tale my teen self didn’t even know a person could dream of. Much of its magic hums along like a current beneath the book’s skin, bursting out in full bloom for a transformative finale. But it’s there all along, if you’re looking and this is the kind of book you want to give your full attention to.
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Presenting “Trading Hearts at the Half Kaffe Café,” a story by Charles de Lint, reprinted from horror romance anthology Single White Vampire Seeks Same edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Brittiany A. Koren for Tor.com’s Monster Mash.
CHERISH EACH DAY
out of life. Likes the outdoors, animals. Seek
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The problem is expectations.
We all buy so heavily into how we hope things will turn out, how society and our friends say it should be, that by the time we actually have a date, we’re locked into those particular hopes and expectations and miss everything that could be. We end up stumbling our way through the forest, never seeing all the unexpected and wonderful possibilities and potentials because we’re looking for the idea of a tree, instead of appreciating the actual trees in front of us.
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