The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson
Jackson really gets better with every book! I was hooked from page one on this updated version of Carrie, and I think Stephen King would be proud to have inspired this. Maddy is biracial and outcast from her peers and miserable at home with her abusive father. Racial tensions dividing the town of Springville come to a head on prom night, and the results are…explosive. Do not miss this amazing YA thriller!
The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson, (List Price: $15.95, Quill Tree Books, 9780063029156, September 2023)
Reviewed by Andrea Richardson, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia
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Queer fandom was “one of the first fault lines, I suppose you could say, of me beginning to question all the things that I had been taught,” says Sen, who came to realize that they were nonbinary through the material, which felt as eye-opening as it did illicit. “I was not supposed to be there,” Sen remembers with a laugh, “and every time my dad found out, he would block the website and I would have to go and find another one.”
One of the things that I love about reading and writing fanfiction is the immersion. I don’t have to explain to you what The Force is or what a lightsaber is. In fact, I don’t have to know what it is myself, but we can use these magics and sci-fi things to move the story along. We don’t have to set anything up. I never felt like I was someone who knew how to set anything up. I didn’t ever need to flex that muscle of world-building as a writer. I didn’t have to describe a new political climate or create a new magic system…One of the things that’s really exciting to me about Rose in Chains is that opportunity to take something that worked really well and meant a lot to me and getting to actually flex those world-building muscles now. Even beyond the Rose in Chains trilogy, if I wanted to continue writing fantasy, it doesn’t feel as daunting anymore. It’s another new genre to play with, and that’s the fun part.
I like my stories to be immersive. I am a visual person when writing and reading. So to me, it’s all part of the characterization: the way that they wear clothes, what the clothes look like, what they look like. I also want it to be a lived-in world. So let’s talk about getting dirty. Let’s talk about taking baths. Let’s think about chapped lips. When I watch particularly fantasy content, I almost look for these things because it is a layer of grittiness that I like, a texture in a story, that I feel is real. The Knight and the Moth was really fun, like gossamer versus armor. You can look into themes of these things too and apply them to the story, or you can decide to read them very literally.
