Candace Walsh’s book, Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity, had me from the very first page, which features a sensual description of making seafood-mushroom risotto in a steamy, cramped New York apartment kitchen. Right off the bat, Walsh displays her talent for evoking rich, palpable settings, and she continues to doRead More
Casey reviews Y: The Last Man
You’d probably expect there to be never-ending lesbian action in a science-fiction series that imagines a post-apocalyptic world where all mammals with XY chromosomes have suddenly and en masse dropped dead. In the Y: The Last Man graphic novels, though, the women have a lot of other important things to do—you, know, like making sureRead More
Casey reviews Among Other Things, I’ve Taken up Smoking by Aoibheann Sweeney
I expected to love Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel Among Other Things, I’ve Taken up Smoking (2007). This, unfortunately, was not meant to be. This is not to say that Among Other Things doesn’t have its good points. It’s a novel whose queerness gradually sneaks up on you: a novel of subtlety above all else, andRead More
Casey reviews The Last Nude by Ellis Avery
I picked up Ellis Avery’s latest novel The Last Nude after reading Danika’s glowing review of it earlier this year. It’s not every author who can claim your lifelong allegiance after you’ve read only one of her works, but I agree with Danika that Avery is one of these writers and reading The Last Nude is enough to convince you. This historical novel, set in Paris in the decadent 1920s period between the two worldRead More
Casey reviews S/he by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Do you know those books that come into your life exactly at the right time? Minnie Bruce Pratt’s memoir S/he is just that book for me right now. Although she’s a woman from quite a different time and place than me—she’s a white woman from the Southern States who came out as a lesbian inRead More
Casey reviews Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
Although Jeanette Winterson’s 1997 novel Gut Symmetries is a book about a bisexual love triangle, it’s nothing like what you might expect from that description. For one thing, it’s not a straight forward narrative of boy meets girl, girl meets girl. You know from early on that Alice, the main character, falls in love withRead More
Casey reviews Dare, Truth or Promise by Paula Boock
I read New Zealand author Paula Boock’s young adult lesbian novel Dare Truth or Promise (1997) in one day, practically in one sitting. I have a soft spot for queer YA anyway, but I really loved this book for its sweet, simple style. Boock writes in a very straight-forward, deceptively plain way that is reminiscentRead More
Casey reviews Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon
Ann Bannon’s pulp novel Odd Girl Out (the first of the famous Beebo Brinker series) is the first, and so far only, 1950s lesbian pulp novel I’ve read. I knew vaguely going into this that things didn’t usually work out so well for the lesbians in these books—publishers usually insisted on a distinct lack ofRead More
Casey reviews The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
I read Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt soon after finishing Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novel Odd Girl Out (1957), so I was understandably feeling jaded and a bit guarded. Bannon’s novel, for those of you who haven’t read it, ends quite depressingly when one of the two lovers, Beth, decides that lesbianismRead More
Casey reviews The Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily m. danforth
The first sentence of emily m. danforth’s much-talked about debut young adult novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, is one of those opening lines you’ll never forget, like Jane Austen’s brilliant opening to Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be inRead More