Laura Madsen > Recent Status Updates

People call T. Kingfisher’s books “fairy tale retellings” but that really doesn’t explain them. This book has a mirror and a poisoned apple but is otherwise not remotely related to Snow White. Nettle & Bone has a godmother but that’s it. Sorceress has a few geese and an abusive relationship but that’s it. They’re all creative and weird and addictive and disturbing.

“It had been so late that it was early again, and we had actually managed to save someone’s life, through no fault of our own. Then we went back and drank heavily. It’s strange how winning can be more jarring than losing sometimes.”

“If you go around eating random plants without knowing what they are, then yes, sooner or later you’re going to wind up either very unhappy or very dead. Plants aren’t necessarily your friends.”

A protagonist after my own heart: a plump middle-aged woman obsessed with toxicology!

On healing: “I had to try. Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don’t, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case,”

“Women my size don’t run if we can avoid it. There are, let us say, certain structural concerns in the chest region.”

“Across the past 2 million years, meat-heavy diets have often proved unsustainable, particularly if the meat in question is that of big, slowly reproducing species.”

“Broken mutualisms often inspire outsized human responses.”

“Cyanobacteria offer us the precedent of nonhuman species capable of creating conditions at the scale of Earth hostile to their own persistence.”

“Natural selection doesn’t weigh the quality of the life a species lives, or its longevity. It only measures reproductive fitness. It is no one’s god or balm.”

“…but that only made him miserabler.”
Reminds me of something I learned from a writer’s conference: You have to understand the rules of language and writing before you can disobey them. Obviously Oxford professor JRRT fully understood the English language and consciously chose to make up words.

Listening and reading but not concurrently—on audio I’m at chapter 26 and on paper I’m at chapter 11. Another great book by Travis Baldree.

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.