Another for my collection of killer opening lines:
Ethan Shaw carried two knives, one for lilies, the other for veins.
And the book just gets better and better from there. It counters all my usual problems with cozy witchy books, and sometimes cozy fantasy in general, not to mention the fraught subject of fertility. It’s full of lines that devastating in their quietness and truth.
It was strange, sharing the silence with a man who’d always fit into his life like an organ, and a man who’d wandered into their home like a leak or a bear—capable of causing invisible damage or very real, very visible problems. That was the messiness, wasn’t it? The consequence that came with magic as intimate as necromancy.
There’s grief and loss too, and change, part of the messiness right along with love and hope. Just the vibe I want for a winter solstice read. Basically, everything about this little novella is exquisite, and what M.E. Morgan has done with the new cover art lives up to the gorgeousness therein.
Ethan faced the moon again. He breathed because breathing seemed sensible; he wanted to remind himself it was possible to breathe right then, to inhale and exhale in the midst of change.