After reading her debut novel, Damned If You Do, Alex Brown has quickly become one of my new favorite authors! As part of this year’s Sapphic September challenge, I read an ARC of her most recent novel, Rest in Peaches, which came out on October 15th of this year. Rest in Peaches follows a high school student, Quinn, who dreams of becoming a professional mascot. Even though Quinn would definitely not be considered the most popular person at her school, she anonymously entertains her classmates at every sporting event as their beloved mascot, Peaches the Parrot. However, Quinn’s dreams are crushed when someone mysteriously sabotages her performance and ruins her Peaches suit at the Homecoming football game. Everything starts to get even worse when the people implicated in the disaster start dying at the hands of a masked killer and Quinn is forced to work with her former best friend and longtime crush, Tessa, to investigate.
Even though I didn’t love Rest in Peaches quite as much as Damned If You Do, I still had some much fun reading it! Alex Brown has totally mastered campy gay horror as a genre and has become one of my auto-buy authors because of it. My favorite thing about her writing is definitely how much it makes me laugh out loud while reading, especially her chapter titles. Some non-spoilery examples include “Oops, Part One”, “Murder, She Podcasted”, and “The First Best Peaches Attends the Home Alone Rager”.
In terms of the sapphic romance, I also really enjoyed Quinn and Tessa’s relationship. Childhood best friends to lovers is one of my favorite tropes, and I loved reading about all the wild things Quinn and Tessa did on their mission to stop the killer! Besides being absolutely hilarious and thrilling to read, Alex Brown’s stories are also incredibly meaningful to me as a queer Asian American woman. Even though I’m Korean, not Filipino like the main characters in Alex Brown’s novels, seeing sapphic Asian girls get to save the day and get the girl in one of my favorite genres is so refreshing.
I can’t wait to see what Alex Brown does next, and in the meantime I’m looking forward to reading her additions to the short story collections The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror (released in September of 2022) and The House Where Death Lives (released in August of 2024)!
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