Title Passing Strange Series --- Author Ellen Klages Cover Art --- Publisher Tor.com 2017 First Printing Tor.com 2017 Category Historical Warnings None Main Characters Haskel, Hellen, Emily, Babs, Franny Main Elements Witches Website ellenklages.com

San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet.

Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where mystery, science, and art intersect.

I actually loved this novella, I didn't expect to, but it was written so beautifully I couldn't help be drawn in. First, the setting is 1940's San Francisco. All our protagonists are lesbian women, in a time when it was a illegal to be so, in fact just walking around in men's clothing (unless you happened to have three pieces of women's clothing underneath???) was cause for arrest. And toss in one Asian character having to dance to "yellow" jokes and you see a world where people are struggling just to be who they are. A lot has changed, a lot has not. At least I can walk down the street in a pair of pants and not have to worry about being groped by a policeman to check if I've got a bra. On the other hand we still look for people to blame, "others" who we can feel superior to, deviants we can gawk at. Maybe one day we can get over ourselves and just let people be.

What really caught me was that one of these women is a pulp horror magazine cover artist, at a time where she of course had to go by her last name only, to hide the fact she was a woman working in a field usually restricted to men. After have read most of Lovecraft's stories last year it was interesting to think about what kind of mind is needed to come up with those monsters, leering villains and near naked maidens in distress. And don't forget an Asian woman as a lawyer!

One would almost think this is not a fantasy, but there is a little magic, very subtle. Just enough to add that little fantasy sheen on something that was already somehow magic. You could almost take it out entirely, but the painting...so beautiful. And I have to admit I keep going back to the cover of this novella, it really is beautiful, well, at least the version I have, must admit some of the other covers I saw on Goodreads are pretty terrible.

Definitely a surprise, I thought this would be the one story that would bore me out of the novella 4-pack that Tor.com gave away free (just sign up for the newsletter and you get reminders when there are free books available to download), but so far it might actually get first place, I still have one more to read though.