Lynn Strong

Cozy fantasy and beyond

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Tag: Reviews

  • The Improbable We Can Do Today and Disability Pride Month

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    When I’m writing cozy fantasy, I sometimes soften up the edges of what it’s like living with multiple disabilities; I distribute them across more than one character, so that none of my characters have to fight all the fights I face at the same time. Haroun, Shai Madhur, Faraj, Irfan, Priye and Ashar got parts and parcels, but I don’t have a single character who’s paying all the disability taxes at the same time, and I haven’t figured out how to present some of my challenges at all.

    Jon Dixon’s The Improbable We Can Do Today doesn’t shy away from any of it. I can’t think of a better book to highlight for Disability Pride Month this year. (I wish I’d met him while the application form for Sheila Jenne’s Disability Pride Sale was still open so I could have pointed him her direction!)

    The Improbable We Can Do Today -- Stories and cover art both by Jon Dixon

    In his newsletter, Jon wrote,

    It’s always seemed to me that one of the laziest and most damaging tropes in fiction – not just fantasy fiction but all fiction – is the use of disability as a shorthand for either villainy or victimhood. The number of times someone with a disability is presented as a capable, complex, pro-active protagonist in books or movies or TV shows is vanishingly small. Meriva is my small attempt to help tilt the scales the other way. Her disability is significant enough to be an ever-present reality every second of her day-to-day life, but – I hope – it never ever defines her.

    When I started writing Meriva, I made myself one rule: her disability could never be the reason anything good (or bad) happened to her. Nor could it be a lesson for someone else to learn from or be inspired by. And definitely never an obstacle to be triumphed over so the story could reward her with competence. She’s already competent – just differently, and on her own terms.

    As a disabled person who wants to read more stories exactly like that? Yes please, more like this!

    The Improbable We Can Do Today is a collection of cozy mystery stories across a spectrum of mystery flavors with an indomitable protagonist who’s absolutely going to live her life on her terms. (The rest of the quote is “…The impossible may take slightly longer,” and Jon’s working on a sequel story collection under that title that I am eagerly-and-hopefully-not-too-impatiently wriggling in anticipation of!)

    I’m dancing around details to avoid spoilers, but the first story resembles the infrastructure of Murder on the Orient Express, except with a stagecoach and no actual murder; others resemble Leverage style heists or research delves. And I cheered out loud when Meriva’s personal circumstances also made her the exact and only suitable person to fix a problem with a countdown. I love the kinds of tales where your disability isn’t a superpower but it is uniquely valuable to include you and acknowledge what you bring to any situation.

    It’s also rare to see a book with a disabled character really grapple with the challenges in managing the balance between independence and caretaking, the way it can impact the dynamics between people, without falling off one side of the ledge (“I’m just a burden”) or the other (“it’s all totally rainbows and roses”). Meriva and Custos have a definite balancing act between them in more ways than one, and yet the book isn’t about disability struggles, it’s about solving crimes! (Along with some delicious detours in not-exactly-coffeeshops along the way.)

    Part of my professional training is in accessibility aids, and Meriva’s world isn’t the same as ours, so I kept wanting to reach into the book and ask “hey, Meriva, do service dogs exist? What about a literal dog cart? Magic exists, but it’s definitely got reliability issues, so could you tell me what might be reliable enough so I could take some notes…” But I didn’t want to be That Yoga and Celery Juice Friend, even aside from how I can’t actually chat with a fictional character about the available in-world aids. And Meriva is absolutely competent enough and experienced enough to have figured out what the best available option is for her in her world. Day job overspill met “trust the disabled person about their own needs” there, along with Rule 1 “hold off on the advice until someone actually asks!”

    While I can’t chat with Meriva, I’ve been delighted to chat (via email across several time zones) with Jon, who is a stunningly multitalented person! Aside from years in acting and IT and also now independent authordom, I learned that he did all the fantastic art for his books and his advertising himself, as an illustration veteran of TSR and Dragon Magazine. And to top all that off, he’s also an inventive cook!

    One of the stories prominently features a bakery with spicecakes and “bittersyrup” (not quite coffee but adjacent, Jon said, noting he had imagined a condensed simmered tree bark that was then reconstituted for drinking). Here’s Jon’s own recipe for the spicecakes.

    Florina’s ‘Bluebird’ spicecakes recipe

    By Jon Dixon

    There are two methods given, using different amounts of yeast.  Using less yeast will increase the time needed for the first proving of the dough.

    1. To make the dough

    You’ll need:

    • 11 fl oz / 1½ cups whole milk
    • 4 tablespoons / ¼ cup melted butter
    • 1½ teaspoons of salt
    • 1¼ teaspoons of dried yeast (only ¼ teaspoon if using longer proving time)
    • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
    • 3 tablespoons white sugar
    • 1 large egg yolk
    • 600g bread flour (plus extra for dusting)

    Warm the milk and melted butter (1½ mins on high in a microwave).

    Add the salt, yeast, sugar, egg yolk and vanilla extract, and mix to combine.

    Add the flour and stir until the mixture forms a shaggy ball. Combine the dry flour on the sides of the bowl with the moist flour.

    Place the bowl in a warm, draft-free location, cover with a towel, and prove for at least 2½ hours (12-24 hours if using the longer proving time).

    2½ (or 12-24) hours later…

    Pull and stretch the dough by hand or with a wooden spoon until the dough forms a sticky ball.

    Sprinkle the dough with dry flour to make it easier to handle and shape.

    Dust the work surface with flour, and roll the dough out of the bowl onto the work surface.

    2. To make the spicecakes

    You’ll need:

    • 65g / ⅓ cup white sugar
    • 1 ½ rounded teaspoon of cinnamon
    • ½ rounded teaspoon of nutmeg
    • ½ rounded teaspoon of ginger
    • ¼ rounded teaspoon of cardamon
    • Handful of raisins (optional)
    • Handful of candied orange and/or lemon peel (optional)

    Mix the sugar, cinnamon and other spices together in a bowl and set aside.

    Dust the work surface with flour and flatten the dough ball into a strip. Dust it with flour, turn it over, and roll it into a strip about 8”-12” wide and as long as possible (the longer the strip the more of a ‘spiral’ there’ll be in the cakes).

    Sprinkle the dough with the sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg mixture and spread it all over the surface with your hand. If you’re using them, sprinkle the raisins and/or candied peel thinly over the surface.

    Roll the dough up tightly lengthwise.

    Cut the roll into 8 sections and place them cut face down into a round 9” cake pan.

    (If you’re using a rectangular 9”x12” pan, make 2 rows of 4 and reduce the baking time to 30 minutes).

    Place in a warm, draught-free location, cover with a towel, and prove for at least 30 minutes.

    3. To cook

    Pre-heat an oven to 180 degrees Celsius/350 degrees Farenheit (160 degrees Celsius/320 degrees Farenheit for a fan oven).

    Bake the proved cakes for 35 minutes. They should be cooked through and golden on the outside, but still soft and ‘squidgy’ in the middle.

    4. To glaze

    You’ll need:

    • 400g / 3⅓ cups icing sugar
    • 3-4 tablespoons of whole milk

    After 35 minutes remove the cakes from the oven and set aside to cool (still in the pan) for about 10 minutes.

    Put the sugar into a small bowl. Add 2 tablespoons of the milk and mix to combine. When thoroughly mixed add the rest of the milk slowly until the glaze is thin enough to spread, but not too runny.

    If the glaze starts to thicken before you’re ready to spread it add a little more milk and stir to thin.

     Spread half the glaze over the cakes while they’re still warm.

    5. To serve the finished cakes

    To serve, remove the part-cooled cakes from the pan, tear them apart at the edges, and place on a plate. Drizzle them with a little more glaze, and serve them with spiced tea or bittersyrup while still warm. (If you don’t have any brewed bittersyrup available, coffee is a perfectly good substitute!)

  • Consorting with the King and the history of lemonade

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    I know I write in a niche; I started writing my books because I wanted to read books like them and couldn’t find them in a language I’m fluent enough in.

    So you could have knocked me over with one of the peacock feathers on this book’s cover when I ran into:

    🤴🏽A kind, soft, middle-aged Middle Eastern gentleman who…

    🫖 …loves his home’s food and culture and architecture and definitely the chai…

    🧸 …and needs a break from all the obligations and expectations and thou-shalts in his life…

    🐈 …and adores the thousand cats who wander around his city.

    🚋 (So much that he made them a little solar powered cat tram!)

    Up til that last bit there, I might have been talking about Chai and Charmcraft, but I am utterly beyond delighted by C. Quince’s Consorting with the King.

    Consorting with the King by C. Quince

    C. Quince’s solar-powered not-exactly-gaslamp edition of something adjacent to the Ottoman Empire is gently and cozily flipping the usual tropes all the way through, and I am so here for it. Instead of the white folks bringing Enlightenmnent to the brown folks, it’s clear early on that Istanbul is an old and beautiful and rich civilization even before the solar power comes onto the scene. The Western visitors have a lot of catching up to do (one of them nearly drinks out of the hand-washing bowl). The Turkish royals are better educated; they speak the handwaved-not-exactly-Saxon-that-gets-rendered-in-English with a bit of hesitation but still more fluently than the Saxon-and-Victorian-coded point of view character speaks Turkish.

    And then there are the cats. And the little solar powered cat tram. And the Cinderella-inverted setup that absolutely won my heart — I can’t say more without spoilers. I knew where it was going but I didn’t mind knowing that because the ride itself was as delightful as the cat tram.

    I might possibly have made an idiot of myself squeaking incoherently in his email about how madly I love this book, but I am not an AI bot or a scammer, but also I hate that I have to lead with that because I can count the number of actual humans who’ve emailed me on the fingers of one hand this year, but also I love this book. (But you can’t say that coherently without sounding like an AI bot or a scammer now, so that kind of leaves so incoherently no AI bot would have sent it, but also that may have led the human on the other end to think I’m entirely off my rocker? 😅 )

    Also, C. Quince introduced his readers to beverages I’d never encountered before, so of course I was extra bonus sold!

    I wish I could write fanfic without causing copyright trouble, I would love to write a crossover fanfic where our characters got to nerd out about their favorite beverages and their mutual love of cats and the rueful challenges of gently, cozily flipping the Cinderella tropes like pancakes rather than like tables.

    Alas, I can’t, but at least I can research some of those fascinating beverages without spoilers or lawyers?

    Kashkab and Qatarmizat from the Solar Sultan

    No spoilers here, but this is a quote from near the end of the book:

    “Anything cold?”

    “Yes, the lemonade,” Haşim said, leading Francis to the appropriate tray of drinks. “Kashkab,” he indicated the pale-yellow drink, “lemon, mint, pepper, and citron. Or, qatarmizat,” he indicated another yellow drink, “is sweeter. Or,” he added with a smile, “my favourite. Lemon and strawberry.”

    “That sounds good,” Francis said. “Why doesn’t that one have a name?”

    “Well, the other ones are recipes from Egypt.”

    If I were a cat you would have seen ears and whiskers lock on immediately with huge black targeting pupils and the wriggle of an impending book-pounce! 😻

    Here’s what How Stuff Works has to say about it:

    The earliest record of the precursor to lemonade hails from the Mediterranean coast of medieval Egypt. Kashkab was made from fermented barley combined with mint, rue, black pepper and citron leaf. Next time you’re at the juice bar, ask your mixologist to whip you up a frothy mug of kashkab! Or how about a shot of sweet and tangy qatarmizat instead? Thanks to the chronicles of poet and traveler Nasir-i-Khusraw, who wrote accounts of 10th-century Egyptian life, and to Jewish books and documents in the Cairo Genizah, we know that the medieval Jewish community in Cairo consumed, traded and exported bottles of the sugary lemon juice concoction called qatarmizat through the 13th century.

    I hadn’t run into Nasir-i-Khusraw or the Jewish community recipes in research before this, possibly because these weren’t dedicated cookbooks. An hour’s research hasn’t been enough for me to track down original sources, but here’s my Taking A Guess Unofficial Amateur Beverage Hack theories on how someone might get a similar sip today:

    Very Under-Researched Kashkab

    (more updates if I find them!)

    From the notes above, it looks like historic kashkab begins with a lightly fermented barley water. Since I personally don’t feel comfortable giving fermentation advice over the Internet because of the number of ways things could potentially go wrong (including exploding glass), I’m going to say “if you feel comfortable making small beer from barley, you do you” here.

    If you don’t feel comfortable making small beer from barley, and you live in a place where Robinson’s lemon barley water is available, that could be a much simpler first step.

    And if you don’t live in range of Robinson’s for sale, many Korean markets sell roasted barley packets for brewing a tea-like tisane.

    Alternatively, if you want to start with lemonade rather than barley water, Rule of Tasty is right there too.

    So after you have your base beverage at whatever level of barley, lemon, and/or fizz pleases you:

    • Grab a fill-your-own tea bag or tea ball
    • (If you’re starting with hot barley tea without lemon, add some lemon juice or zest here to taste)
    • Put into it some fresh or dried mint, some cracked black pepper, and maybe a couple celery leaves for a rue-adjacent flavor with less hazards
    • If starting with hot barley water, steep the tea-bag-or-ball in it for a few minutes, taste testing, and pull when you like the balance
    • If starting with cold barley water or lemonade, you might want to leave the herbs steeping longer because it will take more time to flavor cold liquid than hot.
    • Sugar doesn’t appear in either C. Quince’s book description of kashkab or in the historical notes, aside from whatever you need to get barley to lightly ferment. But again, I leave Rule of Tasty to your decisions.

    Very Under-Researched Qatarmizat

    (more updates if I find them!)

    It sounds like qatarmizat is closer to modern day lemonade, and sugar from sugarcane reached Egypt somewhere between 325 BCE and 700 CE, but I don’t have documentation on what percentage of the population used sugar vs. honey over time. Sugar was definitely in common use by the 1200s, because the Crusaders discovered it and took it to Europe with them.

    I can’t guess whether the bottling was also for the containment of fizzy fermentation or simply for ease of selling unit-shaped things to those who desired them.

    So if you like either sweet still lemonade or sweet fizzy lemonade, both sound plausible to me on this end of time!

    Pour a glass, sip, and enjoy a good book full of cats, since the book-cats will not be offended by the citrus in your glass.