Laura Madsen > Recent Status Updates

Part fantasy, part Edwardian house party murder thriller.

T. Kingfisher is great at character development. Hester and Cordelia feel like real people.

“Nothing is fair, except that we try to make it so. That’s the point of humans, maybe, to fix things the gods haven’t managed to.”

“Well, he’s a dog. They don’t have an idea how the world’s supposed to be, so it doesn’t bother them when it isn’t.
Except herding dogs. They have a pretty clear idea in their heads, so they’re always nipping and worrying and trying to get it to fit.”

“Some things come into being once it’s inevitable that they will exist.”

“Rage was only useful if you were allowed to do anything with it.”

“The history of the world was written in women’s wombs and women’s blood and she would never be allowed to change it.”

“Having thus accidentally anticipated a few centuries’ worth of revolutionary political thought, Marra got down to the business of boiling water and making tea.”

Good description of grief. Staybehind keeps the memories of when he lost his best friends. I still have every text message from my sister taking up room in my phone, 22 months after her death.

Cozy but there are undercurrents of sentient rights, ownership (slavery), indenture, post-civil war in the US, and climate change. Some hints of The Terraformers by the same author.

“Greenhouse gases are the feces of the Industrial Revolution.”

Regarding humans, trees, and CO2: “The worse we are, the better they are to us, and the more we need them.”

“Metaphorically, a forest can walk across a landscape inside the gut of a primate, traveling one defecation at a time.”

Great characters. I love Zale and would like to read more about them!

Great, funny dialogue.

Dear publishers, please don’t print with brown ink. Too hard to read for old eyes.

If you’ve ever been on the Seattle Underground tour, you should read this!

Interesting mention of her son’s education being impacted by The Blight. The book is pre-covid but that tracks with my kids’ pandemic education.

I like that the protagonist is a middle-aged single mom!

“Never trust a religion whose symbol of faith is a particularly gruesome form of execution.”

“The trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label.”

“Fucking netbooks; you can’t even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.”

“If you stare into the Abyss for too long it stares into you, and likely finds you crunchy with ketchup and a little relish on the side.”

“…something waiting in the shadows that is as uninterested in issues of life and death as a stony asteroid rolling eternally through the icy depths of space, pacing out a long orbit that will end in the lithosphere of a planet wrapped in a fragile blue-green ecosystem.”

“The voice caresses my ears like the velvet fuzz on a week-dead aubergine.”

Harker: “I mistrusted myself. Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.”

Poirot: “The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

Cozy sci-fi with found family on a spaceship like Becky Chambers and LM Sagas plus a sentient ship like Mur Lafferty and Martha Wells.

I have read someone call Robert Jackson Bennett a “gateway drug” to fantasy and that’s true. This is a murder mystery/ sociopolitical drama that just happens to be in a fantasy land.

Reading because I really liked The Tainted Cup, which just won the Hugo.