Happy Halloween, friends!

I'm thrilled to share my interview with Kristen Dickson, author of A Witch Lives Here. A Witch Lives Here is a "a whimsical picture book about a mysterious house in the woods full of black cats and flying brooms, and a child and dog who follow the clues to determine if a witch indeed lives there. For fans of Kiki's Delivery Service and How to Catch a Witch." It's the perfect spooky season story! 🎃

Q: A Witch Lives Here follows Felix and Spike as they investigate a mysterious house to decide if a witch truly lives there. To do so, they search for clues contained in the aptly named book, “23 Witchy Clues to Spot.” What inspired the twenty-three witchy clues?

A: Oh, the clues! I believe there was a small army of copyeditors dedicated to counting and double counting the number of clues. We didn’t want to miss one! Or count one twice! It was a big effort to keep them all straight (big shout out to the editorial team at Roaring Brook!). To answer your question, we all loved the idea of Felix treasuring witches so much that he carried his own witchy almanac – and then happened to find the perfect way to put his knowledge to the test (a tall black house in the middle of the forest)!

Q: Your words are welcoming, playful, and vibrant, delivering a heartwarming story of witchy wonder, spooky shenanigans, and friendship. Would you share your process for honing your voice and crafting joyful tales that are treats for the whole family?

A: Thank you so much for your kind words, first of all! This book was SO fun to write. I have always loved Halloween, so I’m very grateful for the opportunity to write the Halloween book of my dreams! Fun fact – this manuscript has gone through at least 20 revisions. Spike’s original name was Claude! But Felix has always been Felix, and he has always wanted to be a witch, and the house in the woods was always instrumental to his journey to become one. In fact, the ending lines (“’I wonder,’ Felix said, ‘if any witches live here.’ And they did.”) were in the manuscript from the very first draft. Like Felix, once we find our own magic, we carry it with us across every threshold.

Q: A Witch Lives Here features stunning pictures that complement the story perfectly, delivering an immersive and spellbinding reading experience. Would you walk us through the collaboration process with A Witch Lives Here’s incredible illustrator, Justine Gilbuena?

A: Isn’t Justine wonderful? This is her debut picture book! I am so honored to be a part of her first publication process, especially having seen her extraordinary talent first hand. I still get goosebumps every time I open the book, because every detail is so darn perfect and adorable. Throughout the collaboration process, it felt like Justine was constantly reaching inside my brain to bring every detail of Felix and Spike’s adventure to life. Fun fact: Felix was partly inspired by one of Justine’s illustrations from a few Halloweens back! Safe to say that Justine’s been baked into Felix and Spike’s story since the very beginning.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from A Witch Lives Here, and what did you learn by writing it?

A: It’s always wonderful to hear of little ones reading the book for the first time, or seeing pictures and videos, or experiencing it while reading it aloud to a group at storytime (nothing like real-time feedback from toddlers, ha!) But nothing beats hearing about families reading it again and again, because that’s a kid’s true stamp of approval. Fills me with joy! This book has several layers to it and can be appreciated in different ways, so my hope is readers can find something new in Felix and Spike’s story every time they open it.

Q: What is your favorite part of writing for little ones?

A: When my kids were in preschool, I hosted a weekly storytime for our neighborhood playgroup in my backyard. Each week we chose books according to different themes (Cars, Dinos, Mermaids, etc), and I quickly learned the importance of humor in capturing the attention of rambunctious four year olds! The more absurd the humor, the better – which is a very fun place to write from. I try to shape my work around the number of belly laughs it might one day receive.

Author Bio:

Kristen Dickson is the author of A Witch Lives Here and Fiona Builds A Fairy House, two picture books about marvelous houses and fantastic friends. Kristen dresses as a black cat each year for Halloween and loves finding magic in everyday things. She lives in Dallas with her family.

Thank you so much to Kristen for joining me in discussing her spook-tacular picture book! 🫶

Happy Halloween friends!

We've got a combo disability release wrap up for September and October this month! Apologies on getting a little behind on these--with the combination of traveling internationally and the start of the school year... the fall has gotten away from me. Really, I should be studying for midterms right now but one thing about me is I'll take any excuse to procrastinate.

September Releases

A Hart to Call Home by S. Sidney

romance

chronic migraine

Espíritu by Aiden Thomas

YA fantasy
ADHD

Tastes Like Summer by Caroline Frank

romance

type 1 diabetes

Feeling Like an ADHD Alien by Pina Varnel

YA graphic novel

ADHD

Keldori by Daybreak by M.T. Zimny

YA fantasy

trichotillomania

Kill Your Darlings by Yuvashri Harish

YA Horror

neurodivergence

Conflict Conclusion by D.C. Emerson

romance

PTSD

The Vanished Sister by Sherry Thomas

historical mystery

neurodivergence

Set the Record Straight by Hannah Bonam-Young (trad pub release)

holiday romance

autism, ADHD

The Curse of Thornhollow by Valtinen Erik Karille

paranormal thriller

cane and ambulatory wheelchair user

Doomsdate by Laura Piper Lee

paranormal romance

anxiety

Kiss of the Black Flame by Helen Scheurer

fantasy romance

chronic illness, chronic pain

Made Better Together by Kylie Skye

romance

PTSD

Between Heaven and Unholy by Joanna Carney

romance

anxiety

From Beijing With Love by Bei Lin

romance

OCD, anxiety

The Bone Brides by Marley Rose-Teter

horror

mental illness

October Releases

You're No Better by Andrew Joseph White

YA horror

autism

The Forest Bleeds by Rachel Kitch

horror

OCD, neurodivergence

Ideal Lost, Part One: The Shrikes by JT Wong

contemporary

depression, anxiety

Forrest and Fable by Evita Wren

romance

POTS

Boundless edited by Marieke Nijkamp

middle grade anthology

every story ft. different disabilities

How to Troll a Guy in 10 Days by Pippa Grant

romance

migraines

Bad Words by Ríoghnach Robinson

romance

depression

Big Nick Energy by Morgan Elizabeth (trad pub release)

holiday romance

migraines

Undone by Peyton Corinne

romance

mental illness

Sunflower Season by Danica Nava

romance

anxiety, panic attacks

Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews

YA horror

autism

Victorious by V.E. Schwab

fantasy

chronic pain

Love Wants Us to Win by Jacqueline Middleton

romance

migraines

Crack the Ice by Lindsey Saenz

romance

autism, ADHD, cancer

It's that time!

October has come to a close! I hope everyone enjoyed Mazywood this month, the new horror-thriller from prolific speculative writer Tananarive Due. We have now selected our picks for November, and it is time to vote!

As fun perk this month, BGN Followers can vote on the selections! We have a number to pick from so choose wisely!

Without further ado; here are the selections. Please make sure to vote so yours is counted!

The First Editions, your next book club read just got a little easier! ✨ Our Love All the Way by Rachel Woodley book club kits are officially available, and they’re ready to help you turn your reading into a conversation worth having.

From thoughtful discussion questions to book-club-friendly activities and more, these kits are designed to help you dive deeper into the story, connect with your readers, and make your Love All the Way book club discussion even more memorable. 💕📖

✨ Ready to grab your kits?
Tap the link to download your Love All the Way book club kits!

Tap here to download your BOOK CLUB KIT

Tap here to download your INDIVIDUAL BOOK CLUB MEMBER GUIDE 

Tap here to download your BUDDY READER KIT 

Tap her to download your SOLO READER KIT 

And while you’re there, don’t forget to check out our Deep Dive Book Club Review of Love All the Way by Rachel Woodley. We’re taking a closer look at the story, themes, characters, and everything that made this book such a great conversation starter for The Page Ladies Book Club.

📖 Read. Discuss. Connect. Repeat. That’s what book club is all about. 💕

#LoveAllTheWay #RachelWoodley #BookClubKits #BookClubReads #ThePageLadiesBookClub

What happens when the one person you absolutely should NOT kiss becomes the one person you absolutely cannot stop thinking about? Add Christmas, workplace rivalry, a career-making promotion, and a whole lot of undeniable chemistry and you have Love All the Way! 🎄💋

We love a holiday rom-com that knows exactly what it’s supposed to deliver: cozy Christmas vibes, romantic tension, complicated feelings, plenty of laughs, and two people who seem determined to make falling in love as difficult as humanly possible.

Rachel Woodley gives us all of that in Love All the Way, while also giving Kennedy a journey that goes beyond simply finding her happily-ever-after.

🎄 Meet Kennedy: Career First, Feelings Later

Kennedy has worked hard to build her career, and after a messy breakup with a coworker, she has decided she is officially done mixing business and romance.

Honestly? We understand the rule.

Unfortunately for Kennedy, rules have a funny way of becoming much harder to follow when Milo enters the equation.

Milo isn't just a coworker. He's her office rival, her biggest competition for a coveted promotion, and seemingly the last person Kennedy should ever consider romantically. Their professional rivalry creates an immediate push-and-pull dynamic, because every interaction has another layer underneath it.

And then there’s that Christmas party kiss. 👀

What starts as one impulsive decision quickly becomes something neither of them can simply brush aside.

🔥 Kennedy & Milo: Rivalry With a Side of Chemistry

This is where the romance really shines.

Kennedy and Milo have the kind of dynamic rom-com readers live for: competition, frustration, banter, attraction, and two people who would probably insist they are not falling for each other while behaving like they absolutely are.

Their workplace rivalry also raises the stakes. This isn't simply a case of “Should we date?” There is a promotion involved, careers to protect, and Kennedy's very real fear of repeating the heartbreak she has already experienced.

We especially enjoyed watching Kennedy navigate that conflict between wanting to protect herself and wanting to take a chance on something real.

Because sometimes the hardest part of falling in love isn't figuring out whether you have chemistry.

It's deciding whether you're brave enough to trust it.

🎁 The Holiday Magic

Christmas is more than a backdrop here. The holiday setting gives the story that warm, festive atmosphere we want from a holiday romance while creating the perfect environment for Kennedy's emotional walls to start coming down.

Office Christmas parties, unexpected kisses, romantic tension, and the possibility of starting over? Yes, please.

There is something especially satisfying about reading a romance during the holidays because the season itself encourages characters to reflect on what and who they really want in their lives.

And Kennedy has plenty to think about.

💕 More Than Just a Workplace Romance

Underneath the banter and holiday sparkle, Love All the Way explores some wonderfully relatable questions.

What happens when a past relationship changes the way you approach future ones?

How much should career ambition influence your personal life?

Can you protect yourself from heartbreak without also protecting yourself from happiness?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: When you've been hurt before, how do you know when it's finally safe to let someone in again?

Kennedy's story makes those questions especially interesting because she isn't simply choosing between two romantic possibilities. She's deciding what kind of life she wants and whether she is willing to take a risk to have it.

📚 Why We Think This Is a Fun Book Club Pick

Love All the Way is exactly the kind of rom-com that can turn into a lively book-club conversation.

There's plenty to discuss about workplace relationships, ambition, friendship, communication, trust, boundaries, and whether Kennedy's “never date a coworker again” rule is actually a sensible boundary or an emotional reaction to being hurt.

And, of course, there is the romance.

Because let's be honest: sometimes the best book-club conversations begin with, “Okay, but what would YOU have done?” 😂

💭 Book Club Conversation Starters

❤️ Would you ever date a coworker?

🎄 Was Kennedy right to try to keep romance and her career completely separate?

🔥 When did you start believing Kennedy and Milo could actually work?

💼 Should a romantic relationship be off-limits when two people are competing for the same promotion?

💕 How much should past heartbreak influence the way we approach a new relationship?

👀 And most importantly…would you have kissed Milo at that Christmas party?

📥 Ready to Read It With Us?

We made the book-club experience easy!

Tap the link to download your free Mini Book Club Kit, Individual Book Club Member Reader Guide, Buddy-Reading Kit, or Solo Reader Kit and bring Love All the Way to your next reading adventure.

Tap here to download your MINI READER KITS

Want to go all in? Join The First Editions for access to our full book club kits and even more Page Ladies bookish goodness. 📚✨

💌 Thank you to Wattpad Books and Rachel Woodley for sharing Love All the Way with us. We loved getting cozy with this festive, chemistry-filled rom-com!

❤️ The Page Ladies Verdict

If you're looking for a cozy holiday romance with workplace rivals, undeniable chemistry, Christmas atmosphere, career ambition, and a heroine learning that protecting your heart isn't always the same thing as following it, Love All the Way deserves a spot on your holiday TBR.

Now we want to know:

Would you risk workplace romance if the chemistry was undeniable, or is dating a coworker a hard NO for you? 🎄💕

If you like the hunger games, you'll like this one.

Temo is a trans teen and he lives in a colonized world where there is the lethal tournament conducted. But when his boyfriend, Ollin, is kidnapped he would have to enter the tournament to save him.

Honestly, as a person from India, which was a British colony just 70 years ago, some of the things gave literal shivers. I could understand some of the nuances in the book.
Temo, Ollin and other characters are really well written and the world building is good. I did feel the pace could have been little quicker towards the middle.

Overall, a great YA dystopian book. Add it to your tbr!

Thank you @booksparks for sharing this beautiful copy with me.

Thank you @sonidoreyes for writing this amazing story.

#frc2026

Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!

I thought we would do something kewl for the final book club of the year and have an epic battle royale of all the second runners up throughout 2026 that our club almost chose. I left a couple out (I'm sorry but I don't want to read Yesteryear lol) but would be thrilllled to read anything on the list! Without further ado, here are 9 juicy options for you!

Sunny’s Book Club is a monthly book club highlighting both new releases and backlist titles we love. A virtual discussion is hosted over Zoom on the last Sunday of the month.

A new physical book will be shipped to you (or available for in store pickup) the month prior to when this month’s book club will take place. The December pick will ship the last week of November to ensure you have the entire month to read the book.

The link for sign up is not a subscription service, you opt in on a monthly basis dependent on your interest in that months chosen title. We do however have a recurring book club subscription if you are interested here.

A rollicking debut novel about a cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options

After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea's dime. 

Usually the responsible one, Bea isn't about to admit exactly why she's suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has . . . a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.?

Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined.

Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves.

A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

“Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Whistler

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

“If Philip K. Dick had written The Bell Jar” (Camille Bordas) it would resemble Albertine Clarke's mesmerizing debut about the frayed borders between our bodies and minds.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Debutiful, Lit Hub, and Our Culture

Ada lives a solitary life. She spends her days in her London apartment building's swimming pool, occasionally visiting with her cousin Francesca and meeting her friends, each of them chatting, drinking, posing invitations Ada ignores. Ada's parents are recently divorced after her father became a bodybuilder: he spends his days at the gym, which is crowded and bright, warm with human proximity, infrequently calling to express minor concerns around his daughter's well-being.

When she meets a man named Atticus by the pool, Ada immediately feels an intimate connection between them: they share a life, in a way she can't explain. Little by little, Ada's estrangement from her familiar surroundings and from reality widens, as though seeing her reflection through a mirror, pieces of it falling away. After her mother entreats Ada to join her on a remote Greek holiday, Ada is jolted out of the physical world and into a new, artificial environment, one that a mysterious and potentially otherworldly force has created and designed for her. As this brilliant first novel pivots with masterful effect into the surreal and speculative, we move through Ada's experiences of life like spokes on a wheel, profoundly surprised by the enduring mystery of our existence, and of our relationships with ourselves and others. When a person's life, in the odd space between mind and body, is inherently one of isolation, are our connections with those around us merely projections of ourselves? And if not, where do they come from?

Albertine Clarke transforms the speculative into an entirely singular experience of deep interiority. The precision, subtlety, and confidence of her writing is nothing short of astonishing. THE BODY BUILDERS is new classic of the speculative fiction genre, landing like a blow, widening a crack that allows us to perceive the world wholly differently than we ever imagined.

National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda returns with a blazing, psychedelic novel about girlhood, violence, and the loss of innocence.

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival's so-called "celebration of life." Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Vivid, terrifying, and celebratory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun blends the primal with the supernatural, solidifying Mónica Ojeda as one of the most singular and exciting voices in Latin American and world literature today.

The spellbinding new novel from New York Times bestselling author Melissa Albert, in which the estranged adult children of a legendary author, written into their dead mother’s beloved fantasy series, must contend with the vine-like creep of family legacy, memory, and magic.

Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods.

In one, she and her brother, Ennis, live in the wooded shadow of their family's isolated Vermont farmhouse; in the other, the pages of their mother’s world-famous Ninth City books, where their magical adventures have made them household names. In reality, Guinevere's childhood isn't the enchanted idyll her mother’s readers imagine: she and Ennis are growing up near-feral, unwashed and underfed, escaping each day to the wild woods they’ve made their playland. As Edith Sharpe’s books explode into epic popularity, the threats of a rural childhood give way to the escalating perils of fame—until the night it all goes up in flames, leaving Edith’s series unfinished and her children the sole survivors.

Now an adult coasting on her mother's name, Guinevere is mid-promotion for a ghostwritten memoir when her estranged brother, an artist who has until now spurned his family's legacy, announces an upcoming installation titled, simply, Mother. As rumors swirl around a death connected to his last show, unsettling recollections from Guinevere’s childhood begin to surface. Her public facade starts to crack, forcing her to confront the questions she's spent the last twenty years running from: What really happened the night of the fire? And what dark secrets lurk behind their mother's creative genius?

Part fairy tale, part literary family drama, The Children is wise to the mythic weight childhood memories gather over time, and the way our most beloved stories grow up with us. It's for anyone who's ever revisited an old favorite and found its pages cast in a darker light, the line separating magic from reality blurring as we discover the books that once comforted us carry shadows of their own.

“Charming . . . There’s so much fine, freewheeling observation and pillowy erudition here, it’s tempting just to sink in.”—The New York Times

A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Annie Bot meets Fallout in this dystopian satire: six women created in a lab, designed to serve the billionaires of the future in a luxury fallout shelter, rebel against their programming after the end times arrive.

Welcome to the Felicity Complex! Constructed during the height of the Cold War, our unique hotel is prepared to protect you, the billionaire class, from nuclear annihilation! Shielded from radiation and supplemented with closed air systems and hydroponic gardens, this resort bunker offers a prime existence underground: full gymnasium and spa, gourmet meals, top-tier medical care, and the best in entertainment.

Meet Hallelujah! Grown in a lab and educated in the ways of concierge hospitality, she believes in her duty to comfort the Lord-anointed refugees of the apocalypse. (Even if her lover Anastasia disagrees. Even if her creator Dr. Younghusband is disappointed in her.) Don’t worry—everyone is safe from communists in the Felicity Complex!

Look, Hallelujah, guests have finally arrived! Hallelujah and her sister specimens have waited ages for you. Never mind the secrets other rich survivalists may be hiding. Just make sure they don’t notice the violent intentions behind our staff’s wide, wide smiles…

A sendup of traditional womanhood and lampooning the paranoias of the elite, The Felicity Complex questions the ambitions behind the entitled few who plan for the end times—and who truly survives them.

Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.

A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for. 

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all. 

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story. 

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

From the Booker Prize finalist and author of Sisters: a haunting novel about the complexities of motherhood, nested within three generations of women and children searching for each other to find themselves.

Found alone on a remote island as a toddler, Ori grows up mired in the mystery of what happened to the young mother who left her. When Ori welcomes a child of her own, years later, maternal doubt creeps in. As sleepless nights slacken her grip on reality, she travels back through memory to that stormy island, waiting in the shadow of a beaconless lighthouse, straining hopefully for the sound of her mother's return.

In ways she doesn’t yet understand, Ori’s unraveling binds her to her mother and grandmother, whose lives were also shaped by the brutal intimacies of motherhood. But can exhuming the past alter the future? Is Ori’s fate—and the fate of her child—intractably tethered to the secrets of those who came before her?

Set in the uncanny, coastal England of Daisy Johnson’s imagination, Long Wave immerses the reader in a physical landscape reflective of the novel’s intense, interior drama. With the hypnotic language, ferocious emotion, and inventive imagery she is known for, Johnson offers a masterfully layered and moving story that looks beyond traditional understandings of family to examine the many elemental forces of generation and transplantation that graft us to one another.

Eight very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading Public Access Afterworld in November. Today is the last day to sign up on our website. You never have to buy the book from Sunny's to participate in book club, we just love it when you do.

Love what we do? Become a paid subscriber for less than a cup of coffee a month. Your ongoing support helps us plan ahead, fund causes we care about, and create meaningful programming for our community.

Share this episode with your favorite first-time voter! With the midterm elections fast approaching, Nox takes you step-by-step through the process of voting. From registering to finding your ballot, we hope that you find this guide informative and helpful as we get ready to vote. Even if you’re a veteran voter, you might learn something new!

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Books/Resources Mentioned:

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This episode was edited and produced by Renee Powers on the ancestral land of the Dakota people.

Original music by Amarissa

Chapter 20

Burning. 

Icarus’s eyes were burning. 

He roared against the pain and tried to rub the Eidolon out. He dropped to his knees and the grasses huffed under his weight. He heard the tumult of the waterfall, the twittering of creatures in the rocks below, all of it tainted by the sound of his agony. 

“Damn it! God damn it!” He shouted.

Footsteps thumped in a jog in his direction and he forced himself to look up—someone was trotting towards him. Nobody ever trotted towards him, not in these between-states. It was a woman, vaguely familiar even in the haze of pain blurring his vision. Her hair was the red of a sunset on the sea woven in complex plaits studded with gold, eyes a rich forest green with a sparkle to them that had nothing to do with the perennial midday sun. 

Her dress was long and flowed around her like a current—wide sleeves brushed the grass tips and a neckline that bared her shoulders plunged to gather at a gold and pearl brooch between her breasts, all of it spun from ivory silk with edges that looked dipped in dye made of pale pink cabbage roses. She was barefoot, unconcerned with the prickle of the ground, and her slender fingers bedecked with rings and chains that made the most pleasant chime when they moved. 

He stared up at her, forgetting his pain when he spied the long, tapering shells of her ears that arced back in long points. The heel of one hand pressed into one eye and made it harder to register what he was seeing. It hit him like a carriage to the face. 

“Eilonwy?” He rasped and winced, gritting his teeth as another wave pierced his skull. “Wasn’t your hair brown?” 

“It’s called a glamour. I was trying to be inconspicuous,” she waved a hand and batted the moment away. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry, Icarus. I couldn’t tell you.”

“You vanished! No, worse - you broke the salt on purpose and I could’ve died. Do you understand that?!” He snarled, anger amplified by the stabbing in his eye. 

A blush crept across her freckled cheeks, “I had no choice. He was going to expose me and I needed to buy time to get away. You would not have died, but I know you think that. Listen to me. We don’t have much time.”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” he grumbled. “Was he even your brother?”

She winced, then nodded and he wasn’t sure which surprised him more, “He was. Dáire left to wake the Ancients, but he never came back. He wasn’t… he wasn’t supposed to offer himself, the fool. He was only supposed to wake it, but my brother wasn’t born with a lick of sense in his head. Now he’s paid for it and we’ve lost an Ancient.”

“I won’t apologize for killing him, that thing was going to rip my throat out,” Icarus hissed. “You keep saying we, what does that mean? What are you? It sure as all the Stygian hells isn’t a fae.”

The tips of her ears drooped in what he chose to believe was guilt, “Not fae the way you know them. Dáire could cross without taking a host, all my kind can. We’re… I’m Tuatha de Danann. High fae.”

His one-eyed glare could wither a forest, “Of course.”

She sighed and placed both hands on his shoulders to cut off whatever else he might say, “I know you don’t trust me, but I need you to try. The gaol that’s got your father won’t hold. The Morrigan is trying to free him. If she does, he’s going to unleash hell upon us all. He won’t just destroy our world, what he’s planning will destroy yours, too. You need to get there and stop him before she sets him free.”

“What happens if he gets free?” Icarus winced against another lash of fire whipping across his skull. “Why can’t you just kill him?”

“He’s got the blood of a demon in him, the only thing we’d succeed in doing is casting it out if we tried. Look, get to the gaol and I’ll find you. A fae can’t kill him in that state, that’s why we put him there in the first place,” she lifted her head, ears twitching at a sound Icarus couldn’t hear. “Get there. Find it or all of us are doomed.”

He growled incoherently and doubled over under the force of another wave, spilling out from under her hands. He collapsed on all fours with a groan, nausea welled up in his gut and turned into scorching bile in his throat. He spit and dry heaved until it passed. Everything was aflame, he could barely think. He managed to ease himself up on shaking limbs and sit back on his heels, then took a long breath before looking up at her again with both eyes. 

She startled. 

Icarus did not like that she startled. 

Eilonwy leaned down, wide-eyed, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

He furrowed his brow, “What? This is my-”

“Not you,” her eyes narrowed. “You.”

“What-”

She pointed at him with a scowl, “Get out.”

The tip of her finger tapped his forehead and Icarus was rocketed backwards, falling through the world and watching the colors bleed in that wet-paint way he was tragically getting used to. He cried out in alarm, cut short when he was unceremoniously dumped back into the human world and the aching physical body that came with it. 

He scrambled to his feet and bolted from his office. He threw open the door to the washroom, ignoring Edith’s worried calls after him. The water was cool and blessedly purifying when he splashed it into his face to smother the fire in his eye. Relief swept through him and the lingering Eidolon swirled and roiled until it was sipped away down the drain. 

Brass chilled under his palms, Icarus gripped the basin tighter and tried to steady his breathing and the mad dash of his heart at the same time. His mind reeled and tumbled over the faded edges of everything he had seen while desperately trying to commit it to memory.

Eilonwy, Tuatha de Danann. It explained a lot. Too much, if he thought about it. 

Danann were very rare, so rare they were mythologized and dismissed in some parts of the country as fiction which always amused Icarus considering the state of things. High fae could travel the realms without anchoring into a human host, no need for possession when you’re full to the brim with their weird magic. 

He blinked rapidly until his vision cleared and everything stopped coming in doubles. Maren’s voice carried in an unintelligible question he could guess at and the door creaked when it opened. Her hand was on his back and she lifted his chin to inspect the damage.

“Tell me.”

He flexed his hand, the chill of the brass must have crept into that damned wrist of his again, “I don’t know. I did everything

Hey Inkmongers!

October is nearly gone, which means it’s time to make our November book club selection!

My dream for Inkmonger is to one day publish a winner of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction (or make the world a better place in the attempt). All of the Inkmonger book club picks will help us achieve this by teaching us all about Le Guin's literary lineage, and the qualities that give stories their hope-generating capacity.

Here are the contenders, hand-picked from the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlists, and Le Guin’s own bibliography:

Elder Race • Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.
But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she’s an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she tells herself). Although she still gets in the way, she understands that the only way to save her people is to invoke the pact between her family and the Elder sorcerer who has inhabited the local tower for as long as her people have lived here (though none in living memory has approached it).
But Elder Nyr isn’t a sorcerer, and he is forbidden to help, and his knowledge of science tells him the threat cannot possibly be a demon. . . .

The City in Glass • Nghi Vo

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other’s devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.

Audition • Pip Adam

2026 Winner of the UKLG Prize!

A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.

Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves – experiences of imprisonment, violence and misrecognition, of disempowerment and underprivilege.

Pip Adam’s uncategorisable new novel, part science fiction, part social realism, asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given.

Five Ways to Forgiveness • Ursula K Le Guin

Here for the first time is the complete suite of five linked stories from Ursula K. Le Guin’s acclaimed Hainish series, which tells the history of the Ekumen, the galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain. First published as Four Ways to Forgiveness, and now joined by a fifth story, Five Ways to Forgiveness focuses on the twin planets Werel and Yeowe—two worlds whose peoples, long known as “owners” and “assets,” together face an uncertain future after civil war and revolution.

In “Betrayals” a retired science teacher must make peace with her new neighbor, a disgraced revolutionary leader. In “Forgiveness Day,” a female official from the Ekumen arrives to survey the situation on Werel and struggles against its rigidly patriarchal culture. Embedded within “A Man of the People,” which describes the coming of age of Havzhiva, an Ekumen ambassador to Yeowe, is Le Guin’s most sustained description of the Ur-planet Hain. “A Woman’s Liberation” is the remarkable narrative of Rakam, born an asset on Werel, who must twice escape from slavery to freedom. Joined to them is “Old Music and the Slave Women,” in which the charismatic Hainish embassy worker, who appears in two of the four original stories, returns for a tale of his own. Of this capstone tale Le Guin has written, “the character called Old Music began to tell me a fifth tale about the latter days of the civil war . . . I’m glad to see it joined to the others at last.”

The Eye of the Heron • Ursula K Le Guin

In Victoria on a former prison colony, two exiled groups--the farmers of Shantih and the City dwellers--live in apparent harmony. All is not as it seems, however. While the peace-loving farmers labor endlessly to provide food for the City, the City Bosses rule the Shantih with an iron fist. When a group of farmers decide to from a new settlement further away, the Bosses retaliate by threatening to crush the "rebellion."

Luz understands what it means to have no choices. Her father is a Boss and he has ruled over her life with the same iron fist. Luz wonders what it might be like to make her own choices. To be free to choose her own destiny.

Support the Migrant Support Collective here!

We've read some wild books this year, and want to hear what your favorite balls-off-the-wall books are. Any genre or release date is fine, the only criteria is that it made you go WTF

It's Election Day!!! Well no, not that one, for our book club's November pick :)