Tag Archives: literary fiction

A Fresh, Queer Take on Crime Fiction: Behind You by Catherine Hernandez

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In her new novel, Catherine Hernandez weaves gripping suspense and affecting emotion into a story of trauma, survival, and healing against the backdrop of one of Canada’s most terrifying historical events. 

Behind You (HarperAvenue 2024) follows Alma, a Filipina woman working as an editor for a true crime series called Infamous, which features sketches of some of history’s most famous serial murderers in the twentieth century. Although trying to balance her relationship with her wife, her teenage son’s moods, and her own health, Alma seems to have a fulfilling life. However, as she edits the last episode of Infamous, a profile of the Scarborough Stalker who raped and killed women during Alma’s childhood in the 80s and 90s, everything left unsaid begins to broil to the surface in her life. 

Soon, it becomes clear that many of Alma’s memories of a childhood spent fighting to be seen, heard, and understood against the backdrop of a manhunt for a dangerous predator are still unresolved. Moving back and forth across two timelines, we watch Alma as a little girl struggling to fit in and protect herself from dangerous characters close to home, and we watch the adult Alma try to cope with her memories and maintain her marriage and family life. Alma’s journey toward healing and safety is set against the backdrop of a dark chapter in Canada’s history and the wider implications of rape culture. 

I have many of Catherine Hernandez’s novels on my shelves, and Behind You is by far my favourite. Immersed in social and cultural history, the novel is an effective time machine: placing the reader in another context altogether and creating an atmosphere of dread as the young Alma encounters events and crimes she does not understand even as she copes with danger and abuse in her own home. Although Behind You is a thriller, Alma is truly central to the story, and the novel strikes the right balance between suspense and sentimentality. Part of the fear that this novel inspires is due to the fact that we care about Alma so much—even knowing her as an adult, we want her to make it out of her terrible home life intact. 

Secondary to the thriller element is Alma’s narrative of coming out and queer acceptance—which morphs into a story of queer joy—the universality of Alma’s queer experience as a young person is not only poignant but comforting. Her narrative is so believable, and it adds colour to a story that has been told and retold in popular media. Behind You explores the experiences of a young girl living on the periphery of a famous set of crimes and the way an atmosphere of danger and terror affects a person—coupled with a cavalier attitude towards crimes against women. Alma’s intensely critical perspective as an adult lends even more energy to her child-narrative, and the two timelines work in concert to create a scathing social critique I found refreshing. 

I highly recommend Behind You as your summer thriller. Hernandez offers a new—and queer—take on crime fiction that will keep you reading until the very end. 

Please add Behind You to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Catherine Hernandez on Instagram. 

Rachel Friars received her PhD in English from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada in 2024. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.

You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

The Beauty and Bitterness of Unrequited Love: The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao

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The Italy Letters cover

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The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao (August 13, 2024) reads like bitter chocolate with rich undertones that will pique the acquired tastes of readers looking for poetic experimental fiction and stories about the mid-life crises of disillusioned literary fiction writers who are not cishet white Ivy Leaguing/New Yorker men. The bitterness comes from the raw, at times desperately pained but always poetic philosophizing of Nao’s narrator, who is struggling with simultaneous financial and emotional precarities that gives rise to frequent flights of morbidity and fantasy—both of which are channeled into the letters that make up this story. The object* of these letters? A straight married woman oceans away who our narrator seems to have developed unrequited intimacy as much out of need for some stability in her life as actual lust.

These heavy sentiments are punctuated by honey-decadent sentences that treat the English language like childhood Ello sets: bending, contorting and even breaking the set pieces in order to achieve a singular vision. Nao is deliberate and thoughtful in the way she writes her narrator’s frustration with a reality that is tired, faded, exhausted by lack of money, lack of mobility, the unfulfilled promises of an American Dream that is inextricable from the American army’s violent upheaval of the ground her mother was born on and later left, fueled by the same sense of absentia that even decades later drives serial addictions and suffuses her daughter’s longing letters.

I also appreciated how Nao de-romanticized the itinerant drifter artist archetype. If white boys who criss-crossed the country in the fifties while penning pieces that earned enough (give or take a couple of trust funds or working wives) to sustain their intoxicated shenanigans were the aspirational archetype that raised generations of equally entitled, misogynistic creators, Nao’s narrator, who is itinerant less out of a sense of thrill-seeking pastoralism and more because of the failures of late-stage capitalism, is more emblematic of the current cultural moment and the creators demanding their voices be heard within it. It is, therefore, also a book about what we owe to ourselves, about women who all too often live by what we feel we owe to others—to our lovers, our family, our bosses, the people whose money puts a roof over our head and food on the table. And it’s about how these patterns can repeat even in the lives of the queerest among us—how perhaps it is precisely those furthest on the margins that are most vulnerable to this sort of harm.

Readers will like this if they are looking for:

  • fiction that is feminist and frustrated with the state of things while still being dense enough to ruminate on a re-read.
  • prose that reads like poetry that reads like parts of Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich and Jasbir Puar’s nonfiction combined into a feeling body.
  • authors that use pop culture moments as springboards to discuss the deeper emotions and anxieties swirling in the zeitgeist.
  • stories about feeling isolated and lonely even when you’re around other people, and with a realistic denouement about starting to move in a more hopeful direction.
  • stories about toxic relationships where the protagonist eventually leaves them.
  • writing about the physical experience of living in a marginalized body. Nao’s writing is a particular standout for this.

Overall, this book won’t be for everyone. It’s one of those reads that’s got a lot of (as Sianne Ngai might put it) ugly feelings that make it hard to take in a single reading (unless, like me, you got to it at the tail end of a breakup that left you with the idea that the prefab middle-class HEA and all its attendant promises of security are moving further and further out of reach with each passing day). It’s also one of those books that ends on a hopeful note, but pulls you through a maelstrom of difficult feelings before doing so, and sometimes we’re a little too up close and personal with the feeling of precarity to want to read such a clear-eyed description of inhabiting it. But The Italy Letters (which you can preorder now) is definitely a book that, perhaps in another twenty or thirty or even ten years, will become part of the broader canon of queer fiction that so quintessentially captures what it was like to live through this.

*We only ever see her as filtered through these letters, this nebulous woman who we only know by nicknames and factoids, dialogue that is never quoted and therefore can be assumed to be cut and paraphrased through the narrator’s own lens.

Content warnings: suicidal Ideation, intimate partner violence, chronic illness, abusive relationships

We Have Always Been Here: 3 Essential Historical Sapphic Reads

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As Pride Month draws to a close here in the states, here are three historical fiction books that blend insightful writing with action/adventure, twisty thriller tension, and bon-mot brilliance, respectively.

So much of history is about teaching us what has been possible, about what sorts of lives have survived, been mythologized, codified, recognized as worthy of being recorded and remembered. I hope that even as the rainbow marketing recedes from store shelves and social media logos, books like this remind us that our feelings, our intimacies, our narratives have been here long before we had singular words to encompass and categorize them.

The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

the cover of The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye

A gritty, gripping, richly immersive story inspired by a 17th century pirate legend, Briony Cameron’s The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye rekindled an old love for adventure stories that I’ve sorely missed.

The story opens on the high seas, where our eponymous intrepid shipwright has found herself bound, wounded, and taken captive while in pursuit of her own fierce vision of freedom. It then dips back in time to show us how she got there, in the process building both a colorful portrait of the seventeenth-century Caribbean islands and a Django-esque revenge story that retains all the visceral, bloody violence of the films while adding rich dimension through a strong, fleshed-out focus on Jacquotte’s relationships with and care for her friends, crew-mates, and lovers.

You can tell how much care Cameron puts into her characters, their personalities seamlessly woven into the path of the plot and coming into focus in their interactions with others. There are no lone wolves here, no lone heroes. It takes a village to run a ship, and Jacquotte’s ascension from indentured shipwright to formidable captain is made all the sweeter by all the people she brings up with her. Honestly, this book is probably a better treatise on leadership than anything with that word in the title.

I am absolutely living for this new trend of stories that take the thrills and trappings of old-school adventure stories and repurpose those imperialist motifs and language to create detailed stories about queer women of color who’ve been kicking around and exploring this part of the world just as long as—if not longer—than the looters whose puffed-up legends formed a sizeable bit of my Early U.S. History curriculum back in high school (which was, incidentally, when I first saw the Indiana Jones movies).

Readers who want (sapphic) high-stakes adventure novels or heist stories filled with action, tension, visceral fight scenes and tender camaraderie will find a perfect text here. The care Jacquotte has for her crew and fellow downtrodden is wonderful and make the story so much more complex and emotional. I truly felt for the characters and their losses and pain, which is no small feat with such a sizeable cast and less than 400 pages.

Jacquotte is a survivor, and Cameron’s writing of her perspective is as singular and incisive as a skillfully handcrafted blade. But all her triumphs come with costs, often heavy ones.

I would caution readers about the prominence of period-specific racism in this book, though. While it always adds to the texture of the worldbuilding and serves to underscore and drive action, Cameron pulls no punches in either the language or its impact on the characters it is addressed towards.

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

Spitting Gold cover

If you’re on this website, chances are you will be able to spot one of the twists the first time it is so much as hinted at. But the ones that come after are what make this book worth reading, if you’re in the mood for a propulsive, action-fueled family drama filled with unlikeable people trying their best to get ahead in the world of post-Revolution nineteenth-century France.

The first half of Carmella Lowkis’s Spitting Gold feels like a bog-standard historical romance before spinning wildly into a great spooky beach read. Readers who enjoy stories about spiritualism and mediums’ lives beyond the performance will find a highly original work in this genre, with an intriguing, morally ambiguous story unfurling in the background of the séance scenes.

This book gives all the satisfaction of creepy metaphysical shenanigans in shadowy dark corners with the added satisfaction of girls kissing (though not much else). More of those beachy horror movies should have girls kissing, imo.

While there are some echoes of Sara Waters’s iconic Fingersmith in this story, it felt more like a cross between Libba Bray and Patricia Highsmith’s work, with the sort of reader-friendly and detailed worldbuilding of the former. Spitting Gold is shorter than most of the aforementioned authors’ novels, which means less room for Waters-style interpersonal studies, and a more focused cast than Bray’s larger series. The romance is not the focus, but the sapphics drive the plot in large measure.

Gothic lit purists might find themselves disappointed, however. This book is far more character focused than atmospheric, driven by the narrative more than metaphor or symbolism, in a way that might not entirely satisfy people looking for something that hews more closely to genre and Du Maurier. It’s not quite as liminal or focused on houses as metaphors, is what I’m saying.

And while I enjoy reading about people whose somewhat understandable worst impulses drive their actions, not everyone does. This book goes deeper into what vices resentment and loathing can breed. It is uncomfortable at times, but in a way that feels narratively consistent. Readers who want their sapphics relatively non problematic, or at the very least not explicitly spiteful, be forewarned.

On the Edge: 100 Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire edited and translated by Ruth Vanita

On the Edge cover

There’s a line from Tressie McCottom’s excellent essay collection where she writes about beauty, respectability and “self-definition masquerad[ing] as a notion of loving our black selves in white terms.”

All too often, stories that attempt to write queer people back into the histories that colonialism, racism, and other schemes of systemic violence have erased them from are met with the criticism that our use of English terms to describe our particular position on the spectrums of sexuality and/or gender is a capitulation to the colonizer’s pen, a sign that queerness itself is an import with no place in the indigenous culture(s). We’re told our love makes us instruments of colonial violence, even as vestigial colonial laws and mores are used to persecute and intimidate LGBTQ+ folks the world over.

Ruth Vanita’s latest transliterated collection is a joyful, vibrant refutation of those rootless exemplars of the bigoted rot that pervades even these postcolonial spaces and places. Queer feeling is the focus of each story in On the Edge. Though the characters (and likely even their writers) would not use or identify with the adjectives or archetypal narratives that suffuse our modern movie and streaming screens, their writing reveals what it means to feel queerly: to experience desire in shapes that aren’t reflected on silver screens, in post-colonial histories (all the stories in the collection were written in the 20th century), or even many family genealogies, overshadowed as they are by an overwhelming majority of heteronormative ones.

There’s so much emphasis on feeling here, it’s remarkable. To read these stories is to be transported into the singular minds of their protagonists and their conflicted, sometimes confounding actions. There are also an abundance of rich, novel metaphors that will appeal to language-loving literary fiction readers. It’s such a lovely cross-section, with stories that range from countryside comedies of manners with echoes of both Sanskrit plays and British holiday farces, to turbulent urban dramas located entirely in the mind of a woman possessed by unrequited passions. It would make a lovely gift for certain Hindi-lit-loving near and dear ones—the syntax and rhythm of Vanita’s English transliterations achingly reminded me of the R.K. Narayan and Munshi Premchand collections my grandparents used to gift me.

I was particularly delighted by the editor’s own story, “Vision”. It reminded me a lot of what I loved in Theodore McCombs’s 2023 short fiction collection—namely, the intimacies and awareness that can open up as we move through our preconceived notions about respectability and desire. I was moved to tears by this collection, by the concrete connection it offered me to a legacy that close friends and I have mostly had to cobble together through whispers and Wikipedia stubs.

I included this collection alongside the other novels because these three books seek, in their own ways, to put queer people back into the history of iconic periods that persist in the cultural imaginations: the Golden Age of Piracy, the spiritualism movement, and rapidly urbanizing post-colonial India. Each of these books takes familiar character concepts—the brutal captain, the scheming medium, the moralizing busybody—and allows us to participate in the (often ahistorical, mostly fiction-filtered) nostalgia these stories invoke.

#historical fiction #pirates #seances #mystery #adventure #history #literary fiction #annan #caribbean #india #lesbian

A Twisty Sapphic Spiritualist Con: Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkins

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Carmella Lowkins’s new historical novel, Spitting Gold (Atria Books 2024), is a fabulously atmospheric story with a twisting plot that keeps you guessing until the very end!

Spitting Gold is set in nineteenth-century Paris. Baroness Sylvie Devereux has worked tirelessly for years to distance herself from her old life, embarking on a career of respectability with her devoted husband. However, when her estranged sister, Charlotte Mothe, appears on her doorstep with a compelling proposal, Sylvie is drawn back into a world she thought she’d left behind. The two women enjoyed a career as popular spirit mediums—all their visitations an elaborate ruse to trick wealthy patrons—before Sylvie disowned her family. But with their father sick and Charlotte’s debts climbing, Sylvie agrees to help her sister perform one final con on the de Jacquinot family, aristocrats who are convinced their great aunt who was murdered during the French Revolution is haunting the family and the house. 

As the sisters begin to orchestrate their old tricks to encourage the family to part with their fortune, strange and inexplicable events begin to occur, drawing the sisters into a haunting they begin to fear could be very real. As secrets between the sisters and the de Jacquinot’s come to light, Sylvie learns that she may not be able to outrun her past. 

As a neo-Victorian mystery novel with a sapphic subplot, Spitting Gold is a smashing good time. Lowkins draws on the history of nineteenth-century table turning and the obsession with the female spirit medium—who indeed became a kind of celebrity in this period—to stage her suspenseful plot. Add to this a dash of lesbian romance and this novel is perfect for readers of Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue. 

I was really impressed with Spitting Gold. It has a thoroughly engaging plot and the writing really draws you into the story. It’s structured so that the reader has little idea what to believe as Sylvie and her sister try to con—and then cope with—the de Jacquinot family and the strange happenings at their home. Lowkins starts us off with one kind of novel with Sylvie at the center, and then abruptly turns everything on its head with so many delightful twists. I had no idea where this novel was heading and I was thoroughly surprised by the ending!

I had such a great time reading Spitting Gold. It is the perfect summer read and great for fans of queer historical fiction and lovers of atmospheric literary novels. 

Please add Spitting Gold to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Carmella Lowkins on Instagram.

Rachel Friars is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.

You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

A New Take On the 20-Something F*ckup Novel: All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

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I have heard only great things about this book since it came out in 2022, but I somehow didn’t actually pick it up until my queer book club chose it for this month’s pick. I vaguely remembered downloading an ARC on my ereader, so I opened that up and jumped in. I was immediately struck by two surprises: 1) I wasn’t really enjoying the book, though I had been expecting to love it, and 2) I had started this book already. I was eight percent of the way through—which is not a lot, but it means at some point I started and abandoned it. Aside from the unease of reading through highlights I couldn’t remember making, I was also beginning to have a sinking feeling that this was not going to live up to the glowing reviews I’d heard.

Sneha is not an easy main character to like in the beginning of the story. She’s freshly graduated from her program and starting a new job in a new city: Milwaukee. She doesn’t have any real connections here, and she struggles to find her footing. Her property manager lives downstairs and erupts in anger if she makes the slightest noise. Her job is demanding and unpredictable. She hooks up with women without looking for anything lasting. And throughout it, she simmers with self-loathing that periodically boils over into cruelty and judgement.

Sneha is a queer woman of colour who has a lot of internalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. She thinks hateful things about other women, people of colour, and queer people. She’s angry and judgmental, but she’s also passive. She feels constrained by being an immigrant, especially because her father was deported. She worries that any misstep will result in failure—not just her own, but also failure to live up to her parents’ dreams.

“What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you.”

At this point in the story, I was having trouble with it. It was interesting enough to keep going, but I began to think that maybe I’ve grown beyond identifying with 20-something fuckup literary fiction—a genre I loved when I was younger. I might have even DNFed it, if it weren’t for my book club. But then…it got me. Somewhere along the way, I realized I’d gotten invested in Sneha and the network of relationships she formed.

There’s such a payoff in Sneha’s character growth—not that she becomes a perfect person, but that she becomes more accepting of herself and others. And that payoff feels so powerful because she was such a mess in the beginning. So I can’t fault the book for that, and I will say it’s worth sticking with through those beginning chapters, when she is being insensitive and even cruel.

If you’re a fan of messy found family dynamics, I definitely recommend this one. All the characters are complex and flawed, but they come together to support each other. Tig is definitely the standout character of the novel: a charismatic Black nonbinary philosopher who imagines a better world and both accepts Sneha and holds her accountable.

“This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, to be given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.”

The small section of the book that takes place in India adds a lot of depth to the story, I think. Even Sneha’s mother is a complex character—maybe more so than Sneha originally gives her credit for.

I was also surprised to see how the story is structured: while most of the book takes place over a small time span, there are a few chapters that go over several years. I think some readers will find that jarring, but I appreciated seeing the bittersweet aftermath of this formative time in these characters’ lives.

I definitely recommend this as a book club book, because there is so much to pull out and discuss, from issues of classism and appropriation to it being set during the recession to Sneha’s character arc to Sneha’s relationship with Marina and a lot more. It’s definitely one I think I would appreciate even more on rereading.

Gothic Horror Infused with Queer Rage: Grey Dog by Elliott Gish 

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Elliott Gish’s debut queer Gothic novel, Grey Dog (ECW Press, 2024), is one of my most anticipated releases of the year. Intense, foreboding, and atmospheric, Grey Dog is the latest in queer horror, and it’s a must-read!

Set in 1901, the novel is structured as the diary of Ada Byrd, a spinster and schoolteacher, who arrives in the isolated small town of Lowry Bridge under a cloud of misery after things went awry at her last post. Starting afresh with new students, Ada explores the surrounding woods and makes new friends who know nothing of her past. Slowly, Ada begins to hope for a future at Lowry Bridge and a place in the community. Maybe, in this new place, Ada can leave her past behind. 

Slowly, however, strange events begin to take place: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. Ada believes that something disturbing and inhuman lurks in the woods, pursuing her from afar and presenting her with these offerings—offerings that both repel and intrigue her. As the creature she calls ‘Grey Dog’ encroaches, Ada’s sense of reality blurs and her past returns to haunt her as she confronts the rage simmering inside her. 

I hesitate to say more without giving the plot away! One of the charms of this novel is its suspense and mystery, which quickly gives way to horror in the second half of the novel. Gish has the incredible ability to generate a sense of fear and danger in even the most seemingly innocuous moments. By structuring Grey Dog as Ada’s diary, the novel is confined to her perspective, which unravels more and more as the text goes on, although there are clues that Ada may not be as honest as the diary form suggests she will be. The reader feels as though they are living in Ada’s head and experiencing the confusing, haunting events of the novel along with her. 

As historical fiction, Gish pays close attention to the social and gendered contexts which confine and police Ada throughout the novel. Ultimately, Grey Dog is a book about rage—queer rage and women’s rage—and the pain of emotional and physical abuse. Ada can only repress her anger at the injustices of her life and the lives of those she loves at the hands of those who seek to control her. When the dam finally breaks, the result is both extraordinary and dreadful in equal measure. 

I loved Grey Dog. I could hardly bear to put it down. I’m reading it for the second time this week and it’s just as fantastic as it was the first time. This novel has become a new favourite for me and I look forward to reading Gish’s future work!

Please add Grey Dog to your TBR on Goodreads and follow Elliott Gish on Instagram.

Rachel Friars is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.

You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

An Obsessive, Erotic, Vampire Gothic: An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson 

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the cover of An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson 

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I feel as though all my adult life I have been wishing for a Carmilla retelling that really illuminates the heart of the original novella—the obsession, intensity, eroticism, and power struggle between Carmilla and Laura that makes the text one of the most lasting examples of nineteenth-century lesbian fiction. I’ve finally—finally!—found it in S.T. Gibson’s An Education in Malice (Redhook 2024). 

I loved Gibson’s queer treatment of Dracula’s brides in A Dowry of Blood (2021) and her new novel, marketed as a sapphic adaptation of Carmilla that finds Le Fanu’s characters at a women’s college in the mid-twentieth century, is one of my most anticipated reads of 2024. Indeed, An Education in Malice doesn’t disappoint. Deliciously Gothic and addictive, every corner of this novel was a pleasure to read. 

We find Carmilla and Laura at the isolated Saint Perpetua’s College in Massachusetts. Surrounded by the history of the campus and the complex motives of both staff and students, Laura Sheridan is thrown into the thick of college life. Almost immediately she is unwittingly pitted against the captivating and imperious Carmilla, professor De Lafontaine’s star pupil in their poetry class. As Laura is drawn further and further into Carmilla’s orbit, she soon discovers De Lafontaine’s own obsession with Carmilla, and the darkness that cuts through the women’s lives. However, as Laura and Carmilla’s feelings for one another turn into something more, Laura’s own darker desires rise to the surface, and it might just be her own curiosity that leads to her doom—or her destiny. 

Not only does this novel do Carmilla (1872) and all of its lush, confusing, glorious Gothic excess justice, but Gibson has also written an entirely new novel of Gothic suspense. This is vampire fiction at its finest, with all the beauty and gore one comes to expect from Gibson’s writing. I couldn’t begin to guess how the story would unfold, and it kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. One doesn’t have to have read Carmilla to enjoy this novel—not at all. It is entirely its own text. At the same time, Gibson clearly weaves familiar easter eggs into her text for fans of the original. 

Everything—from the setting to the rivalry to the world of the vampires—is perfectly crafted to create an atmosphere of temptation and dread. The writing is so poetic I was highlighting on every page. An Education in Malice is exactly the kind of novel I wanted it to be. It’s a perfect winter read for those who are looking for something extra Gothic this February! 

Please add An Education in Malice to your TBR on Goodreads and follow S.T. Gibson on Instagram.

Rachel Friars is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.

You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

A Bittersweet Portrait of Platonic Partnership: Significant Others by Zoe Eisenberg

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the cover of Significant Others by Zoe Eisenberg

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Jess and Ren were college roommates, and they have been inseparable ever since. That’s acceptable in college, but much less common when you’re in your late 30s, have bought a house together, and co-parent a dog. They’re committed to each other, but not dating—Jess is bisexual, and Ren is straight. Jess has always been the responsible one, taking care of Ren. While Jess has a successful career in real estate, Ren is aimless, working at a bar and teaching dance classes at a gym while looking for what to do next. When Ren accidentally gets pregnant after a hookup, she decides to keep the baby, and Jess—as she always does—agrees to help. Then the father of Ren’s unborn baby reappears in their lives, and everything gets a lot more complicated.

College had been full of friendships like ours, when it was natural, normal, to wear each other’s clothes, to do one another’s eyeliner with stoic concentration as warm breath washed over our faces in comforting waves. It was only later that we seemed to mystify people, as if the normalcy of our specific kind of closeness had an expiration date, like milk.

At the beginning of this story, it felt so cozy. I loved the idea of this found family and their unconventional living arrangement. They discuss how romantic relationships are seen as more reliable than their decades-long friendship, and even Ren’s brother, who lives with the two of them, thinks Jess must secretly be in love with Ren.

But despite their closeness, this isn’t an idyllic found family. There is so much under the surface of Jess and Ren’s relationship. Like with many relationships (romantic, familial, friendship) that have gone on for many years, every argument has a dozen other arguments bubbling beneath the surface. A lot of their dynamic with each other has been something they’ve passively let develop instead of actually questioning what they want from this relationship and why. The tension between that cozy, comforting notion of building a life together with a friend and the reality of their flawed relationship really got to me. There’s something so beautiful and sad about this story.

In the middle of the afternoon I might receive a snapshot of the remnants of her lunch. The grainy crust of a sandwich. A half-eaten container of yogurt. Killed it, the note would read. We’d had this type of exchange a thousand times. Two thousand. Unexceptional. Ordinary. The way truly intimate things usually are.

Then, of course, there’s the pregnancy—and the father, Quincy. Quincy is…fine. He’s not a terrible person. I can see how people could find him charming. But for me, when you’re getting a story about this complex relationship between two women and then some dude comes stumbling into it and messing everything up, I’m going to resent that guy! I own that as a flaw of mine as a reader. Despite him not at all being a villain, and in fact being similarly flawed and human to Ren and Jess, I never fully got over my irritation with him, even if ultimately he might have been a necessary catalyst.

I watched them for a bit trying to determine whether they were friends or partners, sisters, maybe cousins, before deciding it didn’t really matter, because there they were, enjoying one another.

Despite this not being a plot-driven book—it’s a portrait of these characters and how they interact with each other—I find it difficult to discuss without spoilers. (vague spoilers) I will say that this did make me cry, and that although the ending isn’t what I wanted, on reflection, it’s the one that makes sense. Was the connection between Jess and Ren an inspiring platonic partnership, or a codependent friendship? Both, of course, and maybe neither. This is a bittersweet story that left my heart aching. (end of spoilers)

One aspect I’m not sure how I feel about is that this is set in Hawaii, and protests and politics (about tourism, telescopes, water, colonialism, and more) are often mentioned, but they are playing out in the background, not a focus of the narrative.

If you’re looking for a fluffy story of found family and the power of friendship, this might not be the best choice: it gets into how these relationships are just as fraught as romances. But if you’re looking for a portrait of a complicated relationship between two women, I highly recommend this one.

A Feminist, Latin American Vampire Gothic: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary

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the cover of Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary!

Recently translated into English, Marina Yuszczuk’s queer vampire novel, Thirst (Dutton, March 5, 2024), is partly what I’d hoped for in a vampire fiction, and at the same time, it was nothing like what I’d expected. 

Although it’s a Gothic, vampire novel on the surface, Thirst is really a feminist novel about two women’s experiences of life, loss, trauma, and haunting across centuries. Taking place over two different time periods in Buenos Aires, what seem at first like the totally disparate narratives of two women who live in entirely different circumstances eventually come together in a dramatic and bittersweet conclusion. In nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, a vampire arrives on a ship from Europe, fleeing the death and violence she and her sisters found there. She is less a Dracula-like figure arriving at Whitby on the deserted Demeter, and more of a lost scavenger, uninterested in human lives even as she grieves her own losses. 

As the world transforms around her—moving from isolated villages into cosmopolitan, interconnected cities, the vampire must adapt her existence in order to intermingle. In the same city in the present day, a seemingly ordinary woman struggles to cope with the terminal illness of her own mother while also looking after her young son. When she sees the vampire for the first time in a Buenos Aires cemetery at the opening of the novel, the two women are set on a collision course that promises both revelation and destruction. 

This novel is marketed for fans of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and I can definitely see the parallels. This is a conflicted, confused, and introspective monster novel with just enough of a dash of broken moral compass to make this interesting. Thirst is also compared to the writing of Daphne du Maurier and Carmen Maria Machado, which is something I understand a bit less—to me, Thirst is unique in its style, and it’s a fascinating take on the vampire story.

For me, much of my enjoyment of this novel came in the first half. The first chapter had me completely hooked and I loved reading about the vampire’s origin story. Dark, gory, and dramatic, the image of the nineteenth-century queer female vampire wreaking havoc on Buenos Aires society amidst an abundance of crime and death was gripping. I couldn’t look away! 

The second half, which focuses much more on present-day Buenos Aires, was less exciting for me, although I loved the relationship between the two women. It felt at times in the second half like this was a feminist novel with a Gothic overlay, and that the vampire plot was secondary to the narration of these women’s lives. This disrupted my expectations and made me enjoy the novel a bit less, although I may have been more engaged had I understood from the beginning that this was more of a novel about the way women see the world. 

Thirst is absolutely worth reading if you’re looking for a new and exciting feminist Latin American author, or if you’re a fan of queer vampire stories and historical fiction. I think it’s an interesting addition to the canon, and I would love to read more by this author. 

Please add Thirst to your TBR on Goodreads.

Rachel Friars is a writer and academic living in Canada, dividing her time between Ontario and New Brunswick. When she’s not writing short fiction, she’s reading every lesbian novel she can find. Rachel holds two degrees in English literature and is currently pursuing a PhD in nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history. 

You can find Rachel on Twitter @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

A Page-Turning Mess of a Queer Love Polygon: The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan

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the cover of The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan

Buy this on Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary!

If you’re looking for something fun, marathonable, the right amount of messy, and full of queer love polygon drama, then look no further than The Happy Couple. I listened to this as an audiobook (a short and snappy 5.5 hour experience) and I found myself always looking forward to my next drive or run just so I could hear what happened next. 

Celine and Luke are engaged, and their wedding date is quickly approaching, but will they go through with it? Luke is a pretty obvious serial cheater and Celine is so focused on the work of being a concert pianist that she has just ignored it. Yes, the oh so happy couple. Additional layers of drama unfold as more and more angles of their love polygon are exposed. Archie is Luke’s best man as well as Luke’s ex-lover who is definitely still in love with the groom-to-be. Celine’s ex, Maria, shows up at the engagement party and stirs the pot. Celine’s sister Phoebe knows Luke has something to hide and is convinced to get the bottom of it. And Vivian, yet another ex of Luke’s, is willing to call people on their craziness and bring some tough love to her friends in this mess.

Buckle up, folks. This cast of wild characters really brings the drama that can only be fully encapsulated by interrobangs. Luke doesn’t show up to his own engagement party?! It’s hours before the wedding and Luke needs a new shirt but who comes to switch shirts with him other than his ex-lover, Archie?! Celine’s ex is having long heart-to-hearts with Luke?! 

The Happy Couple felt like reality TV in the best way. I was immersed in this story’s twists, turns, and reveals that provided a welcome distraction when my brain needed a break from the current world. But what I loved most is that it didn’t just feel like gossip that pulls me in but at the end of the day makes me feel icky. Naoise Dolan writes her indeed flawed characters with a kindness and nuance that allowed me to see them for more than their often infuriating actions and reflect alongside them in the gray decisions they find themselves having to make. It was a delightful balance of unhinged meets kind. 

If you’re driving home for the holidays and need a book you can finish in one road trip, I highly recommend pressing play on this one!

Content warnings: toxic relationships, drug use and abuse, infidelity, suicidal thoughts

Natalie (she/her) is honestly shocked to find herself as a voracious reader these days – that certainly wasn’t the case until she discovered the amazing world of queer books! Now she’s always devouring at least one book, as long as it’s gay. She will be forever grateful for how queer characters kept her company through her own #gaypanic and now on the other side of that, she loves soaking up queer pasts, presents and futures across all genres. Find more reviews on her Bookstagram!