Can’t-Wait Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted over at Wishful Endings to spotlight and discuss the books we’re excited about but haven’t yet read. Most of the time they’re books that have yet to be released, but not always. It’s based on the Waiting on Wednesday meme, which was originally hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.
This week my Can’t-Wait-For Book is Grimoire of Grave Fates created by Hanna Alkaf and Margaret Owen!
Genres: Fantasy
Representation: BIPOC MCs, queer MCs
Published on: 6th June 2023
Goodreads
Crack open your spell book and enter the world of the illustrious Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary. There's been a murder on campus, and it's up to the students of Galileo to solve it. Follow 18 authors and 18 students as they puzzle out the clues and find the guilty party.
Professor of Magical History Septimius Dropwort has just been murdered, and now everyone at the Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary is a suspect.
A prestigious school for young magicians, the Galileo Academy has recently undergone a comprehensive overhaul, reinventing itself as a roaming academy in which students of all cultures and identities are celebrated. In this new Galileo, every pupil is welcome—but there are some who aren't so happy with the recent changes. That includes everyone's least favorite professor, Septimius Dropwort, a stodgy old man known for his harsh rules and harsher punishments. But when the professor's body is discovered on school grounds with a mysterious note clenched in his lifeless hand, the Academy's students must solve the murder themselves, because everyone's a suspect.
Told from more than a dozen alternating and diverse perspectives, The Grimoire of Grave Fates follows Galileo's best and brightest young magicians as they race to discover the truth behind Dropwort's mysterious death. Each one of them is confident that only they have the skills needed to unravel the web of secrets hidden within Galileo's halls. But they're about to discover that even for straight-A students, magic doesn't always play by the rules. . . .
Contributors include: Cam Montgomery, Darcie Little Badger, Hafsah Faizal, Jessica Lewis, Julian Winters, Karuna Riazi, Kat Cho, Kayla Whaley, Kwame Mbalia, L. L. McKinney, Marieke Nijkamp, Mason Deaver, Natasha Díaz, Preeti Chhibber, Randy Ribay, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Victoria Lee, and Yamile Saied Méndez
The first thing that should jump out at you (beyond the appropriately magical cover!) is that created by above the author names – because Grimoire of Grave Fates is not, strictly speaking, a novel; and it’s not a traditional kind of collection-of-short-stories, either. Each story fits together with the rest to tell one bigger story, which is: a professor at a magic school has been murdered! But who by???
I’ve never heard of anything like this before, and I love it! It’s such a cool idea, made even better by the fact that it’s, you know, a magic school rather than a normal school. BRING ON THE MAGIC. With even more cheers for a diverse cast, because yeah, we need more of those, especially in magic school settings.
(I’m already not very sorry that Professor Dropwort is dead. TOO BAD, SO SAD.)
The writerly part of me can’t help thinking that organising this must have been extremely complicated – sure, each individual author only has to write their own short story, but presumably everyone worked together on the worldbuilding and overarching plot. I’ve tried that with just five other people, and it was not the easiest thing in the world!
Or maybe Alkaf and Owen did most of that – deciding how the magic here worked, etc – and that’s why it’s their names on the cover? That would have been MUCH simpler, logistically.
So I’m already impressed from a technical standpoint, is what I’m saying here, and I’m very ready to be impressed by the stories themselves!!!
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