When I first picked up Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, I was unsure of how I would feel about reading it. I have never been a huge fan of anything nonfiction, and I knew it would be a tough book to get through. Even so, I began reading it and was quickly pulledRead More
Family Can Be Monstrous: Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell
In some ways, I have a harder time describing this book now than I did before I read it. That isn’t to say that it’s dense or confusing. But the tone is unique, which makes it hard to categorize. You could call this a sapphic monster romance, but that doesn’t feel quite right. It’s definitelyRead More
The Redemption of Daya Keane by Gia Gordon Review
This book is so delightfully, perfectly messy. Titular character Daya lives in a small, conservative town in Arizona, surrounded by small-minded, conservative classmates and a small-minded, conservative mom. It’s a tough place to be queer. When Daya begins a friendship that turns to something more with megachurch poster-girl Beckett Wild, she might be making moreRead More
A Two-Spirit Journey by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer Review
A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer was this year’s winner of Canada Reads, and if you’re not Canadian, I can tell you that’s a big deal. It’s a TV/radio program where five “personalities” (celebrities of some kind) debate which book the country should beRead More
Memory as Storytelling: Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch Review
Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch has been on my to-read list for years; I’ve heard nothing but excellent things about that memoir. So, when I saw that she had new one out (that I could talk about on the All the Books podcast), I had to pick it up! Reading the Waves ended upRead More
The Troubled Teen Industry and Other Monsters: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
In this YA horror novel, five teens are forced to participate in a new “wilderness therapy program” called REVIVE. Some of them are kidnapped in the night and escorted here by force. They face 50 days hiking through the wilderness and talking about their trauma with two unqualified twenty-somethings. This is based on real programsRead More
Folk Horror and the Troubled Teen Industry: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould Review
In European folk and fairytales, a journey through the woods represents the characters’ coming of age—their passage from the pastoral, relative security of familial and familiar hearths into a fraught, shadowy place where metaphors for social anxieties lurk around every corner. Only with wit and friendship can one come out the other side, though theyRead More
This Queer Horror Book Will Haunt You: Model Home by Rivers Solomon
This was my first Rivers Solomon book, and from the first page, I understood why I’d heard such good things about them. Here are the opening lines: “Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me,Read More
A Hardboiled Lesbian Detective Comic: Deprog by Tina Horn, Lisa Sterle, Gab Contreras, and DaNi
If a gritty noir graphic novel with a “hardboiled hard drinking leather loving dyke detective” sounds up your alley, pick Deprog up—though you might want to give the content warnings a glance first. I thought that was what I wanted, but I quickly realized this was a darker read than I’m currently in the headspaceRead More
A Succubus, a Fallen Angel, and a Forbidden Romance: The Fall That Saved Us by Tamara Jerée
While I am usually pretty ambivalent about book covers, every once and a while a book will come along with such a beautiful cover that I can’t help but add it to my to-read list. One such book is Tamara Jerée’s The Fall That Saved Us. Once I read the summary, though, it went from just beingRead More
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