It never ceases to amaze me that some people only want to read what they know. Then again, it's what algorithms try to do. You like this, so here's a heck of a lot more of exactly the same thing. It ought to make you happy too. I like comfort reading too, in its place, but I also like to venture off into what I don't know, to learn and explore and discover. I can't say that I understood everything Eden Royce covers in this novella, because this isn't my culture or my heritage, but I understood enough to be profoundly moved to tears.

In fact, the first line felt off to me: "Her final cotillion was in full swing and Phaedra St. Margaret was vex." I've never seen that word used in that way. It's not "vexed". It's "vex" and deliberately so. It threw me off kilter immediately and that's not a bad thing. I don't know what a "tyefrin" is, whether it's well-dressed or not, and the internet doesn't seem willing to help me. I have no idea what "agricole" is when it's aged and bottled, even though I know the root of the word. Crucially, I'm unsure as to what's cultural history and what's imaginative fiction. This book is both.

Phaedra is the lead character, though she goes by Phee. She's a young lady, born to society in New Charleston, presumably an alternate Reconstruction Era American south where magic is real. Her family has spared no expense for this cotillion, even hiring dark-robed conjurers to enhance it, but the author cleverly avoids explaining much of what that means. Magic is background here, not the point, though it has a way of creeping through to the foreground when we least expect it. For the first half, what's magic and what isn't seems crystal clear. By the time we have our teeth into the second half, we're lost in the magic and everything is a surprise.

We often use the word "weaving" to describe the process of writing. Authors are weavers of yarns, right? During the homegoing at the end of this book, it felt like I was with Phaedra at the heart of a spool and Eden Royce was weaving her story all around me as I read. It felt less like a novel and more like a transcendental spiritual experience. I've never read Royce before, but she's written a few children's books, an earlier novella and a bevy of short stories and she's won notable awards. Clearly I need to track some down because this feels special.

Initially, it's all about Aunt Cleo, who dies relatively young at only just past forty. The news comes to Phee and her family, of course, and, when her mother declines, Phee steps up to pomp at Aunt Cleo's funeral. I had no idea what "pomp" means in this context, but guessed all the wrong things. It's basically organising the whole thing, but it goes deeper than that and there are structures to obey. You can't back out and you can't fail. However, once committed, it's yours and doing a good job can be beneficial to you as well as the deceased.

Her mother is outraged that Phee took on this role when she wouldn't, partly because Aunt Cleo's somewhat estranged from the rest of the family but mostly because her only child, still unmarried in her final season, is about to escape her control. And, of course, in a world with magic, control is a deeper thing. And so a carriage arrives, drawn by hippocamps, to take Phee to the Micronity of Horizon, where Cleo lived, so that she can start to attempt a job she doesn't even know how to do.

Fortunately she finds the right help from the right people but it seems like that might only have been forthcoming because she's the right person to seek it. There are depths here, some of which I saw coming, many of which I didn't and a bunch of which I'm pretty sure I didn't grasp at all. That may well be how that remains too because I can't search for what I know I don't know because it's either made up for this book or it's cultural and I'm missing enough background to ask questions. Frankly, it doesn't matter. I got what I got and that's enough to make this seriously impactful.

The novella seems to be all about Phee. She's the lead character, we follow her throughout and it ends as a beginning for her. However, in many ways it's really all about Cleo, or Cleonine Atalanta Simons, to use her full name. She helped to found the Micronity of Horizon and served as a leader in its community. It's a shelter town where everyone is welcome, words that explain what it is but don't remotely do it justice. We don't particularly explore it, but we meet many of its residents in unusual fashion. Azalea Brown, council head, known as Zaye, is only the first, and Cross Prioleau, a funeral director who also repairs bird eggs, is far from the strangest.

And strange things abound. Many are abstracted from our reality, as you might expect for a book that carries the label of southern gothic, like the mirror, the bathtub or the door without a handle but which mysteriously opens at the right time. Some are both grounded in our reality but apart from it, like the easing, one of the points at which I felt most lost between imaginative fiction and cultural history. This is a ceremony of sorts, in which a funeral director like Cross, who takes Phee along, sits with a body and talks with it until it literally eases.

Why would easing be needed? Well, the body here is of a runaway slave who was retrieved by his former master, even after they were all freed by law. He took him back in a crate. He's dead now. It isn't pretty. And his body is contorted, turning in on itself as if twisted by his experiences, likely not only from confinement within a crate. In this novella, it feels like the ceremony of easing has both physical and metaphysical effect, untwisting this dead body and freeing the soul of earthly attachments. However, it feels like it could be a historical thing too, the physical change due to a body leaving rigor mortis and done both out of respect and for those who remain.

Certainly homegoings are real. Eden Royce mentions in her acknowledgements that she planned her grandmother's homegoing a decade earlier and it planted a seed that grew into this novella. It would seem unlikely that settin' ups aren't real too, feeling to me like a viewing but conducted at home and overnight. What Royce turns Cleo's settin' up into is a scene that will stay with me. I can't think of another scene in any book this year that will stay with me like this one and likely not from the last few either. I would dearly love to see a movie adaptation of this novella just so I can watch this one scene. It floored me just reading it. The book was emotional already but this took it to a whole new level.

There's so much here to think about. It's about loss and grief and respect. However, it's also about discovery, affirmation and the ache to choose. It's about looking to the past and righting wrongs. It's about family, the people you need to leave and those you need to run to. It's about difference and what that truly means. Sure, it's about race but that's only one of many ways in which we can be different. This is drenched in that but goes far beyond it. It's about what's right and wrong, at a seriously deep level. And it's just as much about beginnings as it is endings.

I should add that, when I say I review books, that usually means that I review stories. It's what's in the words on the pages that matters. When I truly review books too, they're either new editions, like the Black Hill Books reprints of Guy N. Smith classics, or self-published works that need major formatting work. Here, it's just to praise the look. The cover imagery and design is elegant and it continues inside the covers. The chapter headings are delightful and the italic font is lovely. This is a story to treasure and revisit once in a while and I'm happy to say that the book is too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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