Briefly, A Delicious Life has been on my radar for years—a literary novel with a sapphic ghost main character? I’m listening. But it made its way to the top of my TBR after I read and loved Nell Stevens’s 2025 release, The Original. This one follows Blanca, who died when she was 14 years oldRead 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
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
Remember to Remember the Yellowjackets: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth Review
Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines is a dual-timeline horror that follows the mysterious happenings of Brookhants School for Girls. In 1902, two teenage girls fell in love, both with each other and with the scandalous writing of Mary MacLane, only to die tragically with the book by their side. More mysterious deaths follow, until the schoolRead More
Sapphic Love in Defiance of Dictatorship: Cantoras by Caro de Robertis
The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heardRead 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
When the Past Won’t Stay Quiet: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Review
Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. LouisRead More
Calling All Basketball Gays: A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane + Other Sporty Sapphic Books
Happy March Madness season! It’s just a few weeks until the NCAA tournament begins, so in the spirit of basketball, I decided to review a book about it. A Sharp Endless Need (out May 13th) by Marisa Crane is a love letter to basketball and everything that comes along with it—including falling for a teammate. IRead More
A Haunting Gothic About Family in (Climate) Crisis: Private Rites by Julia Armfield Review
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 Lush Horror Novella Embracing Death and Renewal: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris Review
“Why did people need to be in nature to process the things that happened to them? Maybe it was because what was thought of as wild did not require a veil—it saw you as you truly were: an animal skulking among animals.” Though I haven’t read a lot of horror, there is plenty of horrorRead More