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Culinary Combat School: Cooking With Monsters by Jordan Alsaqa & Vivian Truong

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the cover of Cooking with Monsters Vol 1

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Recently, I read and loved Basil and Oregano by Melissa Capriglione, a sapphic YA graphic novel set at a magiculinary school. I am delighted to say that Cooking with Monsters—one of my most-anticipated books of the year—is also a sapphic YA graphic novel set at a fantasy cooking school. In this case, though, cooking is only one half of the challenge. Just as important is the students’ ability to fight monsters, which they will then prepare as gourmet meals.

This was such a delight to read, and I can’t wait for volume two. This book establishes a diverse cast of characters and their relationships with each other, as well as the basics of how training happens at Gourmand School of Culinary Combat.

The main character is Hana. When she was a kid, her and her best friend Bobby were rescued from a monster by a warrior chef, and ever since, it’s been her dream to become a warrior chef herself. Now Hana and Bobby are both starting their first year. The cast is rounded out by Hana and Bobby’s roommates as well as Hana’s love interest and academic rival, Olivia.

While Hana is immediately smitten with Olivia, after a promising introduction, they quickly get off on the wrong foot. Hana is disappointed that her hero isn’t the one to mentor her, while Olivia is resentful that Hana doesn’t appreciate the mentor she does have: Chef Graham. Unbeknownst to Hana, Chef Graham is Olivia’s grandfather, and he swore he’d never take on another student. Olivia is hurt that he’d decide to train Hana over her. This initial misstep spirals into more rivalry and miscommunication between them. Meanwhile, Bobby is becoming closer with Olivia and he and Hana are drifting apart.

While I felt like the beginning of this volume was a little bumpy, I was soon pulled into this world and the well-rounded characters. First of all, there are the monsters, which are all part animal and part food (think Mooseshrooms, which grow mushroom from their antlers). Some are violent and are defeated through combat. Others are cared for, with their fruits responsibly harvested. They’re such a fun visual element.

I mentioned already the diversity of the cast, but that really is woven into the story. Hana and Bobby are coded Japanese and Vietnamese, and they face racism and anti-immigrant sentiments from some people in their community—including a second year student who used to harass them. Olivia is Black. One side character is nonbinary, and another is a trans man with top surgery scars. I often lose track of a long list of characters, but each of them is distinct in both design and personality.

It’s this group of characters that, alongside the monsters, is the main strength of the graphic novel. I can definitely see how this can support a whole series, because I’m intrigued by even the characters we’ve only seen briefly. We’ve also gotten a look into Hana’s own weaknesses she has to overcome in her training, and I look forward to seeing what subsequent years are like at the academy!

This definitely lived up to my (high) expectations, and as I just keep saying in this review, I can’t wait for volume two to come out!

A Queer, Angry Take on Doctor Who: The Infinite Miles by Hannah Fergesen

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This was such a let down.

I used to be a big fan of Doctor Who (see my review of Queers Dig Time Lords) and am currently trying to catch up on the newest seasons. So when I saw a queer sci-fi book coming out that drew inspiration from Doctor Who, it sounded like the perfect entertaining audiobook listen. 

When I read the description, it seemed even more fun. The Doctor character, the Argonaut, doubled as a David Bowie-esque singer! Instead of the Tardis, there’s Argo, a shapeshifting sentient spaceship that is often a muscle car. The main character, Harper, and her best friends Peggy, were huge fans of the TV show Infinite Voyage, until the real-life Argonaut swept Peggy away for adventure, leaving Harper behind. When Peggy is taken over by a dangerous alien parasite called the Incarnate, Harper has to join the Argonaut to save Peggy and the universe with the power of love!

Each of these components sounds like a wacky space adventure that matches the fun of watching an old Doctor Who episode. The problem is that despite all of this, the tone is decidedly dour. Harper is an angry, resentful main character. She hates the Argonaut for getting Peggy into this situation. She is still angry that Peggy left to go on an adventure with their shared hero without telling her.

The Argonaut brings no more levity to the situation. He feels guilty for what happened to Peggy, and he’s given up on being able to help anyone. When Harper and the Argonaut meet, they have one conversation before he abandons her in the 1970s “for her own safety,” to Harper’s fury. She then scrambles to survive, try to find a way out, and search for answers of how to help Peggy.

This ended up feeling like a slog to me, especially because I was expecting a romp through space and time. Maybe this is better suited to Doctor Who fans who preferred the Matt Smith run. 

Then, because this is the Lesbrary, we have to address the queer content, because I spent 80% of the book not sure if it had a queer main character. We do get a single chapter from the Argonaut’s perspective, where we see his background, which was my favourite part of the book. Miles (his actual name) was a queer kid growing up in a small town where he didn’t fit in, and as a young man, he’s taken in by the Argonaut Jason (as Miles dubs him). He later becomes his own idol, the David Bowie-esque singer, to inspire his younger self. He also changes sex and gender with Argo’s help several times, in a similar way to the Doctor’s regeneration, but by choice.

As for our main character, Harper, we don’t get confirmation that she’s queer until near the end of the book. It’s kind of treated as a big reveal, that she’s in love with Peggy and could never admit it, but I don’t subscribe to sexuality as a plot twist, and besides, this being reviewed on the Lesbrary tells you there’s eventual confirmation the main character is queer. Treating this as a reveal felt weird to me, especially because we’re in Harper’s head almost the entire book. The last time Peggy and Harper saw each other before Peggy went missing is referenced throughout, but we only get the flashback at the end, which is when Harper (almost, kind of, but not quite) admits her real feelings for Peggy. To be clear, I don’t mean this in a This Author Is Problematic way, just that it personally rubbed me the wrong way. Miles and Peggy’s queerness is present from the beginning.

This paragraph has spoilers for the end of the book. In some version of this story, I think this reveal maybe could have worked–especially if we already knew Harper was queer/bisexual from the beginning, but it was her feelings specifically for Peggy that she was repressing. Then, the power of queer love could save the universe at the end–I’m definitely not above that story! But while the universe and Peggy are saved at the end, when Harper wakes up at the hospital, Peggy has left. We spend the whole book waiting for Harper and Peggy to get back to each other, and then there is precisely zero interaction between them after the climactic battle between good and evil. There’s no resolution to their relationship (whether friendship or romantic relationship), even though it was the core of the entire story. And Peggy ends up feeling kind of disposable to the narrative: the “happy ending” just involves Miles and Harper going on adventures. We don’t know anything about post-Incarnate Peggy (and only a little about Peggy in general). Why did she leave? Where did she go? Is she happy? (End of spoilers)

I ended up finishing this audiobooks on about 2.6 speed, because I just wanted to get to the end. Unfortunately, it didn’t deliver for me. This has a high average rating on Goodreads, so I appear to be alone in this, but it was the mismatch between tones as well as the treatment of Harper’s feelings for Peggy that didn’t work for me. Maybe if I had been prepared for it to be a heavy read and not a fun space adventure, I might have liked it more—but in my defense, the description for this book calls it a “wacky time-traveling sci-fi odyssey wrapped in an elegiac ode to lost friendship and a clever homage to Doctor Who,” so I think I can be forgiven for thinking it would be fun and not bleak!

This was one I was so excited for and ended up feeling disappointed.

For Nerdy Queer Teens Past and Present: Out of Character by Jenna Miller

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Talk about a painfully relatable read. I’m almost glad this wasn’t around when I was a teen, because I’m not sure I could handle reading it then!

Cass is a fat, nerdy queer teenager who is obsessed with a book series and roleplays as one of the characters in an online community. I was a fat nerdy queer teen who was obsessed with a book series and roleplayed in an online community! She’s a chronic overthinker, I’m a chronic overthinker. Needless to say, I cared a lot about Cass and felt protective of her while reading.

Cass has escaped into the world of roleplaying to avoid her parents’ fighting. Then, at the very beginning of the book, her mom sits her down to have a conversation. She met someone online, and she’s moving to be with him and divorcing Cass’s dad. She immediately gets up and drives off to another state. I feel like I was more angry at her than Cass was.

Her mother was the most important person her life, the one who overdoes holidays and ropes her and her dad into a million traditions, the one who was there for her in all her lowest moments. She was a central pillar of Cass’s life—and she just drives off after a five minute conversation. I won’t spoil anything, but she hardly gets in touch with Cass at all after that.

Needless to say, Cass is devastated. So she spends even more time in her roleplay world. She stays up late, ignoring her homework and checking her phone constantly. She’s struggled with gaming addiction before, so she keeps this part of her life from her dad and her IRL friends, because she can’t stand the idea of this being taken away from her.

Some of her best friends are online, and they are a big source of support. One of them is Rowan, who plays the other half of her ship, and they’ve always been there for each other. (Psst, I also roleplayed a gay couple with my best friend as a teen… I told you this was relatable.)

Then, something unexpected happens. Taylor, the girl Cass has had a crush on for the longest time, asks her out. Suddenly, she has a girlfriend. It’s not perfect timing, because Cass is struggling, but she’s not about to turn down this opportunity—even if Cass feels a little awkward with her, especially because she’s hiding both her online life and her family struggles from her.

The chapters are interspersed with roleplay scenes, which might not work for everyone, but was very nostalgic for me, and they nicely complemented what was happening in Cass’s AFK world.

As I mentioned, I felt so protective of Cass. Her and her dad are doing their best to make a new normal at home, so Cass hides how much she’s struggling. Her grades begin to drop, she forgets to apply to universities, and it feels like no one is noticing that she’s in free fall. My heart broke for her, and I understood completely why she felt helpless to reach out, especially as each problem compounded, making her life feel like a house of cards.

It was also nice to read about a main character who is so confident both in being fat and being a lesbian, especially as a teenager. There still aren’t many examples of that in media.

Although obviously I have talked a lot about Cass here, none of the characters felt one note—not even the peripheral ones, like Cass’s best friend’s girlfriend. It would be easy to write Taylor’s character in a way that excuses Cass not totally clicking with her, but she seems great, and I felt for her.

The conflict all comes from people having different perspectives, which are each valid. Cass’s roleplay friends are hurt and angry that she’s hiding them from the people in her life, for instance, which is understandable—even as Cass isn’t ready to have anyone question this part of her life.

While there are a lot of elements to this story, including family as well as romance, it was the friendships that stood out to me, and how seriously they’re taken. They’re often messy and imperfect, but they’re also so important to Cass, and they can be unexpected and beautiful even when they’re messy.

I highly recommend this for nerdy queer teens and those who once were nerdy queer teens—though I’m sure lots of other readers would enjoy it, too.

A Queer Abolitionist History: The Women’s House of Detention by Hugh Ryan

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Since the days of lesbian pulp fiction, Greenwich Village has been seen as a gay hub, a refuge for queer people from all over the country. In this book, Hugh Ryan shows that part of the reason for that is because from the 1920s to 70s, it held The Women’s House of Detention, a jail/prison for women and transmasculine people, and many of the people held there were queer.

At first glance, this seems like a narrow focus typical of a very academic book. But as each chapter looks at the prison through the decades, we see how this is a microcosm of broad social issues at the time. The story of The Women’s House of Detention is the story of LGBTQ liberation, and it also illustrates how prison abolition is a necessity.

In the introduction, the author explains how he began this research believing prisons need serious reform, but after seeing how prison reform over the decades in The Women’s House of Detention has only ever resulted in larger prisons with more people packed into them, he now believes abolition is the way forward. The prison was first built with smaller cells so that prisoners would have more privacy, each with their own cell–and then years later, they started keeping multiple people in each. A hospital was added–and then years later, it was gutted to make room for more cells. Then a hospital was reinstated. Then it was gutted again. Any attempts at reform always deteriorated with time.

Each chapter looks at a few of the queer people imprisoned during that decade, telling their stories–at least, what we know of them. It’s a fascinating look into the horrors of the criminal justice system, past and present, as well as the no-win situations these people were put in. Many of them return multiple times, because once they had a criminal record, they had no legal means of making money.

Since each chapter focuses on personal stories as a window into the lives of queer women and transmasculine people during that time period in New York, it makes this accessible and readable. We also get a look into queer communities in each decade, including how the people in The Women’s House of Detention participated in Stonewall and previous protests, even if few people saw or heard about it.

The Women’s House of Detention itself is a complicated place for many of the people imprisoned there: the conditions were horrible, but they also found a queer community there.

I haven’t read as much queer history as I would like, but this is one of my favourite books I’ve read on the topic, and I highly recommend it. The discussion about prison abolition versus reform is relevant to the conversations we’re having today, and seeing a timeline of how this push and pull has played out over a 50-year time period is helpful background. Both for the personal stories and the overall message, you should definitely pick this one up.

The Aftermath of Gay Conversion Camp: Tell the Rest by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

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In 2014, I read The Big Bang Symphony by Lucy Jane Bledsoe based solely on the fact that it was included on a book list called “Lesbians In Cold Places.” And you know what? That was a great decision, because I really enjoyed it. It was a slow-building character study set in Antarctica, with a queer main character, of course. So when I saw that she had a new sapphic book out today, I had to pick it up.

I have to start this with some heavy content warnings, because this is a book about conversion therapy and its aftermath. This review will discuss conversion camp and homophobia, and the book includes homophobia, abuse, rape, religious trauma, and suicide.

The book starts with two kids, a thirteen-year-old white girl and a sixteen-year-old Black teenage boy, running through the woods, trying to escape conversion camp. Then we flash forward to 25 years later.

Delia is fresh from a divorce and has just gotten fired as a college basketball coach. She’s also struggling with uncontrollable attacks of anger. She’s never felt so lost or out of control. So reluctantly, unbelievably, she drives across the country to her hometown in rural Oregon to move in with her brother and coach her old high school’s girls’ basketball team.

Her coach in high school was her hero. She gave Delia a path to follow, skills to develop, and a passion to nurture. Since then, basketball and the discipline she has around it has been her guiding light in her life. Maybe she’s hoping that by confronting her past, she can address the anger issues she’s having. Maybe she wants to step into her old coach’s shoes and inspire a new generation of kids. Maybe she just has nowhere else to go. Whatever the reason, she’s determined to take this team to victory, and she demands the best.

While I think this is Delia’s story, we do also get some point of view chapters from Earnest—the boy she escaped with. They never saw each other again after that night, but they both are still grappling with it and their experience at Celebration Camp. While Delia is at a difficult time in her life, though, grappling with her past, her personality, her anger, her family, her career, and more, Earnest seems more settled.
He has a job teaching poetry and a boyfriend he loves. The central tension in his story is struggling to write a poem about his experience at camp and their escape—something he’s been trying and failing to do for years.

As both of them find themselves needing to confront the past, it seems inevitable they will meet again. As we follow along with Delia and Earnest now, we also get chapters of their time at Celebration Camp, revealing more about the experience that had such an impact on them. Still, this is more about the ongoing effects of that experience than the camp itself.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a light read. It feels like an open wound: Delia especially is still hurting so much and hasn’t gotten closure on it. Eventually, though, we do see her begin to work through it, accompanied by the glimpses of the lives of the teenage girls she’s coaching.

If you like to read character studies and quiet stories about working through trauma—and trying to lead a high school girls’ basketball team to glory, because that really is a big focus—I highly recommend this one. It’s a thoughtful, sometimes painful, but effective narrative, and it’s one that’s interesting to read after books like The Miseducation of Cameron Post, because this looks at not just the immediate horror, but the aftermath of being taught to hate yourself as a young person.

A Con Artist at Grief Counselling: The Fake by Zoe Whittall

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Zoe Whittall is a master at writing broody queer novels, and ever since reading Bottle Rocket Hearts, I just can’t resist them.

The description and first chapter of this might lead you to believe that it’s an action book or at least a mystery. Befriending a con artist sounds like the premise for anything from whacky hijinks to thriller territory. But while the first chapter has the main character hiding in her closet, afraid for her safety, this really isn’t a book about danger or mystery. Instead, it’s more of a character study about these people in awkward times in their lives.

After Shelby’s wife died, she couldn’t seem to find her way out of crushing grief and depression. She struggles to leave the house at all. One day, she finally works up the strength to visit a grief support group, which is where she meets Cammie. Cammie a breath of fresh air. She is energetic and adventurous, pulling Shelby out of her shell. That’s especially impressive given the long (long!) list of tragedies she’s gone through, including multiple family members’ deaths by suicide and her ongoing cancer treatment. And she always seems to find herself in bad situations at work. Shelby takes Cammie under her wing, inviting her to stay at her place. She’s happy to help her and to find something to distract from her grief.

We also get point of view chapters from Gibson, a forty-ish recently divorced man who meets Cammie at a bar and they start dating. He can’t believe this younger, attractive woman has fallen in love with him so quickly. It’s almost too good to be true—especially when she starts to demand more and more from him, guilting him if he refuses or even questions him.

When Gibson and Shelby finally meet, it’s not long before they realize that Cammie’s stories about the other are true, and that’s not the only thing she’s lying about.

I can imagine many people will find this a frustrating book, because the description basically tells you everything that happens. This is only around 200 pages, and it’s more sad than it is exciting. Shelby and Gibson are both lonely and vulnerable. Cammie is hard to pin down: is she deliberately cruel? Does she believe her own lies? We only get a little taste of her point of view in this story.

I especially liked Shelby’s struggle to decide the best way forward. Even when she’s hurt, she wants to help Cammie—but at what point do you have to cut your losses and face that this other person doesn’t want to change?

I haven’t met any con artists—that I know of!—but I think if you have had a relationship (friends, family, or romantic) with someone who is manipulative, you’ll find some uncomfortably relatable moments in the way Cammie keeps the people around her on her side—until it’s time to drop them and move on to the next marks.

The Fake isn’t a perfect fit for all readers, but if you like a glimpse into other people’s complicated psyches, though, I think you’ll enjoy this one. It’s a slow-paced, thoughtful look at these three characters.

Girl Meets Girl, Girls Fall In Love, Girl Gets Amnesia: Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick

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Last year, I reviewed She Gets the Girl written by Alyson Derrick and her wife, Rachael Lippincott, and really enjoyed it. So when I saw that Derrick had a new sapphic YA book coming out just in time for the April 4th episode of All the Books, I had to read it. This is an amnesia romance, but while that can sound like a soap opera premise—girl meets girl, girls fall in love, girl gets amnesia and forgets girl, girl tries to win her back—there’s an undercurrent of sadness here that keeps it feeling more grounded than that suggests.

In the first chapter, we meet Stevie. She just graduated high school and has big plans for what comes next… but almost no one in her life knows about them. She has secretly been dating Nora for years, but in their small conservative town, being out isn’t an option. Stevie’s mother is deeply involved in the Catholic church, and her father watches Fox News almost every waking hour. So Nora and Stevie see each other in private, with dates in the woods. When Stevie can’t sleep, she silently calls Nora and just listens to her voice, not wanting to wake up her parents in the next room by speaking herself.

It’s been difficult keeping this private, including having to fake a better relationship with her parents than she believes and even maintaining friendships with people she no longer gets along with, but it will be worth it. They just need to get through the summer before they’re both off to California–Stevie secretly applied to UCLA and got in—and then they can start their life together. They’ve been saving up for an apartment by saving their paychecks, plus Stevie’s job at a coffee shop two towns away is the perfect cover for the time she spends with Nora.

After all that meticulous planning, though, one moment erases everything they’ve worked for. During a date in the woods, Stevie falls. She’s put into a medically induced coma. When she wakes up, she’s forgotten the last two years. She still thinks she’s 15. And she doesn’t remember ever meeting Nora.

Stevie is left trying to piece together the time she’s lost. She’s distant with her parents, and she doesn’t know why. She can’t understand why she was alone in the woods when Nora saw her and rescued her. Any evidence of her relationship with Nora was deleted or hidden, so there’s nothing to stumble on.

Interspersed with these chapters are unsent letters from Nora, explaining her heartbreak and confusion. This version of Stevie doesn’t have any idea that she’s gay, never mind that she’s in a relationship with a girl. She’s worried that telling her will scare her off, but she also feels terrible about lying to her. Stevie thinks Nora is a new friend, someone to hang out with that doesn’t have memories of her that she doesn’t have. Both of them hope that Stevie can recover her memories by retracing familiar things, but there’s no guarantee.

There’s an interesting balance happening here between Nora and Stevie’s perfect relationship (pre-coma) and their hateful surroundings. Stevie is half Korean, and she is startled to find her best friends when she was 15 have grown up to make racist jokes. Her dad has also become obsessed with Fox News in recent years. The threat to her relationship does feel real: both Nora and Stevie’s parents are conservative, so it makes sense that they would stay in the closet until they have somewhere else to live.

There is a heartwarming romance at the heart of this, including that Stevie feels drawn to Nora even without her memories, and it’s adorable to watch her fall for Nora all over again. But the amnesia trope and almost-too-perfect relationship is tempered by the more serious context of the story, including Stevie’s internalized homophobia.

I meant to just read the first few chapters of this and found myself instead reading it in one day. Even though we know the answers, it was compelling to watch Stevie try to piece together what happened in the time she lost and consider whether she really needs to recover it or whether she should embrace the opportunity to start fresh. After all, in this missing time she apparently became more distant from her friends and family and also applied to the local community college when she’s been waiting her whole life to go somewhere new. Does she really want to be that person?

This is a very readable, engaging novel, and though I’ve mentioned that their relationship was almost too perfect, that’s helped by Nora’s characterization. She’s not on the page that much, considering this is mostly a romance, but what we do see of her is charming without being one-dimensional. You can see why Stevie falls for her (twice).

The Enthusiastic Ally to Bisexual Pipeline: Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli

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Now that I’m twice the age of many of the protagonists in Young Adult books, I have a different relationship with them. I still read YA, but I find myself feeling protective of the main characters instead of relating to them. Nothing exemplified that shift more than reading Imogen, Obviously, where I just wanted so badly to give Imogen a hug as I read it.

Imogen is a high school senior who is a very enthusiastic queer ally, even though she’s, as Imogen puts it, “hopelessly” straight. Her sister and two closest friends are all queer. She goes to every Pride Alliance meeting. Her favourite movie is But I’m a Cheerleader, and she collects editions of One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston.

Her best friend Lilli is a year ahead of her and has already found a queer friend group in university—the same school Imogen will be joining in a few months. Imogen is happy for her… even though she feels out of place. She doesn’t want to intrude, as a cis straight person.

When Lilli finally convinces her to visit, she drops a bombshell when Imogen arrives: Lilli felt insecure about not having a serious relationship with a girl before, and she lied about Imogen and her being exes. So now everyone thinks Imogen is bi, including Tessa, who gives Imogen butterflies, which is obviously just Imogen queerbaiting inside her own head.

Imogen as a character broke my heart, to be honest. She’s a people-pleasing overthinker who analyzes herself to death, twisting herself into knots until she loses sight of the very obvious. The very obvious like: she’s not straight. The very obvious like: her friend Gretchen isn’t the authority on all things queer, and can be pretty toxic when she acts like it.

In a social media graphic for the book, the author describes Imogen as having queer discourse brainworms, which is a good way to put it. She tries to educate herself about queer issues, but just ends up thinking that there’s only one right way to be queer. She doesn’t feel the same way about girls as she does in her crushes on guys, so she concludes that means she doesn’t like girls at all. Even when faced with obvious evidence to the contrary, she convinces herself that she’s just trying to be bisexual for clout and that she’s a bad person for appropriating queerness.

“Queerness recognizing queerness. It’s kind of beautiful when you think about it. I really do wish it was mine sometimes.”

Imogen longs to be part of the queer community, and while I’m sure there is some 100% straight and cis person this applies to in the world, it’s such a relatable queer experience. I was in middle school when I excitedly talked about looking forward to joining the Gay/Straight Alliance in high school, and how if I could choose, I’d be pansexual and panromantic. But, of course, I was hopelessly straight…

Gretchen was a difficult character. Some people will absolutely hate her, which I understand. But I found myself thinking that my high school self was somehow right between Imogen and Gretchen: an anxious overthinker who also was so deep in queer discourse that I thought I knew it all. Gretchen is going through some things and lashing out at other people—I hope that this is just the beginning of a journey of processing her trauma, because she’s not in a healthy place now.

I haven’t even mentioned the Tessa/Imogen romance! It is adorable. Tessa is a lesbian and Imogen (spoiler?) is bisexual. Both are Jewish. Poor Imogen takes a while to understand she’s falling for her, but it’s a fun ride, including college shenanigans with her and their friend group.

I loved reading this, even if being inside Imogen’s head could be a little too relatable at times. This is actually my first Becky Albertalli read, but I can now confirm the hype is justified. I highly recommend it to any queer person who once also thought they were hopelessly straight.

A Soft Place for Queer Black Women To Land: Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst

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Mickey is a Black queer author in NYC trying to make a name for herself. She knows that she’s a great writer, with incisive commentary and an eye for the kinds of stories that tap into the conversations happening right now. The problem is she doesn’t have much of an opportunity to use these skills. The magazine she writes for has new ownership who are skeptical of her ideas, especially the ones that centre Blackness or queerness. She’s stuck writing inane celebrity news stories on tight deadlines, coming home exhausted.

She lives with her girlfriend, Lex, who is supportive and caring—and also close with her mother, who rejects Mickey and Lex’s queerness in general. She’s tried to break them up multiple times. Despite all the good in their relationship, it’s a fight they circle back to over and over.

This is a quiet, contemplative novel about a low point in Mickey’s life. It’s so character-based that it’s hard to describe the plot without spoiling anything: the events on the back cover don’t all happen until about 75% of the way through the book. So if you don’t want to know anything about what happens — though this book really isn’t about the events as much as Mickey’s processing of them—keep that in mind.

When Mickey is fired from her job and quickly replaced, she free falls. Lex worries that she’s just staying on the couch eating takeout for weeks, not even looking for a new job. But Mickey faced so much racism at her last job, including in how she was let go, that she’s not sure what to do now. So she does the last thing she expected from herself: she goes home, to Maryland. While staying with grandmother, she grapples with what to do next—made even more complicated when she bumps into her ex.

Tembe Denton-Hurst wrote an article at the Cut titled “It Doesn’t Matter If We Behave” that offers some background into why she wrote Homebodies, especially in the impossible standards for “professionalism” for Black women. She explains that she wanted to provide Mickey a “soft place to land,” a chance to process her feelings, instead of having to just push through and follow the unwritten rules of navigating these spaces as a Black woman.

I felt so tense reading the first section of this book, because as someone who now works in digital media, her experience feels like a literal nightmare. Writing on strict deadlines, having a supervisor who clearly doesn’t respect you, going through endless microaggressions that have the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability so that you can’t point to any one thing as the glaring example—I can’t imagine doing that day after day.

Mickey is a bit of a mess, and this is a confusing in-between point in her life. It’s mostly interior, and there are no neat conclusions to her story. She’s still figuring herself out, still deciding how to navigate a no-win situation. This is one I’m really interested to see other readers’ response to, especially other queer Black women.

A Cute Yuri Romance for Cat Lovers: My Cute Little Kitten Vol. 1 by Milk Morinaga

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the cover of My Cute Little Kitten Vol. 1

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Six years ago (!!), I read Girl Friends by Milk Morinaga, a yuri manga series I’d heard recommended endlessly. I was happy to find that not only was it a cute story about schoolgirls falling in love–what I expected from yuri manga at the time–but it also took their relationship seriously. So when I saw Milk Morinaga had a new yuri manga series with adult main characters, I had to pick it up. And I was not disappointed.

First of all, yes. This is adorable, as you’d expect from the title and cover. Rena and Yuna are roommates that started living together in college and never stopped. Rena is in love with Yuna, but has never told her. When Yuna brings home a stray kitten and wants to move to a pet-friendly apartment together to raise it, Rena confesses her feelings, unable to keep this up any longer. But Yuna’s reaction isn’t what she expected.

Yuna is a fascinating character. She seems to take Rena’s declaration of love very matter-of-factly, and immediately declares she will provide for their new little family (kitten and all). Yuna is happy that Rena seems to like her back, but she’s also confused. As we get to know Yuna more, we see how deeply insecure she is, and how she desperately thinks she has to earn affection–she’s more concerned with making Rena happy than examining her own thoughts and desires.

With most manga volumes, I feel like I’ve gotten just a taste of the story—each volume feels more like a chapter. This one covered a lot of ground in just volume one, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing these two stumble through their relationship and learning how to communicate with each other in the next volumes.