Author Archives: Maggie

A Sweet & Sizzling Summer Romance: A Bánh Mì for Two by Trinity Nguyen

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If you are looking for a sweet and sizzling summer romance to end your summer on a high note, A Bánh Mì for Two by Trinity Nguyen is a sweet romance between a Vietnamese American college student and a food blogger in Sài Gòn who is looking for her inspiration again after the death of her father. I would like to thank MacMillan for providing the Lesbrary with an ARC—A Bánh Mì for Two comes out on August 20th. I greatly enjoyed this novel; the romance is sweet, and both characters have interesting arcs as they struggle to deal with what becoming an adult means in terms of dealing with family and making big choices for themselves. Plus, I learned about street food in Sài Gòn and got very hungry in the process!

The romance takes place between Lan, a girl who currently helps run with family bánh mì stand with her mother and cousin, and Vivi, an American college student in Sài Gòn for a semester abroad. Vivi has told her parents she’s studying in Singapore, but in reality has come to see if she can track down the family history her mother refuses to speak about. As a bonus, she hopes to visit the places that her absolute favorite food blog has written about before they went on a long hiatus. Lan is helping her mother with their stand after the death of her father—she had had aspirations of going to college and being a writer, having enjoyed the popularity of the food blog she had started with the help of her father, but has felt both adrift and drowning under the weight of family expectations. A chance encounter in a park connects the two girls. Vivi, upon realizing that Lan is her favorite food writer, is excited, a little starstruck, and determined to help her find her writing inspiration again; Lan realizes that her deep roots in Sài Gòn could be what Vivi needs to discover her family’s past. As they spend more time together, they grow closer, they begin to realize that this may be more than a summer friendship.

I thought the romance between Lan and Vivi was very cute. Both girls, after a rocky start, are smitten with each other. Through Vivi’s eyes, Lan once again falls in love with her home city and her passions, and through Lan, Vivi is inspired to be bold and reach for what she wants. Both girls inspire and help each other and their feelings grow from that. If you are looking for some sweet first love, this is the place—even their first fight is barely worth the name, and they’re soon back to being joined at the hip.

Besides being a cute romance, this book also has a lot to say about growing up and figuring out how to deal with your family as a newly-fledged adult. Although they come from very different backgrounds and life experiences, Lan and Vivi are both at the same stage of life, where they are technically grown but still trying to figure out how to make their life their own. For Vivi, this study abroad experience is her chance specifically to make decisions that her parents wouldn’t approve of. Lan, on the other hand, is having trouble not taking all her family’s problems on herself, even when they urge her to live her own life. Throw in Vivi’s hidden family history, and there’s a lot for the girls to deal with on top of their burgeoning romance, but it is, in my opinion, the meat of the story. 

All in all, A Bánh Mì for Two is a cute romance that successful drew me into a wonderful mood and distracted me from the simmering summer heat. I would again like to thank the publisher for the ARC.  A Bánh Mì for Two comes out tomorrow, and I absolutely recommend it if you are looking for a cute summer romance to round out your summer.

Check Out This Intricate and Fast-Paced Sapphic Fantasy: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

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After I finished devouring this year’s stunning fantasy murder mystery The Tainted Cup over the course of about three days, I knew that I had to dive into Robert Jackson Bennett’s back catalog immediately. Foundryside happened to be the one my library had the shortest hold list on, and I was delighted to find out that not only was it as well crafted, but it was also queer. In Foundryside, Bennett combines intricate world-building, nonstop action, and surprise sapphic feelings into a thrilling first book of a fantasy trilogy that I can’t wait to finish.

We open in the slums of Tevanne, where Sancia works as a highly skilled thief with a hidden power to read objects she touches to earn a living. Despite being so highly skilled, Sancia lives in a ramshackle, poorly-furnished room by herself. I was immediately interested in Sancia because she was so highly skilled but also, unusually for a thief character, she wasn’t too cocky. She didn’t take unnecessary risks because she simply wanted to save enough money to escape her Tragic Backstory that gave her the unique sensing ability. Not even the accepted magic users in universe can do what she does, and what she would really like is to turn it off. Bennett has created an entire intricately-crafted society around his unique magic system, called scriving. Scriving uses symbols and their relationships with each other to cast a new state of reality on objects. For, example one could scriv a wall to believe it’s a strong as the day it was built or a door to only open if it meets the correct key. It’s a system that can be dangerous: scriv with gravity in the wrong way and suddenly a body turns into paste. With such a system, Tevanne has come to be ruled by a series of Merchant Houses, each with its own proprietary scrivings. No government can be allowed to exist that could puncture the Merchant Houses’ sovereignty, and so if you are not attached to the Houses and live in their campos, there is only slums and scraps for you, which is where Sancia operates. I found the implications of scriving—limited only by ones imagination and logic—to be fascinating and compelling, and it made for a series of Mad Max-esque heist and action scenes, as various characters had tools, weapons, and abilities that were essentially welding together from unpredictable elements, which I found very fun.

When Sancia is hired to steal an artifact from a safe, she is dropped into the midst of a vast conspiracy that will change Tevanne forever, if it survives. What I enjoyed about this story was the dramatic flip: after her semi-successful theft, Sancia runs up against Gregor, a Merchant House man with a burning desire to actually bring justice to Tevanne, and it’s a typical cop/thief dynamic. However, circumstances force them to flee back to Gregor’s campo together, and Sancia comes to meet Orso, the campo’s head scriver, and Berenice, his ultra-competent and practical assistant. Suddenly, we’re in a split in the Merchant Houses, trying to expose who wants to steal power and illegal scrivings for themselves. Sancia, being an outsider, at first doesn’t want to work with any of them—any more than they trust her as someone from the slums instead of the campos—but they have to if they want to both stay alive and prevent magical catastrophe. It was such an interesting dynamic for a band of protagonists, and Berenice’s immediate interest in Sancia was even more welcome.

Berenice, unlike the men with more obvious status, never dithered and quickly established herself as out to get things done. When she meets Sancia and is attracted to her both looks and talent, she expresses her interest with a kiss and then makes it clear that the next move is Sancia’s. Sancia, traumatized and operating on the edges of society, has not had a lot of opportunities to think of love or sexuality in relation to herself, but is pleased with this development. Being the first book of a trilogy, there isn’t a ton of time devoted to their budding relationship, but it does provide absolutely critical and adorable motivation to Sancia at a pivotal action point.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a well-crafted and intricate fantasy book with a rules-based magic system and girlfriends instead of a straight romance, you can do worse than Foundryside. I found it to be an engaging and speedy read, and I put the second book on hold right away.

A Lush Bisexual Vampire Gothic: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

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Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, originally published in 2020 and translated this year by Heather Cleary, is a dramatic and lushly gothic novel about two women who a string of circumstances going back over a century bring together in modern day Buenos Aires. Yuszczuk revels in sensual, physical details as she describes how a vampire from Europe emigrates to Buenos Aires when she realizes she can no longer remain undetected in Europe. Decades later, a modern woman struggling with the realities of her mother’s terminal illness and the ongoing effects of grief inherits a key and sets off a collision of destinies. Thirst is a fairly short read (or compact audiobook in my case), and I had a great time because Thirst is a vampire book that revels in being a vampire book. There’s blood and violence and obsession, and at one point a priest is defiled purely out of spite. It’s a sensuous romp, and perfect for heating up an already hot summer.

Thirst, as the title states, is concerned with thirst, both the physical and sexual.  The vampire narrator is constantly concerned with her physical thirst for blood and with avoiding vampire hunters that are trying to stop her from satisfying that thirst. It’s interesting to me that she both acknowledges that it’s natural for humans to want to stop her from feeding on them and also asserts that she did not ask to be made into a vampire and that it’s natural for her to want to sustain herself, acknowledging the eternal competition between the two. There’s also tension as she is first forced to flee vampire hunters in Europe and then contend with the developing world of forensic science linking her to her victims. Thirst asks, how do you satisfy your thirst in a world increasingly capable of stopping you? 

At the same time, the vampire narrator is also concerned with her more metaphorical thirst.  Living outside of society, and thus societal strictures, she revels in her sexuality, taking what she wants whenever she has the whim. While several of her early encounters are with men—who see her as a helpless lone woman they are taking advantage of even as she uses them—she does not shy away from her physical attraction towards women. Even before she meets the modern narrator, she enjoys an interlude with a washer woman who shows her where she can wash her clothes in private. As they undressed together, I enjoyed that the vampire’s physical appreciation of Justine was untainted with any internal hesitation or regrets—as someone who fed intimately on people’s final moments, the vampire felt free to enjoy any physical pleasure she wanted without bias.

The modern narrator she eventually meets up with, on the other hand, is wracked with grief, indecision, and the expectations of others. Her mother is in the final stages of a horrible, untreatable terminal illness that slowly leaves her more and more paralyzed. As her mother disappears bit by bit under medical paraphernalia and pain, she has to grapple with her day to day life and her young son on top of grief and emotionally-draining caregiving. And as she watches her mother’s choices disappear to be made for her by others, the intensity with which the vampire exists attracts her, even as she is startled and alarmed by the violence. Their immediate attraction to each other is electric and visceral—almost feral. Although most of the book was concerned with their individual journeys, I found the chemistry of their meeting compelling, and the ending satisfying. 

In conclusion, Thirst is a lush gothic vampire novel that takes lingers on the physical realities of being a vampire, the clash between the vitality of life as an individual and the grind of the realities of existence, and the sensuality that is there for the taking if one dares. Yuszczuk keys into a rich gothic and vampiric tradition without overly lingering on logistics or greater vampire lore. This is a book about the journey and the moment. If you love vampires, Latin American gothic, or just some hot summer defiling of norms, Thirst would be a perfect add to your to-read list. It’s a quick but hot read and a great time. 

A Sapphic Sherlock Series in Space: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

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The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is Malka Older’s second novella in the Mossa and Pleiti series, set in the far future, when the last of humanity is in a thriving colony on Jupiter amidst an expanding series of platforms and rails. Like the the first novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes, Unnecessary Obstacles is a murder mystery, with the inscrutable but brilliant detective Mossa taking the lead on investigating a series of disappearing persons cases and her girlfriend Pleiti filling in the vital gaps with her academic connections and slightly superior people skills.  

This novella series perfectly fits the cozy mystery niche. While there is a little danger for spice, Mossa and Pleiti spend most of their time hunting down leads and deciphering what they find, letting a reader sit back and enjoy the ride. As a second book, I really enjoyed that Mossa and Pleiti are working to settle into their relationship. I also like that this book fills out their characters a little more. There’s a fun field trip to Jupiter’s moon, where Mossa grew up, which fills out a little of Mossa’s character and a little of Jupiter’s society. It was interesting to see the sentiment towards a shuttle ride and driving their own vehicle versus the ubiquitous rail cars of the planet. And Pleiti, who in her role at the university is attempting to reconstruct an Earth-style garden, is dealing with the political fallout of the first novella. I enjoyed seeing them work together again, more deliberately this time, and I enjoyed that their search led them to different areas than the first book. They also take a long distance railcar trip, which I found a delightful idea and I can’t believe isn’t a romantic novelty trip on Jupiter.

Although I did ultimately enjoy this novella and have a fun time reading it, I did feel like this one was a little slower compared to the first—the mystery didn’t seem as urgent, and although we did get some new environments on the moon and in the student clubs, I found that this book had fewer of the really cozy world-building details from the first one—or maybe it’s that there were more locations but we passed through most of them fairly quickly. I also felt like, while Mossa had taken their new relationship status to heart and was intent on improving upon her own shortcomings, Pleiti felt stuck in her past mindsets. Mossa was strangely the one doing the best communication in this book, which Pleiti should really think about in my opinion. However, I still liked this book and would read several more in this series —hopefully with more world-building and relationship development each time. I think this Jupiter colony is so fascinating, and this is a series that could sustain an whole progression of mysteries without being too repetitive. 

In conclusion, this series is one of my favorite recent sci-fi developments. I love that the recent trend towards really developing novellas has given scope for amazing authors to present us with fun little stories that aren’t doorstops. Sci-fi and mystery is also a pairing of genres that I love. If you enjoyed The Mimicking of Known Successes, this book is a nice treat, and if you’re looking for a short cozy read, you should definitely add this to your list. 

A Sapphic and Metis Secret Garden: Into the Bright Open by Cherie Dimaline 

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Into the Bright Open by Cherie Dimaline is part of MacMillan’s Remixed Classics series, which has diverse authors reimagine beloved classics through their own perspective. In this offering, Dimaline remixes The Secret Garden, setting it in Canada and filling it with Metis characters and budding sapphic romance but keeping many of the elements from the original. I appreciated that this was not just a copy/paste job on the original, but its own story that is willing to use the original as a base to stand on its own terms as well, and I found this a very fun read that I think today’s readers will appreciate. 

This is still the curmudgeonly Mary Lennox we know and love. Sent to her Uncle’s house, she is appalled by the wilderness, the servants, and her new circumstances. But Sophie, a young Metis girl, is a Dickon-like character but not Dickon. She is as enthralled by Mary’s mind as Mary is by the things Sophie introduces her to in the outdoors. And Olive, Mary’s cousin who is confined to the attic, is in much more dire straits than Colin in the novel. With the addition of a wicked stepmother, Into the Bright Open has less of the quiet interiority of The Secret Garden, but the girls are still driven to make their own paths as they fight for their own space and to rescue Olive from her attic. I was a little bit taken aback by the changes at first, but once I accepted them as part of a remix, I had a good time. 

Given that Sophie is perfectly willing to haul Mary all around the landscape outside, the walled garden they tend is more about giving scope to their burgeoning relationship than about bringing the garden back to life. This is a book that really captured that moment of looking at another girl and going “oh” as that moment of queer realization hits, and it also captured Mary’s growth into someone willing to take direct action and put in work rather than wait for things to be done for her. Mary’s lack of role models of any type in her life rather works in her favor here, as she has been left to her own devices so much that her gradual realizations of her feelings are marked mostly by normal adolescent confusion rather than societal expectations. The way her and Sophie grow into each other as they spend more and more time together was very cute.

In conclusion, Into the Bright Open is an excellent addition to this remixed classics series. Whether you are already a Secret Garden fan or only vaguely know the story, Into the Bright Open is an engaging and cute read to start your spring off with. It stands up on its own, but it also provides an interesting view of remixing a classic through a different lens, and frankly, more historical sapphic YA is never a bad thing. 

A New Classic of Queer Memoir: Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

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I have had Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H on my list since it came out, and I am so glad my library hold on it finally came in. Lamya narrates a series of essays tying together her queer coming of age and her reconciliation of that with being a devout Muslim woman in a very satisfying way, providing deep insight into her personal journey and growth in both her faith and herself. Whether you are looking for a queer memoir to dive into, or a new perspective, or simply to hear the thoughts of someone who boldly references Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, this book will take you on a journey and leave you thinking by the end. 

Lamya starts off with recollections of her childhood, when she started questioning what the Quran was saying, or not saying, about gender and how it lined up with her own feelings. When the adults in her life were unwilling to entertain her lines of questioning, Lamya started a habit of deep inner reflection and questioning that is apparent in every section. Arrayed in mostly linear fashion, the essays cover her realization that she was queer, her move to America in college, and her struggle to find either queer or Muslim community where she didn’t feel like the other half of her was being excluded. They link to specific sections of the Quran as she meditates on what they mean to her on a personal level. Lamya is painfully ready to dig into her own inner thought processes and reflections, including her own internalized biases and homophobia she had to recognize and overcome before she could move forward. Her struggles and her sincerity shine from every page, drawing you in and inviting you along with her through the process. 

I love reading queer memoirs because a queer coming of age is a journey that can be so personal and yet so relatable to anyone else that has done it themselves. On paper, I do not have much oin common with Lamya beyond us both being queer. And yet, when she spoke of her friend questioning why she didn’t transition if she was going to keep becoming more butch—and her sound rejection of the idea—I felt such empathy and connection, because that was a thought process I had also gone through. The idea that we could be so different and yet so similar is heartwarming to me. Simultaneously, I gained new perspective and appreciation for Lamya’s circumstances and choices. This is a memoir that invites both learning and empathy. It also rewards personal reflection, since it is more than just a recounting of her life events. If you don’t normally read memoirs, Hijab Butch Blues is a book that will make you appreciate the genre more. 

I believe that Hijab Butch Blues is going to go down as seminal work in queer narrative canon, and certainly as an eminently readable, unflinching memoir about reconciling faith, life circumstances, and an “authentically queer experience.” I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

Messy Roots: a Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by Laura Gao

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Messy Roots is Laura Gao’s memoir of her childhood and coming of age, first in Wuhan, China, then an early move to Texas, and finally through her choices of college in Pennsylvania and a job in the Bay area. As a Chinese American immigrant, Gao depicts her struggle to reconcile her childhood in Wuhan with the expectations of her friends and classmates in America via a direct and honest look at her own internalized biases and struggles, illustrated by a flowing and charming art style. I found Messy Roots to be a heartwarming and fast-paced read, and I’m really glad a friend recommended it to me.

Gao is brutally honest in her depiction of herself. She starts out by describing her efforts to fit in with her classmates in Texas, including by taking an American-ized name and minimizing hobbies and traits that mark her out as too obviously an immigrant. She finds her Chinese lessons burdensome and resents having to attend Chinese events at her family’s church. When she moves to college, she both connects more with the Chinese student community and realizes that she is attracted to women. Free from being directly under the eye of her family and people who knew her growing up, Gao, like many college students, starts to figure out for herself who she wants to be as a person. I felt like Gao’s personal journey really resonated from the page, because it was messy and not linear. I personally really empathized with how Gao’s attraction to women was evident through her early years with the benefit of hindsight, but not fully realized until college and near adulthood. Laura also struggles with who and how to come out to people, and especially to her family, but even when they are struggling to communicate, Gao depicts a complex and affectionately nuanced showing of family. I think memoirs like this are important, because real life does not reflect a neat narrative like in fiction. Reading this really focuses in on how you keep growing and learning as a person, and things that you think you had moved on from can later become important to you, and I really think this perspective is important for the teen audience this is intended for, although older readers can certainly appreciate that aspect as well.

In the final part of the book, Gao tells about moving to San Francisco after college, and rooming with a group of her immigrant friends. Buoyed by the strong Chinese community in the area and the city’s diverse and modern atmosphere, Gao starts to feel like she is putting down her own roots. But when the pandemic hits in 2020, Wuhan goes from an obscure location to a household name in America. As waves of racism and hatred impact her life and her family, Gao once again struggles to make sense of her identity and her life. It’s a terribly poignant and personal look at a time most of us would rather not look to closely at. It’s sort of refreshing to see a narrative that actively includes the pandemic as a time period that had real impact on people, and not just through the possibility of getting sick. Gao’s narrative highlights the some of the real ripple effects that this global event had, and I think that is also important to show in literature. 

Messy Roots is Laura Gao’s effort to document her journey through her identity.  Unlike a conventional, fictional coming of age story, Gao shows that life is messy and most people’s development is not linear. Her unflinching introspection and willingness to shine a light on the complex and less pretty parts of personal development make for an inspiring and insightful read. I am definitely glad to have read her perspective, and think this would be an excellent book for both adults and teens looking for a new viewpoint about growing up, coming out, and finding yourself. 

A Queer Take on Dragon Riding: So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

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So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole is a Jamaican-inspired YA fantasy. I would like to thank the publisher Little, Brown Young Readers for sending the Lesbrary a review copy. I enjoyed this book a lot, and think it’s a great addition to the genre.

There’s a whole unseen YA novel that happens before So Let Them Burn even starts. The island of San Irie is fighting the Langley Empire for it’s freedom, a chance prayer makes a child the Chosen One of the gods, and there’s a quest to restore the rightful queen – raised in the countryside unknowing of her real identity – to the throne. So Let Them Burn starts after the war is over and San Irie has won independence, and it looks at what happens afterwards, when you have an overpowered teenaged hero and a young queen and no more war to focus on.

Faron Vincent is overpowered, short-tempered, and, most of all, bored. She’s back at home with her family and back in school because no one wants to give a child, even a gods-touched one, a position in the government. And they shouldn’t, because she’s still a child, with a child’s self-centered outlook. During the war, when there was short term goals and fighting to focus on, Faron excelled and was needed as the only weapon against the Langley Empire’s dragon riders. But now, with no battles left to fight, she’s too impatient to learn diplomacy but she’s seen too much to slot back into her old life.

When the Queen decides to hold a diplomatic conference to show their neighbors how well things are going and rub the Langley Empire’s nose in its defeat, she summons Faron and her sister to the capital as part of a show of strength. I found Faron to be not very likeable but still hugely interesting. She’s a character out of place, as her powers, temper, and arrogance probably served her well during a war time situation but now lead to her crashing about like a bull in a china shop. She doesn’t understand any political subtleties and feels that her presence at the conference is like being a show pony doing tricks, but she’s also the type of person to summon her god power to help her win a school yard race. She’s truly a girl who grew up during a war and has the trauma and combat experience to go with it, but she has literally no other life experience to balance that out, leaving her off balance and out of place in this new world she helped create. It was extremely interesting to me to see this take on a “Chosen One” experience after the fact; I thought it was clever and very well done.

Meanwhile, the diplomatic conference goes sideways as Faron’s sister Elara inadvertently bonds with a Langlish dragon and is forced to return to Langley for training. Stuck in Langlish Dragon School, Elara is surrounded by people who hate her and what she represents. She is also walking a tightrope between learning useful intelligence to send back to San Irie and figuring out why exactly Dragon Rider command seemed to especially want her there. She’s also learning to be a dragon rider until her sister back home can figure out how to break the bond. Langlish dragons have two riders, and as time goes on, Elara and her other rider Signey have to figure out how to deal with their growing feelings for each other.

I found Elara’s chapters the most interesting part of the story, because she goes to the school determined to hate everyone, and there’s a lot of people that hate and look down on her, but she slowly finds other people she can sympathize with, because San Irie wasn’t the only country that the Langlish had colonized. Signey also opens up about her own family history, and the two girls slowly realize they have more in common than they think. Signey slowly changes from the enemy to a friend and maybe more. Just as Faron turns the Chosen One trope into a new angle, Elara’s dragon school training takes a common YA conceit and looks at it from a different, and queerer, viewpoint.

In conclusion, So Let Them Burn is a YA fantasy novel with a lot to offer. Not only does it start at a different point in the story than a more typical novel might have started, it takes several YA tropes and gives them a fresh viewpoint. If you’re looking for queer YA fantasy with something new to say, this is a good book to put on your list.

A Sapphic Space Opera of Smoldering Obsession: These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs

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If you’re looking for a queer space opera chock full of complex politics, smoldering obsession, and ever escalating revenge, These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs is a worthy entry into the field. Renowned hacker Jun “Sunstep” Ironway has gotten her hands on a piece of evidence that links one of the Kingdom’s premier families, the Nightfoots, to its most infamous genocide.  The Nightfoots, sitting on top an empire built of the synthetic element needed to make space gates turn on, need to silence Jun before their rivals sense blood in the water and the Kingdom descends into war. They task Esek, a scion they sent to become a cleric, to find Jun, counting on Esek’s lack of morals and fierce cruelty to get the job done. Esek and her former novitiate Chono set off after Jun and family secrets.  But they are also pursued themselves. Six, a shadowy figure from Esek’s past, brings a new definition to the idea of a long game as they seek always to escalate their game of cat and mouse with Esek. As more clues and layers to the relationship between all three groups come to light, who is controlling the information becomes less and less clear.  Instead, they might all be caught in the resulting conflagration. These Burning Stars is a fast-paced, gripping read with interesting world building and even more interesting characters. I had such a great time unpicking the relationships and gaping at the carnage.

First off, Jacobs doesn’t spend too much time on flogging the overall details of the Kingdom. We are zoomed in on the Nightfoots and the specific events that brought them to power, as well as the corresponding actions by the Kingdom’s enforcement Hands of clerics, secretaries, and cloaksaans. But she does drop in enough fascinating hints to give everything some flavor. The generation ships that brought them to the system are treated like museum pieces. The different population groups with slightly different customs. And, my personal favorite, the custom of gendermarks. Different groups have different customs regarding children (the children in the religious schools being trained to go into the Hands are referred to as “it” and denied a gender until gradation for instance), but the general custom is that upon reaching maturity everyone gets to choose their own gender and you announce it with the mark you wear. And, going by some hints dropped in, you can change it as simply as changing your mark.

The implications are fascinating. The Nightfoots are seen as slightly weird for being aggressively matrilineal, meaning they need a female heir who can also pop out more female heirs herself, rather limiting their pool of choice. It also means that of the main characters, Jun, Esek, Chono, and Jun’s wife Liis saw no impediment to their lives, careers, or prospects by choosing to be women. In contrast Six, who disappeared from religious school and thus never officially chose a gender, aggressively refuses to reveal theirs, sowing confusion and mild bewilderment as people struggle about how to identify and talk about them.

There is one official wlw relationship in Jun and Liis, who have lived life on the down low together for long enough to know each other in and out and develop their own couples shorthand. They both have their own skillsets and mesh them together to keep Jun’s hacker persona ahead of all attempts at capture, and when faced with tough decisions they may not always agree, but they always know how the other will want to decide. The lesbian spacer ideal. But the more page consuming relationship (although I would definitely not call it romantic) is between Esek and Chono (and Esek and Six and Chono and Six. The weird but intense energy here is off the charts). Esek literally trained Chono as her novitiate, fostered her brutal practicality, taught her to be ruthless, and in general wound herself into so much of Chono’s character that even after Chono becomes a full cleric in her own right, she can’t break free of Esek’s pull. Esek is everything to her, Esek is terrible to her, she will do terrible things for Esek, she is the one person Esek will hold back from maiming or killing on a whim. There’s a lot going on here and almost none of it is #relationshipgoals. I was hooked. And when you add in how neither of them can let the pursuit of Six go, it’s intoxicatingly dramatic.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for your next queer sci-fi read, add These Burning Stars to your list. The combination of space opera complexity and incredibly petty escalation and revenge is intoxicating. It’s the first in a trilogy, and I, for one, cannot wait for the next one to come out.

A Cozy Queer Witches Comic: Mamo by Sas Milledge

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the cover of Mamo by Sas Milledge

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I checked out Sas Milledge’s Mamo because I had some extra hoopla borrows and I thought the cover art was cute, to be honest. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I was quickly drawn into the quiet town of Haresden and its not so quiet problems. Jo Manalo goes looking for the witch of Haresden because her mother has been cursed.  Magic is, in fact, out of whack all over town, and they need a witch to set it right.  But their previous witch, Mamo, had died, and so Jo goes looking for her replacement. She finds Orla, a young witch who seems both drawn to Haresden and unwilling to be there. It turns out that the titular Mamo was her grandmother, and the town’s problems are her attempt to bring Orla back to the fold. Together, the girls go on a quest to set the balance of magic and their burgeoning feelings for each other on the right track. But Mamo is determined to influence things from beyond the grave, and setting things right isn’t as easy as performing a few magical tasks.

Jo and Orla are delightful characters, and the easy way Milledge fleshs out their characters with the magic and world-building pulled me right in.  Jo is so earnest and kind and loves so deeply, while Orla is prickly and flighty but has deep wells of feelings hidden within her. They set each other off at first, but then they end up working together so well. And their realization that they could be the ones to really help each other out was so satisfying to read.  I found the buildup of their partnership over the course of their quest was really well done, and the ending was everything I hoped for. I really loved how patient Orla was with explaining what she was doing to Jo, and how she built Jo’s confidence up that she could help.  On the flip side, I love that Jo really understood the differences between herself and Orla, and had no interest in trying to change Orla, just in getting to know her. Their compromise at the end was perfect, because it let each be true to herself while setting up a great future for them both.

I also really enjoyed the artwork on this one. It was flowy and cute, full of fun creatures and magical effects.  Orla and Jo were really expressive, and the story telling focused on their reactions to things. I think a lot of comics and graphic novels struggle to balance showing action versus showing character moments, and I thought Mamo really prioritized the characters but not at the expense of the quest or the magic. It was really a cozy and fun book to read.

Whether you’re looking for queer witches, cozy magic, something for yourself, or for something cute to rec to a teen, Mamo is a good entry for any to-read list. Come for the queer witches, stay for the heartwarming magical quest and fantastic art. I had no expectations going into this, and I was honestly so delighted I started thinking about who I could get to read it. It made my whole day better reading it.