In Vaishnavi Patel's fiery, defiant contemporary fantasy We Dance Upon Demons, an exhausted Indian American reproductive health care worker becomes the target of demons when she accidentally obtains magical powers.
Ash Wednesday unleashes a deep dread in Nisha, who knows the Lenten season brings even more intense protesting than usual at the Chicago clinic where she works. Nisha decompresses at the Art Institute, where an ancient Nataraja statue catches her attention. She touches it and faints. After she recovers, she contends with hallucinations and then she meets Muya, an aspect of the ignorance demon Muyalagan. He explains that she inadvertently freed him from his prison in the statue and absorbed some of his demonic power, giving her the ability to change reality. Muya demands she return his magic; when she does not believe his story, he charges her to look within herself. Nisha reconnects with her love of dancing Kathak, and it allows her to see the brave, subversive, and marginalized women who have carried Muya's power in past centuries. However, fiercer demons than Muya want Nashi to surrender the power to them, and they will not hesitate to threaten her friends, family, or the clinic she believes in to get it.
Patel's harrowing vision of the fight to provide reproductive health services in a post-Dobbs United States confronts burnout, depression, and the constant threat of violence facing women's rights advocates. Nisha's journey from the disillusioned belief that she can change nothing to an understanding of the power every individual can hold is charged with the strength of women, community, and the belonging she finds in her family and culture. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads