This book was incredibly imaginative but also sometimes confusing, but overall a very good time. I was going to Review Amnesty this book but it hasn’t broken out like I hoped it would do, and I would like to see more people reading it, so I am going to say some stuff.
This is an extremely imaginative adult fantasy book, despite three of the main characters being children, set in an alternate New Orleans that is just called Nola. In this Nola, magic is commonplace, the dead walk, ghosts are a regular occurrence, and there’s a man named Doctor Professor who coalesces out of nowhere with his piano, and when he starts playing, everyone has to stop what they are doing and dance.
But Nola is in danger, somebody is out there stealing the songs that make Nola run, and it becomes the responsibility of the titular Perilous Graves to save it. It is also, as the author notes in his acknowledgements, “the Blackest fantasy I could concoct”. Nothing about this book was whitewashed, and it was so nice to read something so specific and obviously meaningful.
After you have finished reading (or even during!), the Spotify playlist curated by the author is a Must Listen.