Ash Tuesday

In New Orleans, the dead talk and the living listen. Giving ghost tours on the decaying streets of the French Quarter isn't exactly a high-profile career, but the guides at Spirits of Yore Haunted Tours are too strange and troubled to do anything else. They call themselves Quarter Rats, a group of outcasts and dreamers and goths who gather in hole-in-the-wall bars to bicker, spin yarns, and search for belonging in the wee hours of the night after the tourists have staggered home.

Through the ghost stories they tell, their own haunted lives come into focus. Like the city they call home, these tour guides are messy with contradiction: they suffer joyfully, live morbidly, and sin to find salvation. Weaving together real New Orleans folklore with the lives of eleven unforgettably vibrant characters, Ash Tuesday is a love letter to America's last true bohemia and the people, both dead and living, who keep its heart beating.

With her debut, Blayde has carved out a deep and uber-readable interpretation of what it means to live, love, and grieve in New Orleans."There's something about New Orleans. Maybe you can trace it to Latin America or the Caribbean or maybe not, maybe you can't define it at all.

The divine? The diabolical? I don't know what to call it.

But there's magic, here."