But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see.

Please reblog the polls, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people read the excerpt with an open mind 💖📚 Title and author will be revealed after the poll's conclusion.

Three Parts Dead is a 2012 novel by Max Gladstone. From the book’s official summary: “A God has died, and it’s up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart. Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis’s steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot. Tara’s job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her only help is Abelard, a chain-smoking priest of the dead God, who’s having an understandable crisis of faith. But when the duo discover that Kos was murdered, they have to make a case in Alt Coulumb’s courts—and their quest for truth endangers their partnership, their lives, and the city’s slim hope of survival.”

Publishers Weekly gave Three Parts Dead a starred review, writing: “The combination of legal thriller and steam-powered fantasy may seem improbable, but Gladstone makes it work with an appealing cast and a setting rich with imaginative details, like a priest who shows his devotion to a fire-god by chain-smoking, junkies getting high on vampire bites, cops who become part of a hive-mind when on duty, and the binding of divine power by legal contracts.”

the following events ensued:

1. predictable lively discussion on the preparation of Wienerschnitzel, in which natives and wurstaboos are pro-puff and everybody else is like *confused dog head tilt* why wouldn’t you want the crust to stay ~attached to the thing you put it on? as with other fried foods?

2. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my band name” jokes

3. thirty “Bad Schnitzel is my stripper name” jokes

4. one “ah yes, Bad Schnitzel! a lovely spa town” joke

5. this absolute masterpiece:

my secondborn (my parents)

7/10

sounds vaguely historical but in the way that I'm going to be sent off to war to prevent a succession crisis

potentially confusing to the listener bc the average conversation has little relation to birth order

my sister's, [name] (my aunt)

9/10

direct and to the point!

still very clear about what our family relationship is. I think we can do away with many nouns if this is any indication

my young adult child (my mom)

4/10

it's giving "20 year old minor"

I promise you can just say my kid. it's ok I don't mind strangers thinking I'm like 5 bc that would make me a prodigy for doing stuff like my laundry and dishes in one day and honestly I could use that kind of support

my liberated one (my grandma)

10/10 THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

completely unclear what my relationship actually is to her. her personal oracle perhaps?

Hedgehog-shaped jar, Neolithic period (3500-3000 BCE)

“And every day…”

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