I have never been so confused as I was while reading Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. I felt exceedingly silly, like I was missing a trick (or several) about the impenetrable prose and the seemingly nonsensical character behaviour. I was expecting to be wowed, amazed, startlingly impressed by it as a work of literature. Jeanette WintersonRead More
Sash S. reviews Wilder Girls by Rory Powers
“The Tox took teacher after teacher. Rules crumbling to dust and fading away, until only the barest bones were left.” Body horror. Boarding school. Queer girls. Wilder Girls promises a lot of cool things. Marketed as ‘a feminist Lord of the Flies’, one expects a grimdark pastiche of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, mixed with comfortingly familiarRead More
Megan Casey reviews Fighting for Air by Marsha Mildon
This book is a prime example of why ebook samples should be longer. If Fighting for Air had been available as an ebook when I read it, I would have given up after the ten-percent sample that Amazon offers. At the time, however, there was no ebook—New Victoria came out with one in 2016—21 years after itsRead More
Mars Reviews Stray: Memoir of a Runaway by Tanya Marquardt
Content warning for child abuse, alcoholism, incest, domestic violence, dissociation. This review does contain spoilers. Tanya Marquardt was sixteen years old when she ran away from the home she shared with her mother, stepfather, and assorted siblings in the small Canadian town of Port Alberni. Her flight was strategic, timed right for when Tanya becameRead More
Gail Marlene Schwartz reviews Maggie Terry by Sarah Schulman
“Everyone was in a state of confusion because the president was insane.” –Maggie Terry by Sarah Schulman Maggie Terry is longtime lesbian author Sarah Schulman’s second dive into the crime fiction genre (her first was The Sophie Horowitz Story). The novel explores the life of an addict, post-rehab, set against the backdrop of the TrumpRead More
Megan G reviews Until You See Me by Roberta Degnore
In a Los Angeles train station, a body is found in the trunk of Mrs. Pearl Tild. A body so disfigured, the police cannot even identify its gender. Months earlier, Pearl Tild and her husband Martin are living what seems like wedded bliss. Then, at a dinner party, the mysterious Clare Walsh introduces herself toRead More
Megan Casey reviews Cyanide Wells by Marcia Muller
This book is interesting not so much for the mystery, which is a bit less than so-so, but for the fact that it was penned by Muller, who, along with P.D. James, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, are often considered the first modern women detective novelists. James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) was the first—andRead More
Danika reviews When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri
There has been a ton of buzz around When Katie Met Cassidy. Whenever I see this much attention being given to a sapphic book, of course my ears prick up. Let’s face it, queer women books don’t usually get much press outside of a handful of specialized sites (like this one!) When I read an article byRead More
Guest Lesbrarian Jess H. reviews Birds of a Feather by Jackie Calhoun
Birds of a Feather by Jackie Calhoun is one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. And no, I haven’t read The Well of Loneliness. It is hard for me to think of a single moment of joy in Calhoun’s contemporary romance (published 1999). I use the term “romance” loosely, because romance seems toRead More
Genevra Littlejohn reviews Beneath the Silver Rose by T.S Adrian
Shadiya is a prized courtesan of the Silver Rose, one of dozens of elegant Sisters who serve the men–though never the women–of the land of Anderholm. Fiercer-tempered than any of her compatriots, Shadiya makes what would be reckoned by many in her position as a mistake; rather than allowing herself to be raped, she killsRead More