As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
A Brutal Colonial Horror Story: To the Bone by Alena Bruzas
To the Bone is the story of Ellis, an indentured girl in the Jamestown settlement of the Virginia colony. Ellis aspires toward little more than goodness; born poor in the late 1500s, she can neither read nor count, but understands the world as preachers sketch its edges. She works hard as a servant to the semi-prominentRead More
Feral Eldritch Ballerinas: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea
Laure is a ballet dancer who has devoted herself entirely to her profession. She spends every waking moment honing her skill. And she is perfect. But as she soon learns, perfect is not enough. It doesn’t matter that she’s the best, because she’s fighting to rise up in an institution that sees her working classRead More
Blood, Sex, and Poetry: An Education in Malice by S. T. Gibson
“She kissed me with a martyr’s agonized desperation, like I was the only sword she ever wanted to fall on.” I’ve been eagerly anticipating this book since it was announced: I loved Gibson’s queer polyamorous take on Dracula’s wives in A Dowry of Blood, and I have written several times about my complicated relationship withRead More
This Queer Horror Book Will Haunt You: Model Home by Rivers Solomon
This was my first Rivers Solomon book, and from the first page, I understood why I’d heard such good things about them. Here are the opening lines: “Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that’s why even though she’s never once saved me,Read More
A Hardboiled Lesbian Detective Comic: Deprog by Tina Horn, Lisa Sterle, Gab Contreras, and DaNi
If a gritty noir graphic novel with a “hardboiled hard drinking leather loving dyke detective” sounds up your alley, pick Deprog up—though you might want to give the content warnings a glance first. I thought that was what I wanted, but I quickly realized this was a darker read than I’m currently in the headspaceRead More
The Queer Graphic Novel That Had Me Sobbing at 3 A.M.: The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! You’re all fired for not tell me how good this is. I liked The Girl From the Sea, so I put a hold on Ostertag’s newest sapphic graphic novel, but I hadn’t heard anything about it, so I my expectations were pretty grounded. IRead More
An Obsessive Female Friendship Turns Dark: Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Two teen girls, Hannah Dexter and Lacey Champlain, become obsessively attached to each other in their rebellion and vengeful agenda against Nikki Drummond. Then dark secrets about what happened to Craig, the boy found dead at the beginning of the novel, begin to unravel,Read More
A Brutal and Brilliant Space Opera: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I thought about reviewing Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory on here last month, right after I finished reading it, but I decided against it because I couldn’t figure out how to talk about in any sort of coherent way. My initial Goodreads review was mostly swearingRead More
A Land of Gods, Monsters, and Talking Cats: Monstress Vol. 1 by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Oftentimes bleak but consistently awe-inspiring, Liu’s world of steampunk, art deco fantasy is a marvel to behold. This is definitely one to check the trigger warnings for. Set in a world where humans and Arcanics (a cross between humans and a mystical race calledRead More