However, stories by Seanan McGuire are rarely comforting, they do dig in and make you wonder, make you think.
I also really loved Delia, the landlady ghost who has just stayed and continues to care for the city and its inhabitants, I found the idea of ghosts like Delia very comforting, even as I found Jenna discomforting. Her experience of the city is so interesting and I would love to read more of her story. In particular, Brenda stands out as the most interesting character in the book, her awareness of New York and being a witch – a corn witch, is so interesting. I feel like we only get to know her just enough for the story to be told but not enough to really understand her place in the landscape unlike with the other characters, which breathed for me on the page, ghost or not. The gentleness itself is worthy of mention I feel, and I think it softens the nature of the topics enough to read the story and connect with the characters and what’s happening.Īlthough Jenna is our protagonist, I found myself never really understanding her very well, or connecting much with her. I find these topics difficult to read about myself, but despite this I did really enjoy the novella and appreciated it’s gentle narrative. Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day is a unique novella, and though it deals with heavy topics around death and suicide, for me the novella was about time and our perceptions and appreciation of it. I am a recent fan of McGuire’s work, but I fell hard for her writing, ideas and characters. My Review:Īn eARC of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Unwilling to simply steal that time from the living, Jenna earns every day she leeches with volunteer work at a suicide prevention hotline.īut something has come for the ghosts of New York, something beyond reason, beyond death, beyond hope something that can bind ghosts to mirrors and make them do its bidding. Living or dead, every soul is promised a certain amount of time, and when Jenna passed she found a heavy debt of time in her record.
When Jenna died, she blamed herself for that, too. When her sister Patty died, Jenna blamed herself. Genre: urban fantasy, dark fantasy, novella Blurb from Goodreads: Publisher and Year: Tor.com Publishing, 2017