Author Archives: Maggie

A Sapphic Regency Romp: Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh by Rachael Lippincott

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As a current Pittsburgh resident, as soon as I saw that the Lesbrary had received a review copy of Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh by Rachael Lippincott, I knew that I needed to read it. A fun sapphic romance mixing regency and the steel city with added time travel? Sign me up. And it did not disappoint.

Pittsburgh native Audrey feels stuck. Her first choice of art school has waitlisted her. Her high school boyfriend has dumped her after trying to persuade her to abandon art as a career after he didn’t get accepted. And she feels stuck and unable to create anything new for the portfolio she needs to submit. When a regular at her family’s corner store offers her some cryptic encouragement, Audrey finds herself transported not only to the past but to England. In 1812, Lucy feels trapped. Her mother had wanted for Lucy to marry for the love she did not find herself, but with her gone, Lucy is at the mercy of her controlling father. He is forcing her into marriage with the rich but odious Mr. Caldwell. Isolated and increasingly depressed, Lucy greets the appearance of a girl wearing the strangest and most improper of clothing with interest and relief. Together, they resolve to figure out a way to return Audrey to her time.

The conflicts here are numerous and yet for the most part they’re romcom level problems. As Lucy spends time with Audrey, she wonders more and more how she can resign herself to a loveless marriage even more constricting than life under her father, but she doesn’t know what else she can do. Stranded in a society very different from her own, Audrey regains her inspiration in her art and confidence in herself as several eligible local bachelors show an interest in her. But Lucy is the person that fills her days and her sketchbook. How can she find love or inspiration in the rest of her life if she’s fated to leave Lucy behind? I bet we can all guess the answer, and like a good romance Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh’s charm is in the journey, not the solution.

What I liked best about this book is that it did not take its own plot device too seriously. In some stories, you want a detailed exploration of how the time traveler’s clothes or possessions make trouble, or it makes sense for the other characters to think they’re lying about time travel. And sometimes you want some mild shock about modesty and some honest delight about the magical box that plays music. Sometimes a girl can meet some bachelors that find her lack of local polish charming, as a treat. Sometimes time travel can be fun. And it contrasts so eloquently and emotionally with the bleakness of Lucy’s situation. At it’s heart this is about two girls finding connection despite all the outside events going on in their lives. Reading this felt like a return to watching the nonsense rom coms of my youth, but queer, and it was a lot of fun.

In conclusion, if you are looking for a light-hearted romp to ease your transition from summer to fall, Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh is an excellent choice. It’s got time travel, county balls, corner stores, and delightful queer awakening, all tied up with a happily ever after. Treat yourself to a little delight this fall and fall in love with time travel. And Pittsburgh.

An F/F Romance for Women’s Soccer Fans: Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner

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For everyone currently getting excited about women’s soccer, Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner, out September 19, is a cute romance between two teammates during the leadup to a World Cup year. I would like to thank the publisher for providing The Lesbrary with an ARC for review. I honestly enjoyed this story a lot—it’s a fun romance between two highly competitive people and features plenty of steamy action and on field dramatics.

Grace Henderson is a veteran star on both the US Women’s National Team and her National Women’s Soccer League team in New Orleans. She’s a consummate professional and deals with the intense pressure that comes at playing at her level and being in the spotlight by intensely cultivating her privacy even among teammates. But when rookie Phoebe Matthews is invited to National Team training camp, she manages to throw Grace off her stride almost instantly, and Grace is somewhat dismayed to realize that she will also be Phoebe’s captain back for the regular season in New Orleans. Phoebe Matthews is approaching her first season as a professional soccer player with her usual boundless enthusiasm and energy and a willingness to work hard and do whatever it takes to succeed. Her invitation to be considered for the National team juices her determination even more, as she realizes she could be competing for a spot on the World Cup Team. Gregarious and friendly, Phoebe has never bothered with not being out or with team politics. When sparks fly between them as the professional stakes mount, will they be able to find common ground between walls Grace has built around herself and Phoebe’s need for openness?

I really enjoyed this romance. As someone who has read her fair share of het or m/m athletic romances, I greatly enjoyed this foray into wlw sports. I’m on board. Let’s make lesbian soccer romances the next thing. You get all the cuteness of a romance combined with all the hyper competitiveness of professional athletes. Neither Grace nor Phoebe have taken it easy in their entire lives, or they wouldn’t be playing at an elite level, and that tension on the field translates so well into their romantic tension. Even if they’re not competing against each other, every time they help each other get better they get all hot and bothered. It’s great. I especially enjoyed their dynamic, with Grace taking the lead on the team as Captain and also showing Phoebe around New Orleans, but Phoebe being the more experienced one with feelings and communication. I loved it; it was exactly the level of fun and hi-jinx I want from a romance, but the difficulties introduced for tension did not feel forced or unlikely as sometimes romance problems do.

In conclusion, if you’re still jonesing for some quality soccer content in September, you should look up Cleat Cute, out September 19th. It’s fun and flirty with a heaping helping of sports feelings on top as an extra treat. I really felt like Phoebe and Grace fit together and worked well together. It was the perfect fast paced romance I wanted to get me pumped up for reading again. Definitely check it out: you won’t regret it.

Queerness is a Radical Act: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

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Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is a wild ride of coming of age story, personal growth story, and dystopian sci fi. Gaea Station believes itself to be the last bastion of humanity that hasn’t sold out to aliens since Earth was destroyed. Every resource is carefully allocated and everybody is assigned their place to gather their strength until the day humanity can take their revenge and become a free species again. Kyr and her twin brother have always been considered some of Gaea’s best hopes, with their carefully planned genes, their connection to the station’s commander, and their aptitudes. Segregated to a girl’s training unit, Kyr has had to work twice as hard to receive almost none of the recognition her brother Magnus has but she’s determined that her cohort will do their absolute best and that her and Magnus will do their duty and humanity proud. But the day of their graduation from their youth cohorts to their adult assignments leaves Kyr reeling from multiple heavy blows to her pride and faith in everything she’s known. Torn between different loyalties and faced with unwelcome family revelations, Kry sets off on a desperate journey to save her honor and discovers that the wider universe is bigger and more complex than she ever dreamed.

What I loved most about Some Desperate Glory, is that it is somewhat rare for me to find a character so insufferable at the beginning and then be rooting so hard for their personal growth by the end, but main character Kyr is, in this as in many things in her life, an exception. Her worldview starts out so incredibly narrow—she’s bought into her station brainwashing so hard, she doesn’t even question what topics she should be questioning, and she’s an incredible asshole to everyone around her who isn’t as conforming as her. Plus she’s been raised as the pinnacle of all the station’s hopes (and breeding programs). Even the other people on the station find her insufferably brainwashed. But it’s conversely because Kyr is so by the book that she grows. When presented with evidence, she does change, because she’s been trained to evaluate tactical situations. When faced with people different than her, she is bewildered when she experiences flashes of empathy. Begrudgingly, and with much protesting, her character arc is a hard-earned battle every step of the way. Just the fact that she starts out so unlikeable and yet remained compelling was wildly interesting to me. In a sea of unlikeable hard-edged cult members, Kry should have been just another footsoldier, but she became so much more. I was rooting for her so hard.

Kyr was so brainwashed that she didn’t even allow herself to think about a relationship she would actually want until the possibility was shoved in her face. On Gaea station, there was only Nursery, and the planned breeding program to bolster the station’s gene lines, and everything else was extraneous. Certainly being queer was prohibited as nonconformist. Kry had closeted herself even to herself, covering up her revulsion at the idea of rotations in Nursery with platitudes about duty. In the light of such things as saving the universe, humanity, and the people Kyr cares about, coming to terms not just with her own queerness but also it’s acceptability outside the station may seem like a side plot at first, but it was important to Kyr’s development and it was important to me as a reader. Queerness was something Gaea Station stamped out hard in order to enforce conformity, but Kyr included it in her rebuilding of her own self-image. Her queerness was also key to her character growth, as she realized that having feelings wasn’t just a waste of time and divided loyalties, but something worthwhile and pleasant. Something for herself rather than the greater good. Kyr’s vision and hope of having a girlfriend isn’t just a romantic subplot, it’s a radical act that sets her on the path to tearing down a fascist regime.

In conclusion, Some Desperate Glory is a fantastic sci fi adventure that explores multiple compelling themes. The world building and characters were great, and I was wildly drawn to the main character. Emily Tesh once again proves to be an incredible story teller, and that she can jump genres from fantasy to sci fi with ease.  Definitely add this one to your to read list, sci fi fans.

A Cozy Sapphic Sci-Fi Mystery: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

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In The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older creates a cozy murder mystery in humanity’s distant future on Jupiter. I found this novella to be a delightful, satisfying read. The action clicked along nicely, the world-building was intriguing, and Mossa and Pleiti were great characters.

Mossa, an Investigator, is summoned to the furthest reaches of the network of floating platforms humanity has created to settle Jupiter in order to investigate a disappearance. The victim is a university man, and Mossa’s initial cursory investigation can find no supporting evidence of a supposed suicide, nor why the man would come to such a distant platform in the first place.  Seeking more insight into his politics and motivations, Mossa enlists the help of Pleiti, her ex-girlfriend.  Pleiti is part of a team of Classical scholars who study ecosystems and environments as part of a larger movement to eventually rehabilitate and return to Earth. Together they explore university politics, Jupiter’s largest tourist attraction, and their re-kindling romantic tension with each other.

I found The Mimicking of Known Successes to be an excellent cozy mystery and perfectly novella-paced. It was balanced between intriguing glimpses of world-building and the rising action. I adored how it had traditional mystery elements – a man has vanished! People are acting mysterious! Inter-departmental friction! – and at the same time, a lot of great sci-fi details. I was in love with the rail system and the descriptions of little businesses and industries that came about on Jupiter. But nothing overwhelmed the length of the novella, which is, in my opinion, a problem a lot of novellas have. I would love to read half a dozen more novellas set on this same world, but I don’t necessarily wish this one had been longer. It felt perfectly self-contained.

Mossa and Pleiti were also great characters. Mossa is intensely focused and not great with her interpersonal skills, but I liked how she was aware of her faults, and made efforts to correct them, even if she didn’t always succeed. I loved that Pleiti understood her though, and that Mossa valued and sought out Pleiti’s contributions to the case, even though Pleiti is trained as a scholar not an investigator. The tension of their past feelings for each other and the slow re-kindling of their relationship was great. I felt like there was a lot of romantic tension here for a novella but that it was well established and grounded, which was excellent.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a quick but engaging read, The Mimicking of Known Successes is a great choice. Whether you’re a sci-fi fan who thinks you could use a little mystery or a mystery fan who thinks you could possibly branch into sci-fi, I think you could come into this book from either angle and be satisfied.

Ambitious, Brutal, and Brilliant Trans Sapphic Horror: Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

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I’ve been having a good run with horror lately, and Alison Rumfitt’s stunning work of trans horror Tell Me I’m Worthless kept that streak up. The pull quote on the front cover advertises it as “ambitious, brutal, and brilliant,” and I think that’s a good starting point for this book, because it’s not a nice or neat horror book. There is a house, and it is haunted, but not by any singular ghosts. Rather, the house deals in corruption, trauma, and the little terrible voice in the back of your head, and it can’t be exorcised or rebuilt. Rumfitt shoves her characters to scrabble in the metaphorical blood and muck of their mutual trauma and asks them to deal with their own memories and the creeping rise of fascism in their lives.

Tell Me I’m Worthless stars two women, Alice and Ila, who are both dealing with the trauma of a shared event. In their past, they were a unit – best friends turned lovers, even if they didn’t really talk about their relationship. Before leaving university, they and their friend Hannah had all decided to spend the night in a haunted house. Alice and Ila walked out with conflicting memories of what happened; Hannah never walked out at all. Now, Alice has turned to drugs and alcohol to escape the ghosts she can see, and Ila has joined the TERFs in an attempt to process her memories. But the House hasn’t loosened its grip on their lives, and it’s calling them back once again.

What I loved most about this book was the buildup and the edges. First you meet Alice and her ghosts. Her flat is haunted, and she can barely focus enough to do the sex work videos she relies on for income. Then you meet Ila and realize she’s joined the TERFs. And then finally there’s a chapter from the House POV and you realize it’s a real entity. As things start to fall into place, it becomes apparent that everyone’s being manipulated. I also loved how no one fit into neat boxes. They are absolutely scrambling to deal with their memories, and sometimes they fail, and sometimes they are overtaken by the real-life events they’re enmeshed in. As with many works of horror, Tell Me I’m Worthless has an element of the supernatural, but also relies mainly on the characters’ state of mind rather than jump scares.

If you go into this with your eyes open to the content warnings and think it’s interesting for you, I think it’s a great work of horror. I greatly enjoyed reading it, and felt swept into the mood immediately. I also love the editors lately who are greenlighting queer horror that delve deeper into queer experiences and states of mind in unique ways. There’s some great work going on out there, and Tell Me I’m Worthless is going onto my rec list.

Trigger warnings: sexual violence, sexual assault, body horror, mutilation, antisemitism, racism, and transphobia