Before my full review, I want to give everyone some content warnings for this novel. If rape makes you queasy, this might be a book to avoid; doubly so if rape of young girls drives you away from a book. Two of the characters, one of them a main character, are sexually assaulted at extremelyRead More
Tag reviews Honor Among Thieves by Amy Gaertner
I went into this book pretty blind except for a brief blurb about the plot, describing it as a heist novel. From the blurb I had kind of high expectations, expecting something like a Bond-level plot and lofty, ultra-literary writing. When I opened the book and realized it was some 30 pages, I realized thatRead More
Tag reviews Fairy Tales for Princesses Who Love Dames by Rene von Bonaparte
Fairy tales have always been one of my favourite things to read, and I’ll eat up retellings of them like nobody’s business. So it should be fairly apparent that I was excited to read lesbian retellings of popular fairy tales. Fairy tales! Modern retellings! Lesbians! That’s a perfect formula for me. The tales in thisRead More
Tag reviews 25 Years of Malcontent by Stephanie Byrd
For November I reviewed the follow-up collection by Byrd, A Distant Footstep on the Plain. I’m doing it a little backwards this time by reviewing her first collection second, but it’s for a reason. 25 Years of Malcontent is, like its successor, raw and painfully real, but some of the works in this collection (e.g. “Mother’sRead More
Tag reviews A Distant Footstep On the Plain by Stephanie Byrd
A Distant Footstep on the Plain is a collection of poetry at its finest, its most ragged and painful, and its most hopeful. The primary focus is on things that personally affect Byrd: racism, classism, poverty, and relationships with women. Byrd doesn’t hold back at all whether she’s writing about the experience of racism (“so IRead More
Tag reviews The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard edited by Tom Leger and Riley Macleod
“In some ways, this book is a response to what so many professors of English language literature ask their students to consider at the start of each semester. Why literature? What does literature accomplish?” The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard is straightforward in what it is right in the title. It’s a collectionRead More
Tag reviews Say Please: Lesbian BDSM Erotica edited by Sinclair Sexsmith
Reviews for this anthology abound, because it was a big deal when it came out, continues to be a big deal, and will be a big deal for a long time. I first heard of Say Please in an interview with Sinclair Sexsmith on Autostraddle in April of 2012, and while it seemed really interestingRead More
Tag reviewed Dancing with Venus by Roscoe James
Usually if I don’t already know an author, I try to not read about them until I know how their work stands on its own. Once I’m done, I’ll decide if I’m interested in the rest of the writer’s work, and find out about them as a person on the way. The more critically IRead More
Tag reviews Dear John, I Love Jane edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre
When I chose Dear John, I Love Jane to review, I knew I wouldn’t be breaking any new ground, and it’s yet again a topic entirely out of my realm of experience. I mean, I knew from a young age that I’m lesbian, and I haven’t been married to a man or in committed, heterosexualRead More
Tag reviews Reclaiming the L-Word: Sappho’s Daughters Out in Africa edited by Alleyn Diesel
Reviewing this book was a decision I kind of hem-hawed about with, mostly because it’s about lesbian-identified women in/from the African continent, and as someone who’s never been to the African continent or anywhere close, I felt like yes, I should probably leave this one alone since these are experiences I could never really claim,Read More