Review of Tea Leaves by Jacob Budenz
Tea Leaves by Jacob Budenz (Amble Press, 2023) is a collection of short stories with mostly queer protagonists and filled with a delightful surrealness across the various worlds and characters of the stories.
I first became familiar with Jacob’s writing when he submitted the story “Seen” for DefCon One’s I Didn’t Break the Lamp anthology, which was one of the stories we selected for that anthology. I was pleased to see it reprinted here and love it even years after my first reading. Other stories I enjoyed in this collection included “Under Her White Stars,” in which a witch needs to apprehend another magic user, and brings his boyfriend along to help him. “And Then Again to the Next” is a somewhat tragic story of love across reincarnations and time, with a seeming non-linear format of the story that comes to fruition in the telling of it. Finally, I enjoyed “Borealis,” which I read as a dark modern twist on Sleeping Beauty with some substantial remixing of the supporting characters.
If you enjoy reading stories with queer protagonists who lead messy, human lives, with a dose of the surreal, check out Tea Leaves!
The author provided me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for review consideration.
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