What an absolute privilege to be taken out of my reading comfort zone and to review Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman for My Weekly magazine online.

Published in paperback by Verve on 26th October 2023, Saturnalia is available for purchase through the links here.

Saturnalia

Doors open at 7. The sacrifice is at 9. The dress code is, as usual, black tie.

It’s the winter solstice in a Philadelphia that has been eroded by extreme weather, economic collapse, and disease-carrying mosquitoes. The Saturnalia carnival is about to begin – an evening on which nearly everyone, rich or poor, forgets their troubles for a moment.

For Nina, Saturnalia is simply a cruel reminder of the night that changed everything for her. It’s now three years since she walked away from the elite Saturn Club, with its genteel debauchery, arcane pecking order, and winking interest in alchemy and the occult. Since then, she’s led an isolated life, eking out a living telling fortunes with her Saturn Club tarot deck.

But when she gets a chance call from Max, her last remaining friend from the Saturn Club, Nina will put on a dress of blackest black and attend the Club’s wild solstice masquerade, the biggest party of the year, on a mysterious errand she can’t say no to.

Before the night is over, she will become the custodian of a horrifying secret – and the target of a mysterious hunter.

As Nina runs across an alternate Philadelphia balanced on a knife’s edge between celebration and catastrophe – through parades, worship houses, museums, hidden mansions, and the place she once called home – she’s forced to confront her past so she can finally take charge of her own, and perhaps everyone else’s, future.

My Review of Saturnalia

My full review of Saturnalia can be found on the My Weekly website here.

However, here I can say that Saturnalia is astonishing and I’m not entirely certain I’ll recover from reading it because I found it so unsettling. It’s dark, disturbing and very, very entertaining!

Do visit My Weekly to read my full review here.

About Stephanie Feldman

Stephanie Feldman is the author of the debut novel The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multigenre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov\’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.

For further information, visit Stephanie’s website, follow her on Twitter/X @sbfeldman or find Stephanie on Instagram.