Readers, I’m so excited to be able to share a new format of excerpt for you! I am, unfortunately, one of those unlucky people who has trouble concentrating on audiobooks and podcasts, but I know a ton of you appreciate the convenience of those mediums. So today, in addition to the usual printed excerpt, I also have a snippet of an award-winning audiobook to share with you!
Ruby Peru’s Bits Of String Too Small To Save is a witty, classically illustrated fantasy for adults that asks: What’s the difference between animals and people? Magic and technology? A true home and a place to live?
In 2021, BoSTStS was a New York City Big Book Award distinguished favorite. In the novel (now a dramatized, full-cast audiobook,) innocent ElizabethAnn, her criminal genius Grandma and their loyal sheepdog Jackson dive out of the postmodern police state of No Oaks, through a hidden portal, and into the forested dystopia of Bumblegreen. There, ElizabethAnn must either rescue this world from a terrible blight or be executed as the cause of it. In the process, she investigates the disappearance of an ancient genderless magician, befriends a reluctant teenage queen, and rides a scheming, talking monkey, all in order to restore Grandma’s scientific reputation and to make this troubled land their new and true home.
The long-awaited release of the audio format for the book won the 2022 Deanna Tulley Multimedia Prize. Narrated by the author herself and voiced by a wide cast, this full-cast recording brings the novel’s colorful, imaginative characters to life in fresh new ways sure to delight dark fantasy readers of all ages.
Read on for a print excerpt before enjoying the audio sample!
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Chapter 4:
Wherein Hank Steals a Dessert Spoon, Among Other Things
ElizabethAnn found she had walked right into a sumptuous sitting room. Before her, a velvet-lined box of monogrammed cutlery gaped open on a massive, chestnut table. Antique furniture of every kind and description suggested the room had been designed to host numerous conversation circles, some intersecting others.
Curious to learn the identity of the screeching woman in the carriage, ElizabethAnn dashed across an intricately woven carpet, around a Victorian fainting couch, past an Art Deco lamp, and up to a massive architectural arch, against whose cold marble she pressed her body as she peeked around the corner.
Beyond the arch, a hall ended abruptly in a domed entryway where those mahogany doors stood wide open. Beside them, a butler in a tuxedo idly rocked on his heels and whistled a tune.
The screeching crescendoed and subsided, then a woman (the screecher, herself) leaped from the carriage, dashed indoors, flung her handbag at the butler, kicked off her pumps, and sent them skittering across the mansion’s grand foyer.
The butler yawned and said, “Welcome home, Duchess.”
The duchess bellowed, “Get me my baby!” and her voice echoed off the marble.
Then, sliding in her stockinged feet on the newly waxed floor, the duchess skidded right past ElizabethAnn, into the sitting room where she fell down in a tangle—hairpins flying every which way, tinkling as they touched down. She draped herself, whimpering, over an ottoman.
ElizabethAnn reached up to check her hair and noticed her pigtails had, somewhere along the way, disintegrated into an entirely unstructured mop, so she licked her palm and used it, as best she could, to smooth the hair flat. Then, with her best enunciation, she stepped forward and asked the duchess, “How do you do?” and curtseyed.
“How do you do, yourself,” grumbled the duchess, not in a nice way, glancing over at ElizabethAnn. “Oh, you,” she said, giving the impression she had been expecting a visitor but not someone quite this terrible. “Hank!” she squealed.
ElizabethAnn heard rapid footsteps out in the hall, and the butler—who was cursed with what can only be described as fish lips—entered, all out of breath. He took a seat at the table, pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, dabbed a bead of sweat from his brow, and commenced polishing silver, saying, “There now, how do you do, after all, Duchess?”
He winked at ElizabethAnn, as if finding strange children wandering around one’s house were perfectly normal. ElizabethAnn curtsied again, in reply.
“Where’s the nanny?” asked the duchess.
“Well now, ma’am, I don’t want you to be upset, but the nanny’s run off, just like the last one.”
“Did she? And the housekeeper? With her, I suppose?”
“Yes, Duchess. They both ran off just now, as soon as they heard your, uh, anguished cries from afar.”
The duchess sighed and said, “Well, we’ll get others. Listen, let me tell you about this meeting I’ve been at, Hank. I have got to talk it out. I just feel so absolutely humiliated! There’s no other word for it. What do you expect, I had to get up in front of this whole room full of creeps and lowlifes and confess to being a kleptomaniac!” The duchess clutched the ottoman like a life raft.
“Goodness!” replied the butler, as he tucked a dessert spoon into his left breast pocket and poured the duchess some tea. “But ma’am,” he added, “I thought you were just going for a sort of research or something. I didn’t know you were actually a klepto, yourself.”
The duchess flung her arm around a nearby chair for support. “My God, man! I’m certainly not!” she said. “I was there looking for kleptos—for the thieves that’ve been making off with every odd bit of finery around this place! I wanted to hear some confessions, I did! But, you know, I was undercover. You have to play their game. Then, boom, they accept you, open up to you.”
The butler polished a salad fork and added, “Into the fold, so to speak?”
The duchess gazed out cathedral windows onto exquisitely manicured acreage, resting her chin on an enormous, askew shoulder pad. “Indeed,” she agreed. “Into the fold, precisely. I think the whole concept is an import, if I remember my history, but I can’t be sure.”
“Excuse me,” said ElizabethAnn in a small (but not her characteristically tiny) voice. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but the thing is, um, I came to see the duchess about a monkey. Is this a bad time?” She held her hands over a new rip in her dress.
“Is that so? Glad to hear it,” replied the duchess. “I am, in fact, in the monkey business. Though you should really meet me at my office, or just … I don’t know … talk to a representative.”
ElizabethAnn cleared her throat and squeaked, “You see, some insects said if I wanted to talk to a monkey I had to go through you, and I’ve got to find my grandma because she might be in trouble. She might get put into a home, in No Oaks, or else not have a home at all. And I don’t know how to get home, myself. Only Grandma knows what to do, and I’ve got to find her, and she went in after this monkey, you see?”
With the tops of her fists on the dining table and her elbows pointing out like a couple of more-than and less-than signs, the duchess ranted at the butler. “These people were hardened criminals!” She punctuated her speech with an open-handed slap on the tabletop. “It’s absurd! And there I was, making up nonsense about stealing an eyelash curler. An eyelash curler, for God’s sakes! How many of them even know what that is? Do you?” The duchess directed this last question, with a brisk turn of her head, at ElizabethAnn.
“Of course,” the child replied, having walked the runway in more than one No Oaks pageant, already.
The duchess ignored ElizabethAnn, rested her forearms on the table’s leathery finish, and leaned in, flashing Hank a prodigious helping of cleavage.
“Suffice it to say,” the duchess continued, “no one at the meeting said anything about stealing the things I’ve been missing, like my crystal candlesticks or embroidered linens.”
“The thing is,” said ElizabethAnn, as she backed toward the little doorway by which she had entered. “I feel like I’m kind of in the middle of something here, and you don’t seem like anyone who would really know much about monkeys. Maybe I’m at the wrong place. I should go. Excuse me.”
The duchess cocked an eyebrow at the girl, said “Sit down,” reached out a massive hand, and shoved ElizabethAnn into an overstuffed armchair. “How you do go on,” she added. “Listen, little girl, monkeys live in trees and I hope you don’t think that’s free, after all. I own the trees and I grant the residence permits on a strict petition basis only, and that’s where my expertise in monkeys begins and ends, thank you very much. It’s a simple matter of real estate, Real Estate, REAL ESTATE!”
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And here is the charming audio sample, from a different part of the book!
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From Bits Of String Too Small To Save by Ruby Peru. Copyright © 2017 by the author and reprinted by permission.
Bits Of String Too Small To Save by Ruby Peru was published May 15 2017 by Pangloss Press and is available from all good booksellers, including