Last month my novel Requiem in La Paz received a lengthy write-up in The New York Review of Science Fiction. It would be a complete understatement to say I felt deeply honored. After all, the February issue featured essays by Stephen R. Donaldson and Samuel R. Delany, plus reviews of new work by Kelly Link and Eleanor Arnason. Sharing pages with these award-winning authors, my novel was in truly august company.

For reviewer Michael Levy, Requiem in La Paz is “in some ways as much a traditional Gothic as an urban fantasy, replete with all of the overwrought emotions and romantic vibes one expects from that genre.” No one has ever called my novel Gothic before, but since I immersed myself in the Victorian Gothic as a doctoral student, it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out what I was really doing.

Levy devotes much of his review to discussing my protagonist, Isobel Linden, a former child prodigy now playing viola in a string quartet. He also focuses on the motif of Death and the Maiden: “What Gjevre has set up here is a loose retelling of Death and the Maiden, a motif originally derived from the medieval images of the Danse Macabre, later painted by various artists, including Edvard Munch, and eventually the subject of numerous stories and plays. Most famously it was translated into music by Franz Schubert in 1817. [Isobel’s] quartet is scheduled to play the Schubert piece on their Bolivian tour.” I’m glad Levy identified the Danse Macabre motif and related themes, since I was in fact aiming for a kind of Persephone story, a lyrical narrative about a girl caught up with Death.

The review praises my depiction of Bolivia and its musical culture and also singles out the novel’s “well-handled climax, which features a Lovecraftian god from the depths.” It goes on to call me “an accomplished prose stylist whose language invariably rises to the occasion, whether she’s depicting the beauty of a well-played concerto or the horror of an encounter with Death personified.”

(As you can imagine, that particular line made me very happy.)

Levy spends a whole paragraph in the review describing some of the problems with Requiem in La Paz, but you know something? I agree with everything he says. The narrative voice is sometimes oblique, and there are mysteries that aren’t sufficiently resolved. Even the best novels have imperfections, and one of the most rewarding things about being reviewed in a scholarly journal is that you know your work is being taken seriously, by a critic with the highest standards.

Overall, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the review, and I can’t resist sharing a final quotation:

“Requiem in La Paz is a rewarding and highly literate novel. The characters are worth caring about, and the musical content is invariably engaging, particularly if you’re the kind of reader who actually knows the difference between Schubert and Schumann. The mysteries, if occasionally a bit confusing, are still worthy of attention. And when Gjevre goes all Lovecrafty on you at the end of the book, you’ll think it was worth the wait.”