Tag Archives: ***

A Rapidfire History of Queer Women’s Spaces: A Place of Our Own by June Thomas

Posted on by — Leave a reply
A Place of Our Own cover

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

This year, I’m doing the 2024 Read Harder Challenge—well, I should hope I am, because I’m the one running the challenge and writing the newsletter this time! (You can subscribe if you want recommendations plus weekly updates on my reading, though some of it is for paid subscribers.) One of the tasks is to ask a librarian for a recommendation, so I asked a librarian friend of mine, and they recommended this one. A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture is just what it sounds like: an exploration of queer women’s spaces, including lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, softball fields, lesbian separatist communities, sex toy stores, and queer women events.

I really liked the idea of this book, and it’s written in an accessible, easy-to-read style, so don’t be worried if you don’t read a ton of nonfiction or history books. There are plenty of interesting facts packed in. For example, I was surprised to see acclaimed children’s book author Jacqueline Woodson pop as someone who fought against racism in lesbian event spaces. The feminist bookstores chapter especially made me nostalgic for a time I didn’t really live through: you really see how much the bookstore owners cared and how they truly created community centres, unlike so many stores that claim that today without doing a fraction of the work these bookstore owners were doing.

At the same time, I think this book had a lot more potential. It felt a bit scattered, jumping around in time within chapters. It also sometimes went on tangents—like talking about Harvey Milk starting a camera store—that don’t really fit into the theme and would have been better left to a footnote. Also, a few times the book skims over what seem like the most interesting stories, like offhandedly mentioning a lesbian bar being firebombed in one sentence but going into depth about the history of another bar instead.

The author is clearly passionate about this subject; they include a lot of personal interviews with the subjects. It sometimes feels like a friend getting so excited to tell you about their interest that they go in a bunch of different directions at once, for better or for worse. There are some really interesting aspects, like reflecting on how lesbian bars are expected to be all things for all queer women: inclusive, but an escape from men and the straight world. A place for dancing and cruising, but also a place where people can chat and find community without having to yell over the music. A high-end cocktail bar and a cheap place for beer. That’s something I also appreciated in Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton.

I’m glad I read this, but it’s not one I can whole-heartedly recommend because of that scattered feeling. It can also at times feel overly apologetic of the transphobia and racism of these spaces in different decades—but then later calls it out explicitly. In some ways, I think it’s an impossible task to try to cover all of these different histories in one book. I think I prefer reading about just one of these categories in greater depth. Still, if this looks interesting to you, it’s worth picking up. Just be prepared to fall down a few rabbit holes along the way.

An Obsessive Female Friendship Turns Dark: Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman

Posted on by — Leave a reply
Girls on Fire audiobook cover

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

Two teen girls, Hannah Dexter and Lacey Champlain, become obsessively attached to each other in their rebellion and vengeful agenda against Nikki Drummond. Then dark secrets about what happened to Craig, the boy found dead at the beginning of the novel, begin to unravel, and the bonds of friendship are tested. It becomes harder to tell what’s a mask and what’s real. I listened to this one on audio narrated by Cassandra Campbell, Simone Lewis, and Allyson Ryan.

Hannah Dexter starts as a typical good girl from a middle-class suburban family. But when Lacey, the town’s bad girl, takes an interest in her and takes her under her wing, Hannah becomes Dex. Dex is sharper, tougher, and more willing to get into a little bit of trouble. Lacey introduces Dex to grunge, Kurt Cobain, and dabbling in Satanism to laugh in the face of small-town fears.

It’s easy to see how co-dependency develops between them. Lacey molds Hannah into Dex, someone who can learn to bend the rules and let loose. But even when she’s Dex, there’s a part of Hannah, the voice of reason, that keeps Lacey from taking things too far—until one night, Dex no longer wants to be Lacey’s puppet.

Meanwhile, Lacey keeps the secret of her past relationship with Nikki Drummond, Hannah’s mortal enemy. Nikki and Lacey engaged in a sapphic relationship out in the woods, a place that holds a power of its own as being both haunted and sacred. But there was never any love between them; they were both seeking a reprieve from the suffocation of living in a crappy small town.

Throughout the novel, we see snippets of the relationships between each girl and her parents. Lacey is a typical troubled teen with problems at home—an alcoholic mother, an abusive stepfather, and abandonment issues from her biological father. Hannah’s parents are a constant reminder of mediocrity and showcase a couple that plays their roles on the surface, but bubbling beneath are unspoken tensions that make their relationship toxic. Nikki’s parents are in denial about the master manipulator their daughter is.

Each girl’s mother gets an interlude between chapters that seem out of place at first. But the final one brings it all together with the idea that “girls like them believe they could never become mothers like us.” Once that statement is made, it makes all the other interludes from the mothers make sense. However, because there’s so little point of view from the mothers and most of it comes from the eyes of their daughters, it’s hard to get that message. Perhaps that’s the point: they don’t see it until it’s too late.

Overall, it’s a dark and twisted story of obsessive female friendships that lead to the unthinkable. The premise is not particularly innovative and the plot unraveled much as I expected it to, but it’s well-written enough to keep you reading.

Trigger warnings for rape and violence

Falling in Love at the Food Packing Convention: Lavash at First Sight by Taleen Voskuni

Posted on by — Leave a reply
Lavash at First Sight cover

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

I enjoyed Sorry, Bro, Taleen Voskuni’s first novel: the main character breaks up with a non-Armenian tech bro, falls in love with an Armenian woman, and struggles with her identity as a bisexual woman. What’s not to like? I also appreciated the opportunity to learn about Armenian culture and the Bay Area Armenian diaspora.

Unfortunately, Lavash at First Sight is not as good as Sorry, Bro for one simple reason: it is too short. I am actually not bothered by the fact that the plot follows the same sequence described in the previous paragraph. What I don’t think works is that the novel reads like an extended Before Sunrise/Roman Holiday situation in which the girl has to leave home to find love on vacation. 

Of course, it isn’t really a vacation–Nazeli works for a Bay Area tech company, after all. (Yes, using PTO, but still having to do work is gross, and no one should do it.) The bulk of the novel takes place at PakCon, a food packaging convention for vendors and distributors. If that doesn’t sound very Jesse and Celine, that’s because it isn’t. In between scenes at PakCon, which features an old family rivalry (yes, there’s also some Montague and Capulet action in Lavash), Nazeli and Vanya tour some of Chicago’s sights while they get to know each other. To review, there are the plot beats of Sorry, Bro, PakCon and the reality-esque competition that occurs there, family rivalry, and a Roman Chicago holiday. As I said, Lavash at First Sight needs to be longer in order to support everything Voskuni wants to include.

Two quick asides:

1) If you like your novels on the shorter side, I understand; however, you’re not often going to see me suggest than an author cut/edit. Just write more stuff for me to read!

2) It is actually kind of a Roman holiday because there is a scene set in a Roman bath. No, really, there is.

Perhaps the bigger problem is that Before Sunrise and Roman Holiday don’t have HEAs. (They don’t, and I will not be taking questions.) The plot structure of those films won’t work in a romance novel if the expectation is an HEA. It seems like Voskuni knows this and inserts the family rivalry and the competition at the food convention to give the story a place to go, but those elements belie the breeziness of Nazeli and Vanya’s budding relationship. And while we’re on the subject of too much going in too little of a page count, here seems like a good point to bring up the fact that Lavash at First Sight is a fade to black romance. 

To me, none of these elements go together. Again, I think more time was needed to knit everything together in the most successful way. I liked the story, and I would have liked it better if it had time to breathe.

One thing that I really appreciated about Lavash, however, is the way that Voskuni deals with cell phones. There are text message conversations in almost every book that I’ve read this year, so my reaction to what Voskuni does definitely merits notice. Okay, now I know how this is going to sound, but hear me out: I miss long phone calls. I’m talking about the phone calls that go on for so long that you actually run out of things to say and someone falls asleep. It’s not like cell phones and texting replaced those—if anything, emails and instant messaging did. Plus, you can still call someone on a cell phone, and you don’t even have to worry about phone cords anymore.

What I’m trying to say is that I learned what “dry texting” was a couple of months ago. I mean, I already knew what it was; I just didn’t know that there was a name for it. This will come as a surprise to no one, but I don’t usually write short texts. If I send a short text, I can guarantee that something has been edited out (probably either an aside that begins with the word “also” or has parentheses around it). And, sure, in terms of texting, some people can do a lot with a little. Within the first few chapters of Lavash, we’ve seen multiple exchanges between Nazeli and the tech bro. Not a spoiler alert: he’s not one of those people. Nazeli’s first text to Vanya, on the other hand: quality flirt. 

The cell phone thing is a relatively small detail, but that small detail drew me in. In a genre that is well-known for its conventions and tropes, the small details are often what make us remember a novel or an author. If it isn’t completely clear by now, I wanted more from Lavash at First Sight. That said, I still recommend it, and I will happily read whatever Voskuni writes next.

Liv (she/her) is a trans woman, a professor of English, and a reluctant Southerner. Described (charitably) as passionate and strong-willed, she loves to talk (and talk) about popular culture, queer theory, utopias, time travel, and any other topic that she has magpied over the years. You can find her on storygraph and letterboxd @livvalentine.

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

Posted on by
the cover of The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

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

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 Bisexual, Palestinian American Coming of Age: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Posted on by
You Exist Too Much cover

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

Earlier this month, during a trip to Portland, Oregon to cheer on the UConn Women’s Basketball team in the Sweet 16/Elite 8 (Go Huskies!), my partner and I visited the renowned Powell’s City of Books.  We were perusing its gorgeous shelves when You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (she/her) caught the eye of my partner, who has a knack for making book recommendations that are right in my wheelhouse.  I had been looking for a queer book that highlights the female Arab American experience and the front cover of this book had a single blurb from Roxane Gay, which stated: “My favorite book of the year.” I was sold.

You Exist Too Much was published in 2020 and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.  Arafat’s debut novel follows an unnamed, bisexual, Palestinian American protagonist from her adolescence through her adulthood as she navigates identity, sexuality, addiction, intimacy, and her fraught relationship with her domineering mother.  While the story proceeds in a linear fashion, Arafat uses vignettes into the narrator’s past to contextualize her real-time thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Initially, the narrator’s lack of a name made me feel frustrated.  A name is important; it confers value and respect. Why would Arafat not name her protagonist when the stories and voices of queer women of color are already so stifled?

As I made my way through the novel, Arafat’s choice became clearer. The narrator is constantly fighting to create space for herself.  Her mother often tells her, “You exist too much.” When the narrator broaches even a hypothetical discussion regarding her sexuality with her mother, her mother effectively disowns her, telling her, “Stay away from me and the rest of my family.” The narrator continues to struggle with space in all her romantic relationships, sometimes worrying about taking up too much space, other times feeling like she doesn’t even exist. The narrator’s lack of a name is, in part, a reflection of her disengagement from her mother and the expectation that she take up as little space as possible.

Arafat has a real aptitude for creating characters with depth.  The unnamed protagonist is endearing, yet maddeningly messy, full of love, but also prone to disastrous decision-making. I did not always like her, but I did find myself rooting for her and admiring her resilience and her desire to cultivate healthy love. Her deep empathy for her incredibly flawed mother was achingly beautiful. 

While I did not enjoy the book as much as I hoped I would, I do think it’s an interesting read from a talented writer that’s worth picking up.  If you’d like to read more of Arafat’s writing, she is currently working on a collection of essays.  You can also find her at @zainaara on Instagram.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault, domestic violence, racism, disordered eating, self-harm, homophobia, and biphobia.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

TAGS: ***, Raquel R. Rivera, You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat, Queer, Bisexual, Bisexual Main Character, Palestinian American, Arab American, Palestinian, Coming of Age, Addition, Homophobia, Biphobia

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane

Posted on by
the cover of I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

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

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself follows Kris, a recent widow, as she navigates the world of Shadester and NoShad while raising the child that her wife, Beau, died giving birth to. She has to deal with her own two shadows and with the baby’s two shadows as the kid grows up. Along the way, we get to see what a speculative dystopia where any sort of crime, even accidental, is met with an additional shadow being tacked onto your person would be like.

What initially drew me in is the novel’s point of view. It is told in first person, but a lot of the time, Kris is addressing Beau directly using the “you” pronoun. There are also sections that aren’t really a point of view at all. Formatted as quizzes and impossible crosswords, Crane paints a picture of grief and its aftereffects. The child Kris and Beau have together is simply referred to as “the kid” in most instances; the reader doesn’t find out her actual name until close to the very end of the novel. At first, I was wary of this choice to not name her, but Crane wound up pulling it off spectacularly, coinciding the reveal of the name with Kris’s personal growth from “person who is taking care of this child” to “person who accepts their role as mother to this child.” It really drove the point of Kris’s grief home, and the reveal happened at the perfect time, both for Kris and for the reader.

The world being split into Shads and NoShads was also really interesting. Championed by a president who mirrors a particular former president of ours, the system of shadows is just a way to punish people publicly. Make one mistake—like Kris, who won’t tell us how she got her extra shadow until she’s practically forced to—and you’re marked forever, gifted another shadow in front of everyone who comes to watch the ceremony. Shads are looked down on in society. They only have one day a week where they can grocery shop; Kris is told multiple times that homeschooling the kid is the better option to keep her away from everyone else; and it is all too easy to gain more shadows after you’ve been given your first. The kid receives her second shadow nearly the moment she is born due to Beau’s death, and the world is made so much harder for her to navigate due to something she wasn’t even consciously aware of doing. The government installs cameras in every house and every business, watching twenty four/seven for anyone to make a mistake worthy of an extra shadow. Kris is pretty anxious even before she gets hers. She struggles with her desire for sex that involves BDSM, but that’s the only real issue anyone faces in the sexual identity department. Another thing I liked: everyone in this book is just unapologetically queer. Despite being made of Shads and NoShads, the universe here is a reflection of our own, so it was nice to read about gay and queer folks finding ways to be happy in crappy situations. Honestly, it felt sort of refreshing.

This world is so full and detailed, and I loved getting to explore it with Kris and her rebellious kid who refuses to listen to the rules. However, there was one particular part of the writing that tore me out of the story time after time after time, and it’s how the story is told. In the beginning of the book, we bounce from paragraph to paragraph. There is hardly a single page without some kind of section break for the first one hundred pages; for most of those pages, there’s multiple section breaks, seemingly for no reason. A lot of the story is told through one paragraph at a time. It was disorienting as a reader to bounce from place to place like that so often. I get why Crane did it. They wanted to write in a way that mimicked Kris’s grief. Kris goes back and forth between addressing Beau, along with her past with Beau, and telling the story of her growing child. Maybe, for that reason, it’s meant to be disorienting. Kris can’t tell a cohesive narrative yet because she doesn’t know how to without Beau next to her. However, I had to continuously take breaks from reading in order to digest everything and to get to a point where I wanted to read it again. As the story progresses, the formatting becomes more standard, and we eventually transition almost entirely to regular paragraph and section breaks. Again, this is a reflection of Kris’s grieving process. The easier it gets for her to live in a world post-Beau, the easier it is to read. I just wish I had known about it before I started reading. I don’t think it would have kept me from picking up the book; it just would have been nice to know what to expect.

Spoilers for ending:

The ending of this book was also pretty lackluster to me and felt super rushed, but someone who likes endings where everything turns out great and perfect all of a sudden would be a big fan. I am simply not the person who likes those. Everything just fell in place too perfectly for me. We go through all of these specific trials and tribulations with the world that Crane has built, and then some of the problems just…disappear. However, it’s a happy ending; I can’t be mad about that.

Trigger warnings for: death, bodily harm, drug abuse, homophobia, and BDSM. There is also a chunk of the book dedicated to the kid’s attempt to find out who her biological father is with some tense family dynamics related to her wants.

A Vampire Pandemic: Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin

Posted on by
the cover of Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin

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

Night’s Edge by Liz Kerin isn’t your ordinary vampire book. In this world, vampires are known as Saras: people who are infected with Saratov Syndrome, a brutal pandemic that changes how society functions. You can’t get into a place without first pricking your finger on a scanner meant to identify anyone who is a Sara, and if you go out on your own at night, you’re taking your life into your own hands. Mia is a young woman in her twenties whose mother was turned into a Sara when Mia was a kid, and we follow her as she navigates the codependent, abusive relationship she has with her mother throughout the years.

The best thing going for this book is the world. I was instantly enamored with the concept the moment I started reading, and when things lagged, I stayed because of how interesting I found the Saras. Mia is her mother’s bloodletter. They have a daily ritual: Mia draws her own blood and pours it into her mother’s cup, and that is how her mother gets by without murdering other humans in front of Mia. Treating Saratov Syndrome—treating vampirism—like a pandemic is an inspired idea. I could see the bones of the Covid-19 pandemic shaping the story through curfews, isolation protocols, and an emphasis on people leaving the house at their own risk. As a healthcare worker, this resonated with me and gave the story meaning that I hadn’t expected to find. It’s also such a fresh take on vampires. Saratov Syndrome is probably one of my favorite depictions of vampirism. It’s a disease with no cure. It produces both Saras and people bent on killing them in the name of self-defense. Caffeine, alcohol, and rusted metal become known deterrents to Saras, and you see how the world is changed from our reality in order to make room for that.

The relationship between Mia and her mother is also a high point for Night’s Edge. The book oscillates between present Mia and past Mia, showing us their fraught relationship beginning with her mother’s death/subsequent Sara-turning through where they are now after more than a decade. This is the strongest relationship in the entire book. There’s a love interest, of course—her name is Jade, and she’s everything Mia is not. However, I found myself more intrigued by whatever was going on between Mia and her mom. Throughout the book, you have to watch as Mia slowly figures out that her mother is an abuser, and it hurts when a promise her mother made in the past is broken the next time we switch to the present. When her mother first becomes a Sara, you see her try to avoid hurting Mia for a while, but that soft edge is gone from her in the present. The mother she had before is not the mother she has now. Mia’s life is shaped completely around not exposing her mother’s secret and always being there for her every need or whim. She thinks that she has to spend all of her time protecting her mother from a world that doesn’t understand her the way Mia does. She’s never dated anyone. She doesn’t do anything with her life. She works morning shifts at a bookshop, and she attends to her mom every other moment. This is it. This is Mia.

Then she meets Jade at the coffee shop next door, and her life slowly begins to change. Mia feels an instant spark of connection with Jade. Jade is nice, bright, and seems to feel that same spark for Mia. Their relationship takes shape quickly. Suddenly, Mia is seeing a world outside of her mother’s control. You would think, then, that their relationship would be really interesting. However, Jade is a cardboard cutout of a person. That sounds harsh, I know. She’s supposed to be a stark opposite to Mia, a fun-loving, colorful-eyeliner-wearing, rocker chick who shows Mia what life could be like if she got out from under her mother’s thumb. But that’s all she is. There are no moments of growth for her, no character development, nothing. Jade is the same person at the end of the novel that she is at the beginning of it. While Mia starts to seriously consider and make an effort to leave her mother behind and go with Jade across the country, Jade is just kind of there, an escape plan, a plot device to move Mia’s story forward. Anytime the two interacted, I found myself wishing that Jade would give me something more to hold onto. I wanted Mia to see Jade and figure out what her life could be herself, without Jade telling her what she could do and where she could go. (Spoilers follow) Jade offers to let Mia come with her when she leaves to go on her next adventure, and Mia agrees, following someone else’s plan for her life again. Mia eventually choosing not to go with her is one of the few times Mia makes a decision for herself, and I saw her growing as a character when she did that. She doesn’t make a lot of her own choices, so I cheered for her whenever she did.

All in all, this was an okay read. The end of the story is a bit of a letdown to me (Mia fails to make a decision, and something happens anyway), but other readers might not see it as such. If you want a refreshing take on vampires and codependency, give this a shot! Trigger warnings for: child abuse, blood, death, violence/injury (including domestic violence), and a scene involving active shooters at a musical event.

LA as a Not-So-Urban Jungle: Undergrowth by Chel Hylott and Chelsea Lim

Posted on by
the cover of undergrowth

Bookshop.org Affiliate Link

Seventeen-year-old Mariam finds herself surviving a Los Angeles that has been overrun by a magic jungle of horror. Along the way, she meets a group of other survivors, and together they become a family. But Mariam has her secrets. She magically heals and cannot die thanks to a deal with the devil her father made on her behalf. And the jungle they find themselves in has been caused by her father as well. She must learn to put her faith in others and earn their trust in return to undo the mess he made.

There’s a strong sense of setting here that feels a lot like Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. The lush descriptions of an LA gone to hell under a horrific jungle and the introduction of Mariam as a tough-as-nails type make it an intriguing story and give it a strong start. Unfortunately, that doesn’t hold.

Mariam tries to keep herself emotionally distant to avoid the pain of loss but ends up getting attached to a rag-tag found family. But she still tries to hold her secrets, and that ends up hurting them. At every turn in the story when Mariam is given a chance to be honest, she chooses to lie and continues to create a rift between herself and her new family. She never seems to learn that taking this route causes more pain and danger, and so it doesn’t feel like she undergoes a major character arc.

Additionally, the pacing happens too fast to feel like her attachments are believable. Her crush on Camila quickly evolves into a deep connection between the two girls, but it doesn’t seem organic. Despite this, the relationship that starts to blossom between them is sweet, and it adds a sense of levity to the apocalyptic situation.

Throughout the novel, the author sprinkles details about Mariam’s cultural heritage, with tidbits like talking about her Ramadan dinners and the names she calls her family by. Readers can appreciate the subtle way Mariam’s background comes to light, giving her some depth without overexplaining everything.

There is also a transgender character, Hana, whose identity is revealed in a moment when her hair has to be cut because of lice. It adds another interesting layer to the story without turning into a teaching moment. The author writes many of these character revelations well, showing representations of body dysmorphia and disability in the middle of the end of the world.

As the novel ends, it all happens rather fast and feels like it gets tied up in a neat bow, considering the situation. There is a lack of satisfaction with so many unanswered questions about the world itself. It’s never discussed exactly how long the jungle apocalypse occurred until the very end. The story never shows how the world outside of LA coped or reacted to the events outside of a few glimmers of a military scene at the beginning.

Overall, none of the characters have much development, especially not Mariam or her dad, the villain. But it does get a happily ever after for her and Camila, and it was a fun adventure.

Sapphic Satanic Panic: Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash

Posted on by
the cover of Rainbow Black

Bookshop.org Affiliate Link

In her debut adult novel, Rainbow Black (March 19, 2024), Maggie Thrash (she/her), author of the critically acclaimed young adult graphic memoir Honor Girl, delivers a compelling, witty, and often moving account of Lacey Bond, whose life is forever changed when her parents are arrested and prosecuted for allegedly committing acts of ritualistic child sexual abuse at their rural, in-home daycare during the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The story begins in New Hampshire and spans 27 years (from 1983 to 2010). It is told in flashbacks from Lacey’s point of view.  In the first few pages of the book, readers find out that adult Lacey and her girlfriend, Gwen, have been implicated in a murder from fourteen years earlier. The story then flashes back to the ‘80s and unfolds over the course of Lacey’s adolescence and early adult life.

Lacey’s parents are arrested when she is 13 and they remain incarcerated pending trial. As a result, Lacey and her 20-year-old sister, Éclair, who is as brash as she is beautiful, are left to navigate their legal defense, as well as the media circus that ensues. As Lacey struggles to come to terms with the reality of what is happening to her family, she is also coming to terms with her sexuality.  While she and her family have seemingly always known that she is a lesbian, her exploration of this aspect of her identity is undoubtedly impacted by the crisis in which they find themselves. Although adult Lacey is somewhat insufferable, Thrash endeared me to young Lacey, who is paradoxically both precocious and naïve, and above all else, a survivor.

As a lady loving lawyer, I was drawn to this book because of its queer and legal themes. For the most part, I loved Thrash’s writing style.  It is smart, incisive, and wry, and she is a great storyteller.  I also particularly appreciated her shoutout to the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program, which was a highlight of my bookish childhood.  I would definitely be interested in reading more of her work. That being said, I could have done without the constant foreshadowing. While I understand that the book was marketed as “part murder mystery, part gay international fugitive love story”, the repeated hinting at what was to come felt like overkill in a novel which was naturally unfolding for me. There was also an instance of authorial intrusion (a literary device in which the author breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the reader, interrupting the narrative flow of the text) that was somewhat jarring and felt unnecessary as it did not advance the plot or add to the story in any meaningful way. I also thought the 395-page book was a bit long-winded and could have still been just as powerful, if not more so, had it been shortened.

Overall, I really liked Rainbow Black and would recommend it if you’re looking for an interesting story that weaves together queer identity, intrigue, and the law. Special thanks to HarperCollins Publishers and Edelweiss for the advanced copy.  Rainbow Black is currently scheduled to be released on March 19, 2024.

Trigger warnings for child sexual abuse, sexual assault, statutory rape, drug abuse, murder, homophobia, transphobia, and racial slurs.  

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

A Dramatic Supernatural YA Horror Read: Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson

Posted on by
the cover of Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson

Bookshop.org Affiliate Link

Here Lies Olive by Kate Anderson is a young adult fiction novel that follows sixteen-year-old Olive as she navigates unwitting friendships to save a ghost that she accidentally-on-purpose brings into the material plane in order to find out if the Nothing that she saw when she “died” after an allergic reaction is really all there is at the end. She is constantly thinking about the Nothing; it becomes such a preoccupation and such a big source of anxiety for her that she abruptly ends her friendship with her best friend Davis, and she has to figure out how to be by his side again post-Nothing when his new girlfriend pulls both Olive and Olive’s school enemy Maren into his life.

I’m not usually a YA person, but the premise of Here Lies Olive was so good that I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did! I liked this story a lot more than I expected. The author really captures the drama of being a teenager in a way that I found myself able to get into. At times when I typically would have started rolling my eyes or DNF-ing any other YA novel, I instead found myself able to accept the over-the-top reactions to the dramatic situations Olive and her friends find themselves in due to the way Kate Anderson set up the story. Of course Olive is dramatic; she’s a teen who died, came back to life, and is now terrified about the dark, lonely fate that she thinks awaits her and everyone she’s ever cared about. Of course she stopped hanging out with her best friend and thinks that losing his friendship will hurt less than losing him to the Nothing; she’s a teenager. She doesn’t know any better. I completely understood where Olive was coming from. It reminded me of how big every emotion felt during my own teenage years, and I didn’t even have ghosts or the Nothing to deal with. Olive is definitely the sort of character I could see a younger me finding a lot of solace in.

I was also pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the budding relationship between Olive and Maren. I’m a big fan of enemies to lovers, and while their rivalry wasn’t as strong or visceral as I typically like my rivalries to be, it still seemed plenty important to Olive and Maren, and that was good enough for me to keep reading. A slow-burn has to be a very specific brand of slow-burn for me to love it, and I think Olive and Maren almost hit that mark within this genre.

What really kept me reading, though, was the supernatural aspect of the book. I really love the way Kate Anderson made sure to keep the ghostly details going throughout the story. I was worried that, at some point, the ghost stuff would drop off to be replaced by just regular teenage life, but the book’s supernatural element was up and in your face until the very end. Even the town Olive lives in is spooky! Nearly everybody has a job somehow associated with death, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one hundred percent of the population claimed that Halloween was their favorite holiday. Olive always thinks of the Nothing once she comes back from it, and the moment she brings Jay’s ghost into the fold, she stays with him, intent on righting her wrong and getting the confirmation she craves about what truly happens after death. Olive never loses her curiosity with the thing that led me to pick up the book in the first place, and that kept me holding on when I could have dropped off.

Here Lies Olive still contains some of the regular qualms I have with the Young Adult genre: a villain revealed in the third act who the main character could have figured out was the villain in the first act, parents who talk to their teenagers like they either have no time for them or like they’ve all gone to therapy, and a solution to a problem at the end that feels way too perfect. But I still enjoyed it, and I would easily recommend this book to anyone who wants a YA novel with a bit of a dark twist.

Content warnings for death (obviously), ghosts, and some gore that I didn’t expect but actually really liked.