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The Monsters We Defy
by Leslye Penelope
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Washington D. C., 1925 Clara Johnson talks to spirits, a gift that saved her during her darkest moments in a Washington D. C. jail. Now a curse that’s left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So, when the Empress, the powerful spirit who holds her debt, offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, a desperate Clara seizes the chance. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District. Clara can’t pull off this daring heist alone. She’ll need help from an unlikely team, from a jazz musician capable of hypnotizing with a melody to an aging vaudeville actor who can change his face, to pull off the impossible. But as they encounter increasingly difficult obstacles, a dangerous spirit interferes at every turn.…
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"Leslye Penelope’s latest is a genre-bending mashup that delights as much as it intrigues. A fantasy novel set in 1925 Washington, D.C., the book features a girl who can talk to spirits, a heist, an awesome crew of magical misfits and a heart-pounding romance. All this and more in a well-researched journey through African American culture in the nation’s capital in the 1920s. Clara Johnson, the novel’s protagonist, is as “ornery as a red hornet,” but beneath the hard-boiled exterior is a determined young woman – and one of the most inventive characters in fantasy."
"It’s set in 1920s Washington DC, in the United States, within an African American community where there’s magic. It’s really dealing with issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sexuality – and what happens with magic in this mix, when the crime bosses have their own magical wizards and so forth to help them out. The Roaring Twenties: imagine that with magic, and it makes it a lot richer. I love the title, taken from a Jamaica-born poet, Claude McKay, who writes this poem, ‘If We Must Die’ during the infamous Red Summer of 1919. It’s a rebuttal to lynchings and anti-Black race riots that he’s seeing happening in the United States, when he moves to Harlem. One of the lines from his poem is “The monsters we defy” – I love that Penelope takes that line from this Harlem Renaissance era poem for her title. We follow a young woman, Clara, and her friends, as she is navigating these many worlds. She is trying to simply go about her life, working with scholars. She’s not part of this other criminal world – but she becomes more and more embroiled in it. And we have magical beings; we have bits of folk magic that people are doing; we get a fairy ball, which I was hoping had real fairies. But even better, it’s a ball for queer and cross-dressing Black men. And this is based on actual drag balls of the era! I loved it! Often people erroneously think such events are more modern aspects of society. But Penelope reminds us these drag balls and what-have-you were quite early. Absolutely!"