Picture this: you’re me, enjoying your whirlwind first-ever trip to the iconic Powell’s Books in Portland, and you spot a staff recommendation tag with the words “asexual lesbian” prominently featured. You are, in fact, an ace lesbian, so you’re certainly not used to accidentally finding representation in the bookstore. Naturally, you immediately pick up the book inRead More
Family Matters: Next Time Will Be Our Turn by Jesse Q Sutanto
Next Time Will Be Our Turn was the perfect book to read on an airplane, because so much of it involves characters travelling from one country to another, reflecting on what makes a home a home and what it means to live somewhere that doesn’t have room for their whole self. Fair warning, though: itRead More
A Claustrophobic Sapphic Gothic: The Salvage by Anbara Salam Review
Before I get into it, I will say that my favourite part of this book was how information was slowly revealed, so I recommend going into this without knowing much about it. If you’re in the mood for a claustrophobic gothic novel set on a small, frozen-over island, pick this one up and skip overRead More
A Lesbian Vampire Classic: The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
I picked up The Gilda Stories a few years ago after it was published as a Vintage Classic in 2023: 32 years after its release. I was curious to see what book had been blurbed by Sarah Waters and excited by the fact it was a black lesbian vampire story. To describe it with thoseRead More
A Sapphic Dragon-Slaying Knight: Brighter Than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang Review
In Brighter Than Scale, Swifter than Flame, Neon Yang gives us a bright, fast-paced novella about dragons and knights and clandestine feelings. I have to admit, I was initially drawn in by the luscious cover art by Tran Nguyen, featuring a tough woman in beautiful armor with a second gorgeous, tattooed woman draped over her back asRead More
A Dread-Filled Gothic Thriller: The Salvage by Anbara Salam
The Salvage by Anbara Salam is a gothic literary thriller set on a small Scottish island in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The protagonist is Marta, a trailblazing marine archaeologist sent to investigate a Victorian shipwreck on behalf of a local wealthy family descended from the ship’s captain. On her first dive, she seesRead More
Old Gods, New Cities, and An Arsonist’s Lullaby: When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-Yi Lee
One of my favorite tropes in fantasy is magic linked to body horror. Especially more so when it is treated as a volatile resource, calling into question the price of chasing power. Naturally, I had a fantastic time with Wen-Yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly (October 21, 2025): a bloody, fiery saga about the horror andRead More
A Wild Dystopian Ride: Road to Ruin by Hana Lee
This is a post-apocalyptic ride of a novel with many a comparison to the Mad Max movies. Desert wastelands, thrilling motorcycle rides, and dinosaur-like creatures await in these pages! Jin-Lu, our main character, is a mage-bike courier, which means she has an aesthetically cool and extremely dangerous job taking messages and cargo across the wastelandsRead More
An Utterly Strange and Utterly Beautiful Murder Ballad Retold: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar’s highly anticipated solo debut novella, was released in March 2025. Like a ravening beast, I fell upon my preorder package and tore through the novella in a single sitting. It’s 100 pages exactly, from the very first beautiful linocut print to the last, so it isn’t a Commitment. I’llRead More
Haunted in Every Sense: The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence highlights the power of words. As it is set in a bookstore and the author herself owns Birchbark Books, I anticipated a richly detailed sense of place and community as well as a clear love of books. The Sentence delivers those things along with a complex look at what it means to be haunted. (ContentRead More
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