When I first stumbled upon the novel Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn, I was intrigued by the premise. Given how rampant and inescapable toxic masculinity is in society, it’s not unusual to hear people wish for a world without men. So, what if that happened? What if someone created a society free from men andRead More
Hunger at the End of the World: Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang Review
Land of Milk and Honey is a literary science fiction novel that brings to life a dystopian world in which a smog has killed off food crops. The unnamed main character is a chef that is invited to take a job at a mountaintop colony in Italy, established by an enigmatic man and his visionary,Read More
An Open Wound of a Novel: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review
This is a book I respect, and it’s one I struggled to get through. The subject matter is difficult—not only is it set in a near-future dystopia where prisoners fight each other to the death for a chance at freedom, but it also includes footnotes about the real-life atrocities of the prison-industrial complex. I canRead More
Sliding Doors Meets Mad Max: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
When The Space Between Worlds came out in 2020, it was all anyone was talking about on Book Riot. (That’s the site I work for now and wrote for then.) It’s not often a sapphic book gets that much attention outside the queer book world, and the premise immediately hooked me. So, of course, IRead More
A Haunting Gothic About Family in (Climate) Crisis: Private Rites by Julia Armfield Review
As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
A Tough But Necessary Read: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review
Content warnings for pretty much everything: violence, gore, racism, incarceration, solitary confinement, self harm, cutting At the time of writing this, it’s barely been three weeks since the 2024 presidential election in the United States, which Donald Trump won by a handy margin. Although Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah came out over a yearRead More
Murder by Crowdfunding: Crowded Vol. 1 by Christopher Sebela et al.
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! The Crowded comic book series tells the satirical story of a dystopian world not too far in the future where the gig economy has become unhinged. In this world, everything has a price, including putting out hits on someone’s life through an app called Reapr. AnyoneRead More
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself follows Kris, a recent widow, as she navigates the world of Shadester and NoShad while raising the child that her wife, Beau, died giving birth to. She has to deal with her own two shadows and with the baby’s two shadowsRead More
An Underrated Fantasy Western: The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I am actually going to talk about two books in this review, because while I thought the first book was fantastic, it was not until I finished the sequel that I fully realized exactly how good I thought these books were. The Good LuckRead More
Mechanized Deities and Queer Perseverance: Godslayers by Zoe Hana Mikuta
Bookshop.org Affiliate Link In her acknowledgements at the end of Godslayers, the second book of her Gearbreakers duology, Zoe Hana Mikuta writes, “Okay. So. I’ve been incredibly mean to my characters.” She is spot on. Eris, Sona, and the rest of the cast go through so much in this book. There’s psychological terror, disfigurement, death of close friends, andRead More