Racquel Marie’s If We Survive This is in some ways a familiar story. Set in an alternate present where rabies has mutated into what is ultimately a zombie-fying disease, society has collapsed into an apocalyptic wasteland. Following the disappearance of their father, Flora and her brother, Cain, decide to follow him up to the cabin they vacationedRead More
A Triumph of Sapphic Sci-Fi Romance: No Shelter But The Stars by Virginia Black Review
My first love was science fiction. I was raised in a Star Trek family, my favorite video game is Mass Effect, and The Expanse is my favorite TV show. However, it’s taken me a while to combine my love of science fiction and my love of romance in the books that I read. I have recently rectified this with VirginiaRead 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
A Chilling YA Horror: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould Review
Courtney Gould’s What the Woods Took is a creepy YA horror that follows a group of teenagers who are sent on a hike through the woods as part of an experimental wilderness therapy program: an abusive, exploitative practice with very little oversight. Even before the supernatural horrors began, we have teenagers getting kidnapped out of theirRead More
The Troubled Teen Industry and Other Monsters: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
In this YA horror novel, five teens are forced to participate in a new “wilderness therapy program” called REVIVE. Some of them are kidnapped in the night and escorted here by force. They face 50 days hiking through the wilderness and talking about their trauma with two unqualified twenty-somethings. This is based on real programsRead More
Folk Horror and the Troubled Teen Industry: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould Review
In European folk and fairytales, a journey through the woods represents the characters’ coming of age—their passage from the pastoral, relative security of familial and familiar hearths into a fraught, shadowy place where metaphors for social anxieties lurk around every corner. Only with wit and friendship can one come out the other side, though theyRead More
A Tough But Necessary Read: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Review
Content warnings for pretty much everything: violence, gore, racism, incarceration, solitary confinement, self harm, cutting At the time of writing this, it’s barely been three weeks since the 2024 presidential election in the United States, which Donald Trump won by a handy margin. Although Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah came out over a yearRead More
An Underrated Fantasy Western: The Good Luck Girls by Charlotte Nicole Davis
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I am actually going to talk about two books in this review, because while I thought the first book was fantastic, it was not until I finished the sequel that I fully realized exactly how good I thought these books were. The Good LuckRead More
An Enemies-to-Lovers Space Opera for the Ages: No Shelter But The Stars by Virginia Black
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! No Shelter But The Stars by Virginia Black was published on January 23, 2024 and follows Kyran Loyal, the last in her line of family royals for a planet that has been lost to her people for years, and Davia Sifane, a woman fromRead More
A Dazzling Debut: How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! I first learned about Sabrina Imbler (they/them) last year when my girlfriend and I traveled to Seattle to watch the UConn Women’s Basketball team compete in the Sweet 16. Whenever I travel, I like to visit a local bookstore, which is how we endedRead More