Between a Cup of Time & Tea

by Bailey Brooke

Soji Lovell is autistic, methodical, and certain she knows the right thing to do.

She says she is crossing the continent of Aurelia's ancient, basalt-strewn ruins with her service dog, Sky, to scatter her father's ashes.

She is lying to everyone, including herself.

The fire that killed her father left her wife, Carmi, unable to walk, and Soji is certain the fault was hers. When a doctor in the capital city of Elaris writes with a possible treatment, the ashes become cover for the real errand: setting everything back the way it was.

But Aurelia is full of things that refuse to stay buried. Floating towns celebrating their dead, ancient machines still humming beneath ruined cities, and travelers carrying griefs of their own. The farther Soji walks, and the more she comes to understand herself and the world around her, the harder it becomes to ignore what she’s been running from.

Will she find a way to put the past right, or has she become trapped in it?

For readers who love quiet, character-driven fantasy, ancient ruins, queer and disabled protagonists, and stories about grief, healing, and the strange things we leave behind.

Genres: Fantasy

359 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication November 14, 2026

About the author

Hiya! I’m Bailey (she/her), though I also go by Beebee. I’m a trans, autistic writer originally from Massachusetts.

My poetry and prose have appeared in Oddball Magazine, New Words Press, and Moonstone Press’ S/He Speaks: Voices of Women, Trans & Nonbinary Folx. I write about grief, queerness, disability, belonging, and people doing their best to understand one another.

Outside of writing, I draw, obsessively organize things, occasionally dress up in fursuit, and stream online while being a goofy goober. I can also rarely be found without a cup of tea or iced coffee nearby. I’m the author of the upcoming

Between a Cup of Time & Tea is my debut novel about a trans autistic woman traveling through a ruined fantasy world in the hope of helping her wife. It releases in late 2026.

Reviews

[ech0reads · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for kindly giving me an ARC.

The first thing I was drawn to was the absolutely stunning front cover. The art is incredible and perfectly fits the cozy adventure vibes of the book.

The representation in this book is so good. Not only is there well-written queer, neurodivergent, and physical disability representation, but the challenges that the characters face because of these are so organically woven into the plot and intrinsic to the characters, without being their whole identity. The characters are queer, neurodivergent, and disabled, but that's not all they are by any means. This felt like something that was written from such a personal and raw perspective and it shone through the prose, characters, and plot so well.

All of the places that Soji visits along her journey are so interesting and unique. The way they're described is so whimsical that it feels like the author is travelling alongside her.

My favourite scene has to be the mines. It was so unsettling in a melancholic way. I really liked the statues with the destroyed faces, it felt like such an echo of the past, and it felt like the mines brimmed with histories and stories that were untold. It was really well done and the world building was incredibly fleshed out.

I think because this story feels so personal, I struggled to fully connect with it. It's hard to explain because the characters, world building, and plot were all so interesting and layered, but maybe because it was such a strong own voice that I felt less engaged. I'm not entirely sure but I would still highly recommend this book.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

What the Ruins Remember, What the Living Cannot Restore, and the Strange Obligations of Love
In Bailey Brooke’s "Between a Cup of Time & Tea," an autistic trans custodian crosses a world of damaged machinery and surviving archives, discovering that preservation is not the same as deciding another person’s future.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 30th, 2026

Dr. Melisande’s letter has gone soft at its folds. Soji Lovell keeps unfolding it, rereading a possibility that refuses to become a promise. The doctor’s letter smells of nothing. Beside it lies a smaller, rose-colored envelope, still sealed and smelling faintly of lavender. Carmi, her wife, has written “For when you’re feeling down, Love Carmi” on the front. Soji refuses to open it until she has made Carmi better: she has turned affection into a reward for work not yet completed. The thought begins with a lone “No.” She can recite the doctor’s qualifications. She has not read a word of her wife’s reassurance. Bailey Brooke’s “Between a Cup of Time & Tea” begins with that arrangement of paper and desire. She will cross a continent to help the person she cannot yet allow to help her.

Even the itinerary Soji gives Carmi has a stop she has kept to herself. She is a custodian from Korst, an autistic trans woman accustomed to keeping a small library, its records, and the occasional human misunderstanding in workable order. Her father died in a fire; Soji was burned, and Carmi, who rescued her, lost the use of her legs. Carrying her father’s ashes and accompanied by Sky, a large, alert Bernese service dog, Soji has undertaken to visit places he marked in his journal. The itinerary also conceals a trip to the capital, Elaris, where Melisande has mentioned experimental nerve grafting that might restore some function to Carmi’s body. She has treated the fire as a verdict, with repair her only possible appeal.

Much of Aurelia is still living off the handiwork of the dead. Basalt towers loom over marshes; copper pipes emerge from the earth; machinery operates long after its makers are forgotten. Custodians preserve books and documents, but also teach, maintain, interpret, and improvise. Soji can catalogue an object, repair its parts, or trace its changing uses. A broken valve may need replacing; a wife is not a faulty mechanism awaiting her spouse’s diagnosis. Disabled bodies do not become meaningful because they resemble salvageable equipment. Aurelia has made ordinary use of buildings and mechanisms their builders could never have imagined. Soji, resourceful about what ruins can become, is less able to picture a happy marriage that does not reproduce the one before the fire.

Early in Riedval, the floating settlement where fireworks carry the dead’s ashes, Soji watches the custodian Nael paint a ceremonial rocket. The aging man works with the help of a weighted glove. The glove steadies his burned, trembling hand, though only barely; he must bring the brush and rocket casing closer. He is making a firework, explaining his friendship with Soji’s father, and getting on with it. Soji, meanwhile, keeps her own burned hands under cover. Her father’s letters to Nael grow less legible as illness advances. The handwriting registers a loss no account of symptoms could make so intimate. During Morvita, Soji finally unfolds Carmi’s letter, and tears begin to stain the page as she reads her wife’s declaration of love. Fireworks split the rainy sky as Soji clutches the letter and breaks off halfway through a promise to fix everything. Nael has said nothing about acceptance. Earlier, he painted the rockets with the same gloved hand that showed her the letters recording her father’s decline. Now the fireworks are rising, and Soji is still bargaining with the living.

Tea keeps turning up among Aurelia’s towers, wreckage, and improbable machines. Soji makes it to establish a predictable morning; strangers offer it to establish hospitality; the ancient draconic construct Calyx remembers making wild mint tea for a sick hatchling when mechanical attendants could have performed the task. “I chose to,” Calyx says. Their voice keeps snagging on the recollection, disappearing into static before the words return. Their daughter, unlike the mechanism that speaks of her, remains vivid in memory. Their old power could not keep her alive, but they can still tell Soji who made the tea.

Roadside encounters do not always carry this much imaginative weight. At times the journey acquires the tidy design of a lesson: a stranger appears with a related loss, a local history supplies an illustrative catastrophe, and the traveler carries another insight toward Elaris. The lessons can feel scheduled. Calyx is a more substantial figure because their anger resists immediate consolation. Calyx repeats “my responsibility” before insisting, “She had to be.” The tea is tender, but the repetition makes love sound like a contract that could never be fulfilled. Soji repairs the failed mechanism, but release from the cavern cannot bring back the hatchling or tell Calyx what to do with centuries of grief. The repair matters: Calyx can leave the cavern. Their grief comes with them. Nothing in that success establishes that the daughter would have lived had her parent been more powerful, or that Soji must bring Carmi a cure before she deserves to go home.

In Elaris, the consultation Soji has planned for months turns on an absence: Carmi’s. Nerve grafting is experimental. Melisande estimates perhaps a five-percent chance of success if performed soon; rehabilitation would be long, and the procedure might do nothing. Melisande asks: “Is this about your wife’s choice, or yours?” Soji tightens her grip on the pamphlet, then says she does not understand. Soji has camped and economized to put money aside, but Melisande tells her the procedure would already be covered. She has prepared for the wrong obstacle. Soji insists Carmi will have the final say, although Carmi does not know a consultation is taking place. Melisande notices Soji’s scarred hands, which Soji has spent the journey trying not to examine herself. The doctor offers treatment for those, too. Soji refuses that possibility as quickly as she clutches Carmi’s pamphlet.

Pursuing treatment is not itself Soji’s betrayal of Carmi. Carmi’s eventual position is not that her wheelchair has made medicine morally suspect. She may investigate later, but insists that the risks are hers to weigh. Soji hopes to protect Carmi from a possible disappointment and, in doing so, deprives her of the information necessary to decide. Yet Carmi’s physical absence for much of the novel comes at a cost: she is often more available as Soji’s imagined obligation than as a person apart from her.

Anna’s death reaches Soji through custodial records rather than a story told at home. In Elaris she finds the hospital account of her mother’s fatal complications during pregnancy and childbirth. The records establish a medical calamity; Soji reads them as an indictment of her birth. The accusation is hers; no file makes it. In a photograph from Riedval her father helps rebuild the settlement; in his earlier letters the handwriting still runs steadily across the page. By his last years he struggles to recognize the daughter examining these traces. The hospital papers establish Anna’s death; the journal records an awkward courtship, misread moods, tea, and the little domestic plans that did not survive her. Soji wants a cause she can turn into a verdict against herself. Instead the pages leave her among two people she was too young to know, whose lives cannot be reconstructed from the circumstances of their deaths.

Pages of her father’s journal give Anna a life beyond the solemnity of her grave. Anna has appetite, humor, inept enthusiasm for painting, and plans to travel with their child; her husband offers tea when he has no answer to fear. Anna’s wish to show their daughter the world returns in the places Soji visits to scatter his ashes. Even the places her father chose for his ashes have a history Soji never knew. The final undated entry is an apology to Soji, written in an almost unreadable hand. Soji throws the book across a wagon in anger, and Sky carries it back. She recognizes that even near the end he managed to write her name: “He remembered my name.” Soji expected only deterioration and discovers her own name in the middle of it. In a remembered drawing lesson, young Soji keeps envisioning the white petals an oxeye daisy has lost. Her father guides the pencil toward the nearly brown center of the flower in front of her. The child wants an oxeye daisy with all its petals; the adult wants a dance that begins with Carmi walking. In both cases she mistakes the imagined version for the only one worth drawing.

After Ophélie, whose sister died in the Chênefell epidemic, confronts Melisande with a gun, Soji intervenes and is shot. The confrontation brings a sudden, rather melodramatic gunshot into a book otherwise sustained by anxious conversations and long journeys. The wound, unlike the gun, belongs completely to Brooke’s design: Soji now needs the assistance she has been trying to arrange for somebody else. Melisande’s older decisions during the Chênefell epidemic raise a related problem: choices made under pressure may save some and leave others with unanswerable grievances. Ophélie’s grief cannot justify the gun, but the gun does not answer her grief.

Dependence is no longer an argument Soji can conduct at a distance when she reaches Eastwater. Two attendants lift her with practiced efficiency, but Soji feels like a sack of potatoes: handled, conveyed, scarcely consulted. Auta, an ancient construct working at the facility, intervenes with a different offer. Auta move the attendants aside and assert their authority, only to use it to ask a question. Would Soji like to push herself? The path is smooth, Auta explains; there are inclines; they can open doors and help if asked or if danger requires it. Soji agrees. For the first time since the shooting, she feels she has a choice. She grips the wheel rims. The chair does not move by declaration: her arms must turn the wheels, and Auta remains close enough to open doors. It is a small, exhausting freedom, offered rather than arranged on her behalf.

It matters that Soji has to work for those first few yards. Every incline enters Soji’s arms; her palms ache against the rims. She remembers Carmi working the rims with apparent ease and wonders how much effort she had mistaken for ease. Auta can assist without making her prove incapacity first. Their practical sentences leave Soji room to answer; even the silence before her hesitant yes belongs to her. Elsewhere, Brooke allows characters to explain such consideration long after an action has made it plain.

Much of Brooke’s prose follows Soji’s cataloguing eye: a red-winged blackbird calling “konk-la-ree”, a Manx shearwater recognized behind it, her count of seven hundred and twenty-three minutes on foot. She rehearses social replies and recoils at a stranger’s embrace. Counting tells her where she is; an unexplained social demand or uninvited touch can interrupt the count without warning. Close third-person narration shifts from accumulation into abrupt private refusals. Her clipped inward protests interrupt long descriptions, making the private panic louder than the polite answers she manages to give. Soji can study ancient mechanisms yet remain baffled by an invitation to yell for someone she is not angry with. Sky, an attentive listener who seldom argues, is perhaps Soji’s least exhausting acquaintance.

If the prose labors, it is often because Brooke mistrusts the feeling her first image has already made legible. Soji says she is fine while her breathing betrays her; then the narration explains the lie, and a companion may arrive to diagnose it again. By the next reassurance to Sky, the reader can often hear the qualification coming. The sharper passages remain bodily: Sky’s weight against a leg, a wheel rim gripped, a journal thrown. Brooke is particularly good at giving Soji an exact, funny observation; she is less reliable at stopping before a second sentence interprets the first. Across thirty chapters, these small delays accumulate into a genuine pacing problem.

The table of contents has diagnosed Soji before she leaves home. The five act titles – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance – borrow a vocabulary popularized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her work on dying, later applied widely to bereavement. Bereavement researchers Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, and Kathrin Boerner, writing in “OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying” in 2017, challenge the idea that grieving people reliably move through such a universal sequence. Brooke is free to borrow the pattern without endorsing it as clinical fact. Soji tries to make loss governable through lists, destinations, and procedures, while the novel places her experience inside a series of named emotional compartments. Too often, however, the heading has given away the emotional discovery, while Soji’s actual grief continues to double back and refuse its allotted place.

Repeated explanations gradually give Soji’s advisers the same voice. Melisande explains consent and choice; Auta explains assistance and worth; traveling companions offer further arguments for allowing others to love and help. Yet these conversations sometimes resemble successive tutorials in a philosophy Soji has been slow to absorb. As these characters converge upon the same therapeutic wisdom, the different histories that ought to make them disagree recede. Melisande’s urgency as a doctor and Auta’s attention to permission could make a fascinating disagreement about when to intervene. Instead their answers arrive nearly reconciled. Likewise the long route, with its accidents and hospitable settlements, supplies atmosphere at the price of momentum. A shared breakfast or a pause beside a stream can deserve an entire scene; the problem is not the absence of swordplay. Too often the wagon seems to stop for the next lesson rather than the next town.

Ordinary directness is often the kindest language Soji encounters. She cannot always infer what others intend from tone or convention, and she needs people who will say what they mean without ambushing her with touch or expectation. Auta’s questions and Carmi’s direct reassurance are therefore part of an ethic of accommodation, not merely a stylistic preference. A direct question can grant Soji authority; a repeated moral summary can take interpretive authority away from the reader. Brooke’s author’s note asks that queer and disabled characters be allowed ordinary work, desire, mistakes, and daily life rather than perpetual self-justification. Brooke lets her be selfish, brave, and occasionally impossible without presenting autism or trans identity as an explanation for the harm she causes.

Perhaps Carmi’s journey to Petal’s End deserved a few scenes of its own. Carmi comes to us through letters, memories, Soji’s drawings, and the final confrontation. Her agency is hardly absent: she arranges accessible lodging, travels to Petal’s End herself, and later directs the dance. Yet much of her interior life remains inaccessible beyond Soji’s fears and projections. Her absence creates longing, but limits a book about honoring her decisions. We learn that Carmi has booked an accessible hotel, with ramps, a lower bed, and personal assistants, but not how she weighed Soji’s silence against her decision to come. Brooke’s sympathy can also make disagreement too easy to integrate into a shared lesson. A marriage may survive a confession and still have to reckon with the decisions that made it necessary.

On the road home, Soji travels with Raviticus, a community of performers and survivors, and takes a role in “The Lost Traveler.” Her character drags a rope while veiled performers knot colored ribbons to it, each addition light on its own but heavier in company. Her injured hand and leg make each step costlier. The symbol leaves little for readers to discover. The closing poem returns to the rope and its lesson, as though the play had left some symbolism uncollected. Yet Bree’s performance gives the poem by the dead Léda a continued life among strangers. That act of preservation is lovely; the double explanation is much less so.

Under the stage lights, the allegory briefly stops behaving according to plan. Soji releases her burden according to the script and then sees Carmi in the audience. One line stands alone in the narration: “Carmi.” She raises a hand to her chest, nearly misses her cue, and finishes with an unsteady voice while Sky presses against her leg. The script says “With hand to heart”; Soji obeys, but the gesture has stopped being merely theatrical. It is the first action she can manage when Carmi appears, buying her just enough time to finish the line. Applause becomes a wall of sound, and Soji flees. She makes it as far as a tree before her injured leg gives way. Her cane beats an uneven retreat into the dark. Grief, inconveniently, has not read the title of Act V. She has managed to loosen the rope before a crowd; she still cannot face the conversation waiting beyond it.

Later, beneath the willow where they carved their names as teenagers, Carmi approaches carrying Soji’s favorite black tea. When Soji admits she is not ready, Carmi replies, “You just have to be here.” Carmi has found her wife at their old tree, brought the tea she likes, and left Soji room to be frightened. Soji shows her a drawing of Carmi working at her embroidery in her wheelchair. In the sketch, Carmi is busy with the stitches, not posing for the future Soji once intended to deliver. Her chair is in the picture; so is an afternoon she has made for herself. At last she admits why she went to Elaris. Carmi insists on the right to consider treatment for herself, including the right to defer it. Carmi is allowed to be hurt, but not for long. Brooke has spent most of the novel exploring Soji’s reasons and leaves Carmi comparatively little room to be angry about their consequences.

Only after the confession, with its relief and unresolved costs, does the long-imagined dance begin. Soji’s first instinct is to manage it: she stands behind the chair, holding its handles, and asks how they should begin. “However we want to,” Carmi answers. The plural quietly defeats Soji’s lonely itinerary. They find a smoother stretch of ground near the ramp. Carmi has learned new dance moves; she has not come to be guided through Soji’s memory of their wedding. Carmi releases the wheel locks, takes Soji’s hands, directs her to spin the chair, then uses a free hand to guide its wheels in the opposite direction. The wheelchair supplies the turn; Carmi draws Soji into the movement. Soji’s wounded leg protests. The chair remains visible and necessary. Soji’s cane, the wheel locks, the joined hands: each requires a small adjustment. For once, she is following steps Carmi invents as they go.

Soji can still hope to help Carmi; she can no longer mistake that hope for a decision already made. My rating is 75/100 (Goodreads: 3.50/5) – good and often moving, but held below its highest possibilities by structural predictability, slackened pacing, and the urge to explain every humane conclusion. Carmi has not promised never to seek treatment. Nor has Soji promised that she will never try to help. What changes is who begins the next conversation. At the last, Carmi chooses the steps. Soji remains injured, Carmi remains in her chair, and the dead remain dead. The lovers have not restored the world that burned. They have found a patch of smooth ground, music arriving from somewhere beyond the street, and just enough room to turn toward each other.