Meredith Monday Schwartz

All right, Bill from An Unlikely Story put this one in our hands for the March Indie Press List, and I want to take a moment to properly thank him because this book is like nothing I have read in fantasy.

and I nearly didn't read it the right way.

I started, well, I almost started it on my e-reader.

A few chapters in, I realized something was happening that my Kindle was simply not equipped to handle in the very best way.

The footnotes.

This book has footnotes, and they are so good.

Sebastian, our centuries-old narrator, annotates his own memoir in real time, and those annotations are a whole experience all by themselves.

They are funny, dry, self-aware.

So I stopped, switched to the physical book, which has a dramatic cover and beautiful red sprayed edges and deserves to be in your hands anyway, and started over.

Come for the story, stay for the footnotes.

Now, I want to be upfront about the pacing because I think that's the thing most likely to trip readers up.

This book is 544 pages, and there were stretches where I genuinely marveled at how slowly we were making progress.

It was this odd feeling.

However much I read, that much more seemed to be added to the end of the book.

And this is the important part.

I never once wanted...

to skim, not a single page, because this is a big, rich, textured book, and it takes up exactly the space that it needs.

The slowness sometimes is the point.

You are not supposed to race through it.

You're supposed to live here for a while, and the ending is fantastic.