In Elissa Janine Hoole’s Kiss the Morning Star, Anna takes a roadtrip with her best-friend-for-years, Kat, to find proof of God’s love. It’s a few weeks before Anna’s 18th birthday, and a few months after her mom died in a house fire and her pastor father stopped preaching, and speaking altogether. A lesbian, Young Adult, coming-of-ageRead More
Anna K. reviews Times Two by Kristen Henderson and Sarah Kate Ellis
Sarah Kate Ellis is the vice president of marketing at Real Simple magazine, and Kristen Henderson is the bassist and a founding member of the band Antigone Rising. And they’re a lesbian couple who both became pregnant via the same donor on the same day. Terrible plan, you think? Maybe…if it had been theRead More
Anna K. reviews Wildthorn by Jane Eagland
With 19th-century British asylum scenes reminiscent of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Eagland’s YA novel, Wildthorn, is in turns suspenseful, sad, and romantic. Louisa Cosgrove is sent by her brother to the home of a wealthy family to be a companion for another young lady. But instead of a cushy manor, she finds herself left at WildthornRead More
Anna K. reviews Inferno: A Poet’s Novel by Eileen Myles
Poet and former artistic director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project Eileen Myles—who is also a lesbian, although “lesbian poet” is an identity with which her protagonist grapples—presents Inferno as “a poet’s novel,” but what keeps it from nonfiction is unclear. It reads as a rambling, associative, nonlinear memoir of her career, as she name-drops from 1970s GreenwichRead More
Anna Katterjohn reviewed Come and Go by Lee Harlem Robinson
Lee Harlem Robinson, the fictional narrator of Come and Go (and the pseudonym for first-time novelist Hannelore Arbyn), was transferred to Hong Kong after a relationship with her boss in London. As the novel opens, Lee has just gotten out of a relationship with Stella, who left her for an intern, and she is farRead More
Anna Katterjohn reviewed Shadow Swans by Laura Thomas
Laura Thomas’s Shadow Swans is by no means a romance novel. It is a love story. It is also a story of change, of the deliberate destruction of all that comes after a coming-of-age. Ruby Cooper is a 22-year-old millionaire; she created a social networking website for computer geeks. She chooses to make her homeRead More