Hollow by Taylor Grothe is a book with a lot of potential. The main character, Cassie, has recently moved back to her home town and reconnected with her childhood best friends—but the past few years have been tough for all of them, and they just don’t fit the way they used to. When they go onRead More
Conversion Camp is Hell: Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin
Cuckoo opens in 1995 with a true-to-life horror situation: seven queer kids being sent to a conversion camp in the middle of the desert. The camp is your classic nightmare: brutal labor conditions under the supervision of uber-religious and questionable leadership. Physical punishment from both counsellors and fellow campers. Truly mystifying lessons that are both boringRead More
Family Can Be Monstrous: Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell
In some ways, I have a harder time describing this book now than I did before I read it. That isn’t to say that it’s dense or confusing. But the tone is unique, which makes it hard to categorize. You could call this a sapphic monster romance, but that doesn’t feel quite right. It’s definitelyRead More
Suddenly Star-Crossed: With Stars in Her Eyes by Andie Burke Review
Seconds from a meteoric career launch, cellist Courtney Starling suffers a frightening migraine attack during a key performance. She escapes to her happy place—her best friend’s Kansas bookshop, where she meets Thea Quinn, who moved into town looking for a fresh start. Their meet-disaster (which features a little dragon) feels like a sign. Maybe TheaRead More
The Redemption of Daya Keane by Gia Gordon Review
This book is so delightfully, perfectly messy. Titular character Daya lives in a small, conservative town in Arizona, surrounded by small-minded, conservative classmates and a small-minded, conservative mom. It’s a tough place to be queer. When Daya begins a friendship that turns to something more with megachurch poster-girl Beckett Wild, she might be making moreRead More
Monsters Above and Below the Waves: They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran Review
After a banger debut with She is a Haunting, I was eager to get my hands on Trang Tranh Tran’s sophomore novel They Bloom at Night. Tran delivers another gripping story, with atmospheric tension intertwined with the struggle to fit in to your own body and community. This book dragged me in as relentless the tides, and thenRead More
A Queer Diasporic Matrilineal Epic: Amma by Saraid de Silva Review
Some silences are so profound that they become part of the landscape, not just heard but inhabited. Amma knows that terrain—how silence gets passed down not just through forgetting but through a caring that has been cornered. In this debut novel from Saraid de Silva, the unspoken doesn’t just haunt the margins of the characters’Read More
Grief, Obsession, and Isolation: One’s Company by Ashley Hutson Review
Content warning: this review includes discussion of suicide, violence, and rape. Ever since I heard the premise of One’s Company, it’s been on my TBR. So when I was choosing the first book to read in 2025, this seemed like the perfect kind of weird, thought-provoking literary fiction I was in the mood for—and itRead 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
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