Rich and Strange: "If You Were a Tiger, I'd Have to Wear White" by Maria Dahvana Headley

This week’s instalment of Rich and Strange is up at Tor.com! Here’s a taste:

This story is pitch-perfect where tone, voice, and setting are concerned; reading it I felt awash in the kind of California sunlight that feels grim and desolate in its inescapability. The story’s pace is a beautiful thing, too, a slow unfolding of narrative sleaze running parallel to an urgently building emotional crest. Like a film from the classic period it portrays, it’s a story both coy and breathtakingly passionate, wringing wonder from bleak, drab despair. There’s magic in the fade of diamante, in the reduction from main-stage to side-show, in going from riches to rags, and Headley captures that mixture of self-destructing desperation perfectly.

Read the rest here. This is a story definitely going on to my for-award-consideration list.

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