What happens when you die? One day Alex was laughing on a bright summer sidewalk. Then, a Taser to the heart, he was gone. Best friends since childhood, Alex and Jonah need to figure out how to go on –in life and in death– and how to find justice. "Like Water is a love letter to both the streets of Oakland and the youth who walk them. It tells of the city's history as well as the conflagrations threatening to devour it. These are characters attempting to love through the fire." - Nayomi Munaweera author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors
TT. Thorn Coyle has been arrested at least four times. Buy her a cup of tea or a good whisky and she'll tell you about it.
A salty-tongued, tattooed mystic, Thorn is author of the alt-history urban fantasy series The Panther Chronicles, the novel Like Water, and two short story collections. The Witches of Portland will be out in Spring, 2018. She has also written multiple non-fiction books including Sigil Magic for Writers, Artists & Other Creatives, Kissing the Limitless, and Evolutionary Witchcraft. Thorn's work appears in many anthologies, magazines, and collections.
She has taught magical practice in nine countries, on four continents, and in twenty-five states. Her other occupations have been numerous, and include working four years each on the Pacific Stock Options floor (as a young Anarchist punk with a blue, flat-top Mohawk), in a woman-run peep show, and full time in the San Francisco soup kitchen she ended up volunteering at for twenty years. All of this, along with her activism, informs her fiction.
An interloper to the Pacific Northwest, Thorn joyfully stalks city streets, writes in cafes, and talks to crows, squirrels, and trees.
This book is bold, well-written, tender, incisive, and important. It's also hard to read, because Coyle's portrayal of Jonah's grief is powerful and deeply real. The viewpoint characters all feel like people I will know for the rest of my life. Extremely well done.
This book is staying with me. The characters feel like people I know, or at least should know, and that I got to get under their skin for a brief but potent period of time. I really look forward to more fiction from this author. Having read many of her non-fiction books, I feel excited by this new way of letting Thorn's brilliant insights live in the world.