In an earlier post, we explain in depth why our 2019 conference theme is heroes, and how we’re not only re-examining what kind of individual is welcomed as, or even permitted to be, heroic, but also how heroic actions differ from the hegemonic norm. We demand heroes of all genders, all sexualities, all races, all sizes, all abilities. And to further that aspiration, we’ve selected eight 2019 Books and Breakfast titles that we hope will expand your definition of who might be a hero or what acts you consider heroic. Toward that end, we’re highlighting four areas in this year’s selections: religion, race, gender/sexuality, and body—and please note that some titles sit on multiple axes, not just the one they’re listed under!

So you might get a head start on reading, here is the full list of 2019 Books and Breakfast selections. We’ll also be featuring more of these books in more detail throughout the coming months, starting with our religion titles below.

 
2019 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Religion

Race

Gender/Sexuality

Body

 
RELIGION SELECTIONS

The origin of modern fantasy literature is often traced back to Christian writers of the late 19th century, with heroes who are male and cisgender, living or transported to a feudal setting with roots in medieval western Europe. So many heroes are either explicitly or implicitly Christian—and so often, those of other faiths are explicitly or implicitly villainous. In 2019, we want to examine heroes from other faiths, and for our Books and Breakfast religion picks, the two titles are G. Willow Wilson’s The Bird King and Rena Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood.

The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

Much has been said about G. Willow Wilson’s sumptuous new novel. Set in 1491 in Muslim Granada during the last sultanate’s reign, The Bird King begins with the imminent arrival of the Spanish Inquisition and its attendant persecution. But first, readers are introduced to Fatima, the sultan’s favorite concubine, and Hassan, the royal mapmaker with a secret magic—for he can shape reality out of the maps he draws, even places he’s only dreamed of. Hassan’s gift is highly prized, especially for moving the sultan’s armies in wartime, but used for not much else except for amusing a bored Fatima who has never set foot outside the palace.

When the Inquisition arrives, Fatima knows Hassan’s gift will be seen as sorcery. And when it’s inevitably discovered, the two friends go on an epic journey, over land and sea, mythos and heart, fleeing torture and death, to find the island of the Bird King. To find refuge in a place that, for all they know, might be completely imaginary. After all, they only know it from stories—and the stories that they’ve told each other for years in comfort—stories that help Fatima escape from her bondage and Hassan from his supposed deviancy of loving other men.

Stories, we know, are everything. The Bird King knows this too. What Wilson layers on is truly spectacular: the poisoned effects of colonialism, the interpretation of reading and sacred texts, religious freedom and exclusion, magic entwined with folklore, an exploration of refuge and community, and a thoroughly kickass, strong-willed, hypocrisy-exposing, angry, Muslim hero in Fatima. To give you a taste, when the sultan asks her what more she could want, with her fancy clothes, limitless entertainment, fancy food, and his favor, she replies, “To be sultan.”

—Faye

The Sisters of the Winter Wood by Rena Rossner

The original draft of The Sisters of the Winter Wood was simply a fantasy retelling of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” But as author Rena Rossner recounts, “[W]hen I finished my first draft, I realized that my book didn’t have a soul…I had originally set it in an imaginary town called Blest, in France, but I realized that I needed to find a new setting, something that felt more real—authentic to who I was.” In re-drafting, Rossner found the soul of her book in Dubossary, a shtetl on the border of Moldova and Ukraine, where Rossner’s grandfather’s family lived—and where, on the eve of a pogrom, Jewish residents resisted and forestalled tragedy.

Against this background, including the averted pogrom, Rossner’s tale becomes explicitly Jewish: Sisters Liba and Laya are the daughters of a learned Jew, himself the son of a rabbi, and an aristocrat who loved him so much that she forsook her intended betrothed and converted to Judaism. This is a book built on details, and readers will first note the details of the family’s everyday Jewish life: the prayers, the food, the courting rules. But Russian influence lives in Rossner’s work as well, again in the details: Liba and her father can both shape-shift to bears, apparent through Liba’s ravenous hunger and inconvenient claws; Laya and her mother shift to swans, all discarded feathers and a yearning to fly.

If you’ve ever read Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” you know what comes next: lushly ripe fruit, irresistible kisses, and ultimately danger of the sort that girls know all too well. The book is told through alternating viewpoints: Laya’s daring free verse, filled with her curiosity and bold desire for adventure, and Liba’s more staid prose, as she frets, worries, and ultimately makes the choices that will save her sister. This is a retold fairy tale in all its glory: myth and legend trap the unwary, choices and danger abound, and one girl, with so much strength derived from her faith, saves the day.

—Amy

Each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books—and then, during Sirens, invite our attendees to bring their breakfast and discuss them. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each of our annual themes and given attendees yet another opportunity to deconstruct, interrogate, and celebrate what women and nonbinary authors are doing in fantasy literature.

This year, our Books and Breakfast program will feature eight books, with two dedicated to each of the themes of our past four years: hauntings, rebels and revolutionaries, lovers, and women who work magic. The complete list of our selections and a spotlight on our hauntings selections are here; a spotlight on our rebels and revolutionaries selections is here; and our spotlight on our lovers selections is here. We hope this helps you pick which ones you might like to read before Sirens!

 
2018 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Hauntings

Rebels and Revolutionaries

Lovers

Women Who Work Magic

 
SPOTLIGHT ON WOMEN WHO WORK MAGIC

Our two Books and Breakfast picks focused on women who work magic are S. A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass and Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s Spellbook of the Lost and Found. Do you plan on picking these up soon? Let us know! Tweet @sirens_con or use the hashtag #Sirens18!

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

The City of Brass opens in eighteenth-century Cairo, with Nahri—who despite having readily apparent magic, refuses to believe in it. She gets by on the streets by reading palms, stealing, and performing some rather miraculous healings. As part of a con, Nahri accidentally summons Dara, a djinn, and then all hell breaks loose. The dead rise from the mausoleum, Dara forces Nahri to flee from Cairo on a flying carpet, and a giant bird of unknowable power appears in the desert. How about that magic now, Nahri?

Nahri goes kicking and screaming. Despite her life on the streets in Cairo, she wants nothing to do with Dara, his magic carpet, or his impossible stories of ancient beings of fire and water. Or, for that matter, their destination: Daevabad, a magical city with mysterious ties to Nahri’s magical heritage—and one where secrets abound, plots unfurl, and magic is practically palpable.

Charkraborty has said that The City of Brass began as, essentially, history fanfiction. Scant references to djinn and Suleiman and myths that she researched and then wove into an entire secondary fantasy world stretching from Morocco to Ethiopia to China. In many, many ways, The City of Brass is a tour de force: breathtaking world-building, near-seamlessly dropped into actual history and geography; an extensive fantastic history, about which the reader salivates to know more; myriad distinct cultures premised on war or culture or art. This world is as impressive—and as interesting—as Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse or Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire universe; the art and culture as well-designed as Cassandra Khaw’s Food of the Gods or Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus; the secondary characters as developed and fascinating as Fonda Lee’s or Alex Marshall’s. You’ll want to stay a while.

Spellbook of the Lost and Found by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

If you’ve read Fowley-Doyle’s previous novel, The Accident Season, you know her allure: She takes something so everyday, so commonplace, and turns it into a fairy tale, one that you’re not even sure is a fairy tale, as she glides along just the other side of coincidence and conjecture. She lives in the very best of that liminal space between the strangeness of our ordinary world and the merest bits of magic. Her work is gorgeous.

Spellbook of the Lost and Found does for lost things what The Accident Season did for accidents: examine the deeper meanings and interconnected themes of something that happens to all of us. It starts with hairclips and jewelry, but so soon, it’s so much more: a sense of safety, maybe a friendship, seemingly a person.

And while things are lost, others are found: The diary pages of a girl named Laurel—which hint at mysteries and magic. Three strangers squatting in an abandoned estate house. A spellbook. A spellbook that works.

If living in Fowley-Doyle’s enchanted spaces aren’t enough, if her oh-so-Irish, lyrical prose isn’t enough, stay in Spellbook of the Lost and Found for the twist toward the end, which ties everything—shockingly, beautifully—up neatly, almost savagely. No one gets out of this one unscarred, but maybe that’s just everyday life.

Each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books—and then, during Sirens, invite our attendees to bring their breakfast and discuss them. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each of our annual themes and given attendees yet another opportunity to deconstruct, interrogate, and celebrate what women and nonbinary authors are doing in fantasy literature.

This year, our Books and Breakfast program will feature eight books, with two dedicated to each of the themes of our past four years: hauntings, rebels and revolutionaries, lovers, and women who work magic. The complete list of our selections and a spotlight on our hauntings selections are here; a spotlight on our rebels and revolutionaries selections is here; and we’ll be featuring the women who work magic selections in the coming weeks. We hope this helps you pick which ones you might like to read before Sirens!

 
2018 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Hauntings

Rebels and Revolutionaries

Lovers

Women Who Work Magic

 
SPOTLIGHT ON LOVERS

Our two Books and Breakfast picks focused on lovers are Roshani Chokshi’s A Crown of Wishes and Ellen Klages’s Passing Strange. Do you plan on picking these up soon? Let us know! Tweet @sirens_con or use the hashtag #Sirens18!

A Crown of Wishes by Roshani Chokshi

First, a note: Please don’t let the fact that A Crown of Wishes is the second book in Chokshi’s Star-Touched series deter you! We promise, you may read it easily as a standalone—and in fact, only a single scene in A Crown of Wishes is informed by the first book in the series, and even then, only slightly.

A Crown of Wishes belongs to Gauri and Vikram, she a warrior princess struggling under her brother’s rule, he a puppet emperor ascendant of the neighboring kingdom. For reasons you won’t truly understand until the end of the book, Vikram stumbles into the Tournament of Wishes, a deadly game run by the enigmatic Lord of Wealth in a mythical land. Vikram’s invitation is for two, and in a somewhat improbable meeting with Gauri, helped along by the gods, he proposes that they enter the tournament together: He can wish to rule in truth; she can wish to rule in her brother’s stead.

But the gods, of course, have other plans. As Gauri and Vikram navigate myth and magic, they learn an awful lot, through near-death and chance encounters, through conversations and magic. Beautifully, though—and unlike in many romances—they don’t just learn from each other, though they do plenty of that. Here, they learn a lot individually, too: about their pasts, their stumbling blocks, their hang-ups. They see how they need to grow individually, and small spoiler, at the end of the book, when they take time to get their individual hopes and dreams in order before reuniting, you can cheer a relationship of equal individuals who choose to be together in a thoughtful way (even as Guari complains, as we all might: I sent him a gift. He should send a gift back. Why hasn’t he sent a gift back?).

A Crown of Wishes is, in many ways, the best of the rom coms: funny, smart, sexy, and with a twist at the end that levels their happy ending up from merely happy to legendary. Vikram is hot, of course, but also clever and willing to play the gods’ games. Gauri is a revelation: Though she is gorgeous, Vikram frequently describes her as a beast or a monster, in the most admiring terms possible, and it will make your feminist heart melt into a delighted puddle. She’s brute force to his calculated misdirection, a fierce directness to his patience, a dagger to his charm. And they so clearly belong together.

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages

Passing Strange is, perhaps, best described a tone poem. A tone poem, for anyone who didn’t suffer through classical music classes once upon a time, is this: a piece of orchestral music, typically in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme. They’re shorter than symphonies or concertos and, due to their single-movement nature, often lack the variation present in symphonies or concertos as well. Think of them as the musical representation of painting, perhaps. And the same is true of Passing Strange, it’s a glorious work, novella-length, that paints a lesbian romance in airy brushstrokes.

Passing Strange is set in San Francisco against the backdrop of the 1939 World’s Fair, and the city is as much a character as anyone: inviting, enchanting, deviling the human characters themselves. The World’s Fair’s Magic City makes an appearance, as do Chinatown and the city’s famous Painted Ladies rowhouses. For those of you who yearn for sentient settings, drawn with vivid magic and wills of their own, this one’s for you.

But this one is also for anyone who loves a love story for the ages, a moment in time where two people meet and everything else falls away. Where abusive husbands and judgmental people and your own limitations pale in comparison to the person in front of you. In this case, its two women finding each other, improbably, impossibly, despite the violence and discrimination of so many in the city. They are helped along the way by more women, and while the form of their happy ever after won’t surprise you, the beauty and transcendence of the scene depicted on the cover just might.

Each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books—and then, during Sirens, invite our attendees to bring their breakfast and discuss them. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each of our annual themes and given attendees yet another opportunity to deconstruct, interrogate, and celebrate what women and nonbinary authors are doing in fantasy literature.

This year, our Books and Breakfast program will feature eight books, with two dedicated to each of the themes of our past four years: hauntings, rebels and revolutionaries, lovers, and women who work magic. The complete list of our selections and a spotlight on our hauntings selections are here; we’ll be featuring the lovers and women who work magic selections over the next few months as well so that you can pick which ones you might like to read before Sirens!

 
2018 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Hauntings

Rebels and Revolutionaries

Lovers

Women Who Work Magic

 
SPOTLIGHT ON REBELS AND REVOLUTIONARIES

Our two Books and Breakfast picks focused on rebels and revolutionaries are Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties. Do you plan on picking these up soon? Let us know! Tweet @sirens_con or use the hashtag #Sirens18!

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

From page one, Adeyemi’s debut novel will drag you relentlessly along, unable to stop for even a breath. Find yourself a few hours and a pot of tea; you might not be able to put it down.

We open with Zélie, a girl born of violence and secrecy. Several years ago, Zélie watched the monarchy kill her maji mother, but one victim of the throne’s massacre of the magic-workers of Orïsha. Now, she practices rebellion in secret, refusing to be broken by the lasting oppression of her people by the throne. But Children of Blood and Bone is more than covert combat schools and thwarting bullying authorities; this revolution is about bringing magic back to Orïsha—and with it, restoring the freedom and dignity of Zélie’s people.

Enter Inan and Amari, the royal children of Orïsha. Both resent their father deeply, but that resentment manifests in different ways: Inan perfects his father’s wishes in his search for approval; Amari clings to her sheltered life, closing her eyes to her father’s tyranny. When the king finally goes one step too far for Amari, she throws off her carefully crafted ignorance and escapes the palace, only to have a chance encounter with Zélie. The two become resentful, suspicious traveling companions in their joined mission to recover Orïsha’s magic and overthrow the king, while Inan gives chase, hoping to both maintain his world as he knows it and finally earn his father’s praise.

Adeyemi’s pacing is spectacular, her worldbuilding even more so. Adeyemi draws strongly on West African heritage and culture to build her world: Orïsha, its people, and its magic are vivid, unforgettable; its systemic oppression of Zélie’s people, raw and all too familiar. And Zélie and Amari are similarly vivid and unforgettable. You might think the book is Zélie’s, but Amari is equally compelling as she grapples with her privilege and her pampered upbringing, and the partnership that the girls forge of distrust and hurt is a thing of beauty.

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

For everyone looking for a flagrant, brazen, unabashed work of fantastic feminism, this one is for you. It’s fantasy as commentary, a collection of short stories that use myths, legends, and magic to carve furious insight into our everyday world. It’s for the angry girls, the queer girls, the “crazy” girls, the girls who just want one dang thing that’s their own private corner of the world. Why is that too much to ask?

As Faye Bi said, when she reviewed Her Body and Other Parties for Sirens earlier this year, “The stories are punch-you-in-the-face, unabashedly feminist. Darkly hilarious. Sex-positive. Queer. Smart as hell. More often than not, brutal. Her protagonists are easy for me empathize with and to cheer for. The stories, as I suspect Machado does too as in ‘The Resident,’ know exactly what they are and do not have the time—or patience—to beat around the bush.”

We could spend days analysing and deconstructing each of Machado’s stories. We won’t. Instead, we’ll simply add that this is collection is one of those works of unquailing, fuck-you feminism, wrapped in a package of monsters and ghostly bells and impossible death, and leave you to do with that what you will.

Each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books—and then, during Sirens, invite our attendees to bring their breakfast and discuss them. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each of our annual themes and given attendees yet another opportunity to deconstruct, interrogate, and celebrate what women and nonbinary authors are doing in fantasy literature.

This year, our Books and Breakfast program will feature eight books, with two dedicated to each of the themes of our past four years: hauntings, rebels and revolutionaries, lovers, and women who work magic. The complete list of our selections is below, but we’ll also be featuring these books over the next few months so you can pick which ones you might like to read before Sirens!

 
2018 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Hauntings

Rebels and Revolutionaries

Lovers

Women Who Work Magic

 
SPOTLIGHT ON HAUNTINGS

Our two Books and Breakfast picks focused on hauntings are Kali Wallace’s The Memory Trees and Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts. Do you plan on picking these up soon? Let us know! Tweet @sirens_con or use the hashtag #Sirens18!

 
The Memory Trees by Kali Wallace

Sorrow Lovegood spent the first eight years of her life in an orchard in Vermont, wrapped in not only the love of her mother, grandmother, and older sister, but also the suffocating history of her matriarchal ancestors. The women of her family have lived in this same orchard for twelve generations, despite their harrowing misfortune and a legendary feud with the neighbors.

Then, something awful happens, Sorrow’s heart shatters, and she’s sent to live with her father in Miami. Eight years later, Sorrow, frustrated by her hazy memories of her childhood, returns to the orchard to confront her lost memories, her family’s history, and her haunted heart. What she learns, with the orchard’s help, is both revelatory and devastating: the truth of a tragedy centuries in the making.

The Memory Trees is, in turn, going to shatter your heart. Wallace’s decision to make Sorrow, with her lost memory, the narrator was a smart choice: Sorrow’s heart rends over and over again as she discovers incremental details about what happened eight years ago, and Wallace is such a skilful craftsperson that, every time Sorrow’s heart breaks, so does the reader’s. Much like The Monsters of Templeton, Wallace also uses an unusual narrative structure to convey information in bite-size chunks: She alternates contemporary chapters from Sorrow’s point of view with historical chapters depicting Sorrow’s female ancestors and the origins of the family’s neighborhood feud and perhaps related misfortune. The result is a harrowing portrait of grief, loss, and the very best of what a hauntings book can be—even sans ghosts.

 
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

While Sirens is a fantasy conference, sometimes we can’t help ourselves. Thus, An Unkindness of Ghosts, an Afrofuturist science-fiction novel set on the HSS Matilda, a leviathan of a space vessel that has been shuttling its inhabitants to a mythical Promised Land for the past thousand years. The Matilda strongly resembles the antebellum South, with the wealthy, white Sovereign and similar inhabitants both occupying the upper levels of the ship and imposing vicious regulations and hash indignities on the inhabitants—people of color, queer people, neuroatypical people—who live on the levels below. Indeed, many of those lower-level inhabitants even farm the land of the colossal vessel under the authority of cruel overseers.

In case you were wondering if An Unkindness of Ghosts would be pulling any punches, it opens with Aster, a healer on the ship and our protagonist, amputating the foot of a child, an extreme surgery made necessary by nonsensical and dehumanizing rules, but a surgery that Aster, the child, and the child’s grandmother nevertheless take in stride. Brutality can make the extraordinary seem ordinary, even when that means carrying an amputated foot around in a cooler. This normalcy of Solomon’s world makes us immediately check our assumptions, our expectations, and our humanity.

An Unkindness of Ghosts is, as you might anticipate, a deconstruction of our society, an interrogation of our values, and a cautionary tale. After all, please remember that its fundamental premise is an Afrofuturist spaceship that replicates the antebellum South. Historical trauma looms large in this book, and Solomon’s examination of race, slavery, and prison is just as incisive as, say, Jesmyn Ward’s in Sing, Unburied, Sing. Similarly, Solomon considers issues of power and control through the lenses of gender, sexual identity, race, class, and ability. As Aster realizes that she can better her world, but only if she’s willing to foment a civil war, we’re all in.

Welcome to the last of our spotlights for this year’s Books and Breakfast! We have three more popular, controversial and just plain brilliant titles related to our 2017 theme of women who work magic. You can also check our highlighted titles for June (which also includes the full list), July, and August.

Read the descriptions below of 2014 Guest of Honor Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns, Angela Slatter’s A Feast of Sorrows, and Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona. Thoughts? Picked out your books for each morning? Let us know on Twitter at @sirens_con and at the hashtag #Sirens17.

Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

Every generation, three triplets on the island of Fennbirn are raised to compete for the crown. Each possesses a coveted magic: Mirabella is a fierce elemental, able to spark hungry flames or vicious storms at the snap of her fingers; Katharine is a poisoner, one who can ingest the deadliest poisons without so much as a stomachache; Arsinoe, a naturalist, is said to have the ability to bloom the reddest rose and control the fiercest of lions. Raised apart, the sisters are fated to not only fight to become Queen, but to kill her sisters to do so. The night that Mirabella, Katharine, and Arsinoe turn sixteen, the battle begins.

Three Dark Crowns is a brave book. Kendare crafted three heroines: three difficult, conflicted, resentful heroines struggling to reconcile expectations and likely death with what they might want for themselves. Kendare also crafted a world of people who view the sisters as objects, not to be loved, but to be used to gain power. Stick with this one until its cliffhanger end: the sisters will surprise you.

A Feast of Sorrows by Angela Slatter

This collection of short fiction features twelve of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award-winning author Angela Slatter’s finest, darkest fairy tales. In them are women and girls—fearless, frightened, brave, bold, frail, and fantastical—who take the paths less travelled, accept (and offer) poisoned apples, and embrace transformation in all its forms. You won’t just find princesses and ghosts, but the gamut of artisans as well: bakers, quilters, crafters, spinners, and coffin-makers. Never have the feminine arts been so magical or so deadly.

Reminiscent of Angela Carter and Emma Donoghue, or even Aimee Bender’s The Color Master, Slatter’s work is both timeless and fresh: fascinating, feminist reflections from the enchanted mirrors of fairy tales and folklore. This one is to be savored, one story, one revelation, and one smart, determined woman at a time.

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

Noelle Stevenson’s award-winning webcomic became an award-winning graphic novel. Nimona is an impulsive young shapeshifter with a knack for villainy. Lord Ballister Blackheart is a villain with a vendetta. Their mission: prove to the kingdom that Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin and his buddies at the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics aren’t the heroes everyone thinks they are. But as small acts of mischief escalate into a vicious battle, Lord Blackheart realizes that his sidekick’s powers are as murky and mysterious as her past. And her unpredictable wild side might be more dangerous than he is willing to admit.

Brilliant, witty, and subversive, Nimona includes everything from dragons to science, archnemesis and secret lovers, assassination attempts and nerdy references all over. But more than that, it’s a terrific exploration of feminine ambition and agency in the all-too-masculine world of superheroism and supervillainy.

This month, we’re spotlighting three more popular, controversial and just plain brilliant Books and Breakfast titles related to our 2017 theme of women who work magic! You can check our highlighted titles for June (which also includes the full list) and July.

Read the descriptions below of Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s This Strange Way of Dying, and Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Bayou Magic. Thoughts? Let us know on Twitter at @sirens_con and at the hashtag #Sirens17.

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

At the edge of the Russian wilderness, Vasilisa spends her winter huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse’s fairy tales. She loves the tale of Frost, a blue-eyed demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect their homes from evil. After Vasilisa’s mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings back a devout new wife, who is vehemently against the family’s honoring household spirits. But as crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer and misfortune stalks the village, Vasilisa must find her own power to protect her family from a threat that seems pulled from her nurse’s most frightening tales.

Even in fantasy literature, the word “witch” is so often a slur. The Bear and the Nightingale, beautifully crafted and set in a Russia bound by tradition, picks relentlessly at this trope: gendered expectations that limit women to marriage, children, and faith; how quickly society cries “witch” when women defy those expectations; and what it means when those allegations, so rooted in ignorance and fear, are actually true.

This Strange Way of Dying: Stories of Magic, Desire and the Fantastic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Spanning multiple time periods and the genres of fantasy, science fiction and horror, Moreno-Garcia’s collection of short stories is infused with Mexican folklore, yet firmly rooted in a reality that transforms into the weird and fantastical. The stories lift the veil of the everyday to expose the realms of what lies beyond, with creatures that shed their skin and roam the night, vampires in Mexico City that struggle with disenchantment, an apocalypse with giant penguins, legends of magic scorpions, and tales of a ceiba tree surrounded by human skulls.

This Strange Way of Dying is full of wild, beautiful prose and with Mexican folklore and myths—and Moreno-Garcia shines when she’s writing about liminal spaces and being caught between identities such as heritage, class, and race. And we think you’ll love the bold, empowered Jaguar women who go after what they want.

Bayou Magic by Jewell Parker Rhodes

It’s Maddy’s turn to have a bayou summer with her grandmother. At first she misses life back home in New Orleans, but soon she grows to love everything about her new surroundings—the glimmering fireflies, the glorious landscape, her grandmother’s famous gumbo—but then there’s something else, deep within the water, that only Maddy sees. As her grandmother shares wisdom about sayings and signs, Maddy realizes she may be only the sibling to carry on her family’s magical legacy. And when a disastrous oil leak threatens the bayou, she knows she may also be the only one who can help.

Bayou Magic is all about a girl finding her power. Set in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Maddy’s grandmother’s community and the bayou are practically tangible, and how a bayou summer changes Maddy is equally vivid. Bayou Magic celebrates hope, friendship, and family with a clear conservationist bent.

Sirens veterans know that each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books related to our annual theme—and we invite attendees to bring their breakfast on Friday and Saturday mornings during Sirens to discuss them. Last month, we announced our 2017 Books and Breakfast books on women who work magic, and you can check them all here.

Every month, we’ll be highlighting a few titles chosen, in the hopes that you pick up these great books in time for Books and Breakfast! For July, our spotlight is on Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky, Rin Chupeco’s The Bone Witch, and Laura Anne Gilman’s Silver on the Road. Questions or thoughts? Comment below or sound off on Twitter at @sirens_con and the hashtag #Sirens17.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn’t expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one’s peers and families.

But now they’re both adults, living in the hipster mecca of San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who’s working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world’s magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together—to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

All the Birds in the Sky asks hard questions: about magic and morality, about technology and the ethical use thereof, about people and life. Its near-future setting, and its almost magic vs. technology structure, allows Anders to explore these questions and more about our societal mores and ambitions. Notably, even as the book careens toward the end of the world as we know it, humanity remains center stage.

The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized in the kingdom. For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that can reach beyond the boundaries of the living—and of the human.

Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts all of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force. And Tea must be strong—stronger than she even believes possible. Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival of those she loves.

If you like ambitious girls, this one’s for you. Because while Tea starts the novel quite young and understandably afraid, by the end of the novel, she’s a woman who makes choices—and you’ll be waiting breathlessly to see what she does in the second installment. Further, the novel’s bifurcated timeline structure allows the reader to compare Tea in her childhood with Tea today: a luxury for readers who love character-driven novels.

Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman

A heroic fantasy about a young woman who is trained in the art of the sinister hand of magic, but at what price?

On her sixteenth birthday, Isobel makes the choice to work for the Devil in his territory west of the Mississippi. But this is not the devil you think you know. This is a being who deals fairly with immense—but not unlimited—power, who offers opportunities to people who want to make a deal, and makes sure they always get what they deserve. But his land is a wild west that needs a human touch, and that’s where Izzy comes in. Inadvertently trained by him to see the clues in and manipulations of human desire, Izzy is raised to be his left hand and travel the circuitous road through the territory. As we all know, where there is magic there is power and chaos…and death.

Silver on the Road is a slow burn of a book. Izzy’s choice to become the Devil’s Left Hand happens quickly at the beginning, and you spend the rest of the book traveling the Wild West with her as she learns what it really means to have made a deal with the Devil. But it doesn’t mean what you expect: There’s both good and bad for Izzy, great power and, yes, great responsibility, and all of it much more subtly wielded than your usual deal-with-the-devil fare.

Each year, we select a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books related to our annual theme—and we invite attendees to bring their breakfast on Friday and Saturday mornings during Sirens to discuss them. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each year’s theme and given early risers both company and book talk.

The Sirens theme for 2017 is women who work magic. We’re delighted to announce our book selections early so that participants interested in Books and Breakfast can read them in time for this year’s conference. We’ll also be featuring three Books and Breakfast titles per month to get these books on your radar!

 
2017 BOOKS AND BREAKFAST SELECTIONS

Friday, October 27

Saturday, October 28

 
JUNE SPOTLIGHT

This month we’re spotlighting Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Dia Reeves’s Slice of Cherry, and Tiphanie Yanique’s The Land of Love and Drowning. Do you plan on picking these up soon? Definitely let us know by tweeting at @sirens_con and/or using the hashtag #Sirens17!

 
The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest, hoping this sacrifice will keep her from terrorizing their town. But the witch, Xan, is kind, rescuing the abandoned children and delivering them to welcoming families on the other side of the forest, nourishing the babies with starlight on the journey.

But when Xan accidentally feeds a baby moonlight instead of starlight, filling the ordinary child with extraordinary magic, she decides to raise her as her own. Xan keeps the child—whom she calls Luna—safe by locking her magic deep inside her until her thirteenth birthday. But when a young man from the Protectorate is determined to free his people by killing Xan just as Luna starts coming into her powers, it is up to Luna to protect those who have protected her–even if it means the end of the loving, safe world she’s always known.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon is compulsively readable: it both hearkens back to well-known fairy tales and presents something new, feminist, and inclusive. It’s a story about growing up and growing older and making hard choices and choosing whom to become. And besides Xan and Luna, the book features a friendly swamp monster, a very tiny dragon, a fearless girl, a boy with a conscience, a woman with a tiger’s heart, and a story told all wrong.

 
Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves

Kit and Fancy Cordelle are sisters of the best kind: best friends, best confidantes, and best accomplices. The daughters of the infamous Bonesaw Killer, Kit and Fancy are used to feeling like outsiders, and that’s just the way they like it. But in Portero, where the weird and wild run rampant, the Cordelle sisters are hardly the oddest or most dangerous creatures around.

It’s no surprise when Kit and Fancy start to give in to their deepest desire—the desire to kill. What starts as a fascination with slicing open and stitching up quickly spirals into a gratifying murder spree. Of course, the sisters aren’t killing just anyone, only the people who truly deserve it. But the girls have learned from the mistakes of their father, and know that a shred of evidence could get them caught. So when Fancy stumbles upon a mysterious and invisible doorway to another world, she opens a door to endless possibilities.

If you’ve ever read Bleeding Violet, you know about Portero; if you haven’t, well, it’s more of less Buffy’s Hellmouth times a hundred. The people of Portero are tough to figure out—and surprisingly, Kit and Fancy are just as tough to crack as Bleeding Violet’s unreliable narrator, Hanna. While Hanna’s story was so much about her and her personal relationships, Slice of Cherry asks larger questions about power, vigilante justice, and how to figure out when you’ve gone too far.

 
The Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

In the early 1900s, the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule, and an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea. Orphaned by the shipwreck are two sisters and their half brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them.

Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic, set against the emergence of Saint Thomas into the modern world. Following the Bradshaw family through sixty years of fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, love affairs, curses, magical gifts, loyalties, births, deaths, and triumphs, Land of Love and Drowning is a gorgeous, vibrant debut.

Land of Love and Drowning is one of those books in which you can lose yourself on a quiet afternoon. It’s complicated and complex, with magic that turns up in the strangest of places. It’s reminiscent of both Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and Daína Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love, not only for its multi-generational timeline and quiet magic often worked by women, but for its close look at the culture, traditions, and legends of an island in the Caribbean.

As Sirens veterans know, each year, Sirens selects a variety of popular, controversial, and just plain brilliant books related to our theme—and invites attendees to bring their breakfast during the conference and have an informal conversation about those books. Over the years, this program has highlighted the depth and breadth of each year’s theme and given early risers both company and book talk!

For 2016, we’ve kicked Books and Breakfast off early—so all of you have time to choose a couple books and read! This year, we’ve also launched a giveaway program to get these books into your hands prior to Sirens.

SEPTEMBER GIVEAWAY

For September, we’ll be giving away, to one lucky winner, two Books and Breakfast selections: Pantomime and Like Water for Chocolate. You can read more about the books below, but here are the rules:

To enter, you must tell us of your favorite female character in fantasy literature. All entries must be submitted by September 30, 2016, either by Tweeting them to @sirens_con or by emailing them to (help at sirensconference.org). Each individual may enter only once and you must currently reside in the United States in order to win. By entering, you grant Sirens the right to use your entry and to name you (by name or Twitter alias) in connection with that entry. The winner must provide their address to Sirens in order to receive the prize. This offer void where prohibited.

Pantomime by Laura Lam

Pantomime kicks off a remarkable series about an intersex protagonist, set somewhere between the world of the pampered and over-privileged and the gritty backdrop of a traveling circus. More important than the setting, and the uncertain magic that builds the fantasy thread, is the main character’s questioning—not only of who they are, but who they are going to become, and how they will become.

When Iphigenia—Gene—realizes that her social and class circumstances are forcing her into very strict rules of behavior (and gender expression), as well as continued medical examinations and secrets, she leaves home, joining the circus as Micah. While the secrets don’t exactly end, Micah can finally begin to explore what it means to be Micah, and to explore loving in Micah’s body, and to explore the magic that Micah can make. This leads into future books, so note that this is only the beginning of a series.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

Like Water for Chocolate is a worldwide bestseller, a work that many in the US know only in translation, and has been adapted for film. It’s the sort of book that we include in Books and Breakfast because it has fantastical elements—and because we are always discussing and debating whether we can include magical realism as a part of the fantasy family (even if only as a beloved cousin).

Tita lives in Mexico of more than a hundred years ago, and she can’t marry; she’ll have to devote her life to caring for her mother. However, she’s in love with Pedro, her sister’s husband…. Her tumultuous feelings are expressed through the magic of food. Forbidden romance, recipes, family relationships, sex, and tradition all play a part.