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Dec. 2nd, 2018 10:43 amI took shameless advantage of my friendship with Iona Datt Sharma and Katherine Fabian to demand an early copy of Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night, their upcoming novella, which is coming out this Friday just in time for it to be the most enjoyable holiday-adjacent thing you'll read this season.
Layla is a respectably-gay-married pathologist with a full-time career, a house and two kids; Nat is an aggressively queer jobbing composer. Their only commonalities: they're both poly, neither of them do very much magic, and they're both dating deeply weird fairyland-adjacent professional magician Meraud. Other than that they have very little to talk about, and generally attempt to avoid doing so -- until Meraud disappears, with his rescue contingent on a complex magical treasure hunt that, Tam Lin-esque, can only be performed by his beloved.
In this case beloved is a plural, which means it's time for some OBLIGATE TEAMWORK.
"I'm only hanging out with you because this ONE PERSON needs us to work together but I GUESS if they like you there's something to you" is a great and tragically underused story structure and it is utilized here SO WELL. There's collective magical riddle-solving! There's a fake engagement! There's the collision of different kinds of queer lifestyles! There's nonprofit bureaucracy and city planning! But most of all there are the complex family and community networks that weave through everybody's lives, and the magic that these connections create, which is really what the story is about, and feel-good in the best possible way.
Layla is a respectably-gay-married pathologist with a full-time career, a house and two kids; Nat is an aggressively queer jobbing composer. Their only commonalities: they're both poly, neither of them do very much magic, and they're both dating deeply weird fairyland-adjacent professional magician Meraud. Other than that they have very little to talk about, and generally attempt to avoid doing so -- until Meraud disappears, with his rescue contingent on a complex magical treasure hunt that, Tam Lin-esque, can only be performed by his beloved.
In this case beloved is a plural, which means it's time for some OBLIGATE TEAMWORK.
"I'm only hanging out with you because this ONE PERSON needs us to work together but I GUESS if they like you there's something to you" is a great and tragically underused story structure and it is utilized here SO WELL. There's collective magical riddle-solving! There's a fake engagement! There's the collision of different kinds of queer lifestyles! There's nonprofit bureaucracy and city planning! But most of all there are the complex family and community networks that weave through everybody's lives, and the magic that these connections create, which is really what the story is about, and feel-good in the best possible way.
