May 2025

Hello readers,

It’s May! We’ve arrived at my favorite time, when everything is green again, and the lilacs are blooming, and there is a tremendous amount of grass to keep up with in our field. It’s amazing. I love spring. 

This month I have some lovely art of Leo and Grimm to share with you, as well as a bit of a Sorcery and Small Magics cover update, and news from overseas! There’s also another song from my writing playlist, and updates on what I’ve been reading, so let’s get to it.

• Sorcery and Small Magics is going to Germany this fall with Foliant Verlag! I am so charmed by their cover, with art by Veronika Wunderer and design by Stefan Hilden. This will be a paperback edition with some very cool sprayed edges.

• Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a little change in the Kindle edition of SASM recently. That’s because the US cover is getting an updated look! Not sure when they will start showing up in bookstores, but keep an eye out for print copies in the coming months if you’re a fan of the new leafy green look. Or snap up the forest background now if you want it.

• Lastly, I have another pretty thing that I’ve been so excited to share. In April I wanted to do something to celebrate Sorcery and Small Magics being out in the world for six months so I got in touch with the wonderfully talented Hannah Latham and she made my dreams come true with this gorgeous portrait of Leo and Grimm in the sunflower field!

  

  Art by Hannah Latham

  I love how Leo looks entirely caught up in the moment, meanwhile Grimm looks like he’s having a crisis. Truly an accurate portrayal of them throughout not just this chapter, but most of the book! There were a few scenes I always knew I wanted art of, and this is one of them. You might see more pop up in the future!

Books: We have quite a lot to catch up on! Jumping all the way back to the beginning of March, I read and adored We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. I’ve been meaning to get this one ever since enjoying You Should Be So Lucky last year and once I did I couldn’t put it down. This might even be my favorite out of all Sebastian's books! It was a great start to my month.

I‘ve really hit my stride with non-fiction lately. I listened to Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (a lyrical if often troubling exploration of the life of scientist David Starr Jordan), Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (expectedly galling deep dive into Facebook, though the most riveting bits for me were actually about the author’s life outside her job there), and Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green (I’m glad I know more about this disease now, even if current events make that knowledge even more distressing). I’m so happy I discovered that audiobooks make non-fic much easier for me to absorb!

In the speculative realm I read Blood Over Bright Haven, which was just as good as everyone told me it would be! This book wields its subject matter like a blunt object to great effect. I can’t think of anything else I’ve read recently that manages to draw such clear parallels so distressingly well. With April came the release of one of my most anticipated reads of the year: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. It’s a little more sprawling than the first book (in its politics at least, the prose remains tight and sharp) but I enjoyed it quite a lot and Ana and Din are still one of my favorite duos. I continued on in the Vorkosigan saga with Mirror Dance. This one is a bit of a tonal shift, not just because there’s a different POV but because it is by far the darkest book in the series thus far. Big trigger warnings for torture and other unpleasantness. Nevertheless, I’m still enjoying these characters and am interested to see where they go next. 

After that I needed a bit of a palate cleanser so I got cozy with the MG graphic novel A Song for You and I by K. O’Neill (beautiful artwork), the third volume of the Witch Hat Atelier manga (remains very charming), and The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, which was such a sweet and funny read. Cozy fantasy fans should absolutely be looking out for it in the fall! And I finished off the month with Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, the final book in the trilogy by Heather Fawcett, which I enjoyed a great deal.

Shows: I am currently in a watching slump. Sad but true. Not many new shows have caught my attention lately, and the only new movie I watched was Nosferatu (LOVED IT). I did spend an enjoyably stressful weekend binging the entirety of The Pitt, but other than that I’ve been watching things that I feel pretty mediocre about and thus won’t bother mentioning here. I’m really itching for a show to come along and devour me body and soul (sometimes you just want to hyperfixate, ya know?).