Shaken Free has a cover!

A bright note in a loooooong publishing process, plus holiday book reccs

World events feel like they are moving quickly (too quickly?) but the process of publishing Shaken Free—the sequel to my fantasy Hell novel Shaken Loose—feels very, very slow.

I’d originally hoped to have the sequel in readers’ hands in summer 2025, about a year after the first book’s launch. Way too ambitious! So my editor and I settled on January 2025. I met all my deadlines for submitting the manuscript, choosing a title, responding to edits, reviewing the typeset version, etc. but things slowed down. Part of the delay was because some review sources like Publishers Weekly require copies six months before the launch date. The book itself was ready, I was ready, but we wanted to give Shaken Free the best chance at getting industry reviews—which meant a long lead time. I felt stuck in a kind of “hurry up and wait” situation.

Now, though, we have a firm publication date—June 2025.

That’s a long time off! Will anyone remember Annie, Trua, and my other denizens of Hell by then? Or will they have gotten lost in the scrum of real-world Hellish characters like Dr. Oz, RFK Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard?

(Actually, I’m not super-worried about that. The sequel will have one of those handy who’s-who lists of characters at the beginning of the book.)

Meanwhile, there’s more good news in that we not only we have a firm pub date but we have. . . a cover! (Trumpets, please.)

This one, like the cover for Shaken Loose, was designed by my daughter Becca Schuchat.

I really like it. The overall design makes clear that it’s a sibling of Shaken Loose, but the colors are very different. The reds of the first book have been muted into purples, and the light blue and white streaks suggest not fire but. . . what do YOU think they suggest? With that winged horse? Maybe sky? Maybe—

Ilana, stop giving hints. :-)

Siblings!

In any case, I’m delighted to have a firm pub date and a cover. It’s a small, bright moment in a long publishing process and a challenging political season.

More info to come as I gear up for marketing. But not until the new year! Meanwhile, I hope you’re able to find bright spots of your own in this season of long nights, whether those bright spots are time with loved ones, moments in nature, or favorite activities like cooking, music, crafts, volunteering, goofy cat videos, or. . . reading.

For reading: here are three of my favorite books from the past few months. They would be great holiday gifts for others or for yourself.

James by Percival Everett, which just won the National Book Award for fiction. It’s a re-telling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim. It’s clever and funny and tragic and brilliant. Now I want to go back and read the rest of Everett’s massive body of work. (Everett also wrote the book on which the film American Fiction was based.)

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman. Grossman’s The Magicians was a homage/subversion of the Narnia and Harry Potter fantasy books. Here he tackles the legend of King Arthur and Camelot, but you do NOT need to have read any other King Arthur books to enjoy this. (I hadn’t.) A young knight from the boondocks journeys to Camelot seeking adventure and glory, only to find that King Arthur is dead and Camelot is a ruined ghost of itself with only a few of the most marginal knights remaining. It’s a swashbuckling adventure story, filled with compassion and humor and magic, but also an underlying question of how one lives in a diminished era where the famous heroes are all gone. Sound familiar?

Lucy by the Sea (2022) by Elizabeth Strout. This is the best Covid-era novel I’ve read so far. The narrator Lucy Barton is a middle-aged NYC writer who, as the first news starts to trickle out about a strange virus, gets a call from her ex-husband urging her to flee with him to a house on the Maine coast. The tone is quiet, slow, and contemplative, which I found calming in the jangling final weeks of the presidential campaign. It took me back to that early pandemic time when we let UPS packages sit on the stoop for days in case there were deadly germs on the box. More than a trip down memory lane, though, it takes advantage of the pandemic slowing everything down. Little things that might get tossed aside in our normal bustling world — signs of an adult child's shaky marriage, the tiny habits of an ex-husband that make you furious — appear in crisp focus when Lucy is sheltering in place and the day's highlight is a solitary walk out of the house. Lucy by the Sea is set in the same Maine town as Strout's best-selling Olive Kittridge, but like The Bright Sword you do NOT need to have read any other books to follow and enjoy it. It stands beautifully alone.

You can order all three of these books (plus a few others I particularly liked this year) through the page I just started on Bookshop.org, or of course through your local bookstore.

Happy holidays! What books do YOU recommend for cozy winter reading or giving this year?