When I read YA, particularly contemporary YA and most especially sapphic contemporary YA, I always approach it from the perspective of my sixteen-year-old self. If this book had existed when I was a teenager, what would I have thought of it? Zakiya N. Jamal’s If We Were a Movie would have caught my attention right from the Hannah MontanaRead More
A Must Read for Fans of Carmen Maria Machado: Sympathy for Wild Girls: Stories by Demree McGhee Review
This is a collection of stories about queer Black women that is going to live in my head for a long time. The opening story is about a young woman who has been raised on stories about violence and murder of Black girls like her at the hands of men. She’s consumed by this narrative,Read More
A TBR Shame Spiral in Six Titles
As a librarian, my TBR (to-be-read) shelf is never ending. Every time I think I am going to crack down on my whole bookshelf of unread books, something amazing comes through the returns chute, or my VERY well-meaning coworkers share something that they think I will love (most times they are right on the money)Read More
Sci-Fi as Protest: Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
I don’t think I’ve ever been so pulled into a novel by the dedication, author’s note, and epigraph. (The epigraph to Part One is “i did not come to preach of peace / for that’s not the hunted’s duty.” -Danez Smith.) In the author’s note, Johnson explains the inspiration behind this book coming from her time participating in the 62-day sit in at Nashville’s Tennessee State Capitol. I found myself writing down multiple quotations, including…
An Open Wound of a Novel: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review
This is a book I respect, and it’s one I struggled to get through. The subject matter is difficult—not only is it set in a near-future dystopia where prisoners fight each other to the death for a chance at freedom, but it also includes footnotes about the real-life atrocities of the prison-industrial complex. I canRead More
Resisting from the Margins in The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe et al.
As someone who enjoyed Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer album and accompanying film, I was thrilled to finally read The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, an anthology of five stories cowritten by Janelle Monáe with Danny Lore, Yohanca Delgado, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sheree Renée Thomas, and Eve L. Ewing. This book returns to the dystopian worldRead More
In Defense of Messy Main Characters: Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie Review
I can’t count how many people I’ve recommended The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie since I read it ten years ago. It’s just such an atmospheric, beautifully written, absorbing story. And yet, when she came out with her next novel, Skye Falling, I inexplicably didn’t pick it up. Since then, Skye Falling hasRead More
Sliding Doors Meets Mad Max: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
When The Space Between Worlds came out in 2020, it was all anyone was talking about on Book Riot. (That’s the site I work for now and wrote for then.) It’s not often a sapphic book gets that much attention outside the queer book world, and the premise immediately hooked me. So, of course, IRead More
It’s Never Too Late to Learn: Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory Review
Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory (out April 8, 2025) is a book that reminded me that I do actually like romance novels. If I go too long without reading one because my head is stuck in tragic fantasy-and-horror land, I start to delude myself into thinking that I hate cheesy romance and feel-good stories. Fortunately,Read More
Horror that Lingers: We Came to Welcome You by Vincent Tirado Review
Mesmerizing, sickening, echoing-hole-in-your-stomach, roller coaster lurch of a creeping inferno: Vincent Tirado’s We Came to Welcome You: A Novel of Suburban Horror is all that and more. Released in the last quarter of 2024, to the tune of “The Other Black Girl meets Midsommar,” the book takes the banal normalcy of racism and colonialism and twists it until itsRead More
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