Bitter Medicine

"This is a contemporary fantasy set in California, New York, France, and many other places. It’s a fun paranormal adventure story that contains a very sweet romance. The main character is a woman who has given up her powers and gone into hiding to take care of her elder brother and protect him from their younger brother. She’s been making herself smaller: she has extraordinary abilities but chooses to do something mundane for a living to preserve their cover identities. As the book unfolds, this all starts to unravel and she is forced to confront the past. It’s really fun. The magic system in the novel is based on Chinese calligraphy. Tsai has built a very rich world. She is multilingual and made a cool choice not to translate any of the other languages (Chinese and French) in this book – you can understand a lot through context, even though there’s no translation. It works really well. That’s exactly why I love SFF. You can play with the parameters of the normal world in a way that allows you to ask questions about everyday issues, and to conduct thought experiments that crack open what is at the heart of those issues. You can play with symbolism in interesting ways because you can completely change the context. At heart, most SFF stories are human stories about people in extraordinary circumstances making choices that you or I might make. It’s a way of getting to the bone of what makes people human."