Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Bless The Blood: A Cancer Memoir is a striking book that gets under your skin and stays there for days afterward. Though billed as a YA book, the writing and story hold a depth of feeling and insight that will engage far older readers, too.Read More
A Feminist, Latin American Vampire Gothic: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Recently translated into English, Marina Yuszczuk’s queer vampire novel, Thirst (Dutton, March 5, 2024), is partly what I’d hoped for in a vampire fiction, and at the same time, it was nothing like what I’d expected. Although it’s a Gothic, vampire novel on the surface, ThirstRead More
A Sweet Middle Grade Coming-of-Age: Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Ivy Aberdeen’s life was already chaotic between her newborn twin brothers, her older sister’s odd behavior, and Ivy struggling with her own confusing feelings for girls that she can’t quite name. But then her family home is swept away by a tornado and Ivy’sRead More
A Holiday Romance with Depth: Season of Love by Helena Greer
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Every year, I intend to read a bunch of queer holiday romances in December, but I don’t usually follow through with it. The holiday romances that I have read were often flops, which doesn’t help. This year, I gathered together my collection of sapphicRead More
A Thrilling Serial Killer Suspense Novel: The Final Child by Fran Dorricott
Buy this from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores and the Lesbrary! Content warnings: child abuse, child death, trauma Back in the 90s, a serial killer known as the Father kidnapped and murdered children, always siblings. Only one survived: Jillian, who became Erin, and she just wanted to forget the whole thing. But Harriett, whose cousinsRead More
Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date Is a Satisfying End to Ashley Herring Blake’s Bright Falls Series
Buy this from Bookshop.org with a Lesbrary affiliate link! First, a confession: I never liked romance novel covers. For the first thirty-five years of my reading life, I had no idea what went on between the covers of romance novels (well, okay, I had some idea), but if it had anything to do with whatRead More
Join the Henchfolk Union: Strictly No Heroics by B.L. Radley
Bookshop.org Affiliate Link Strictly No Heroics is a YA urban fantasy novel that treats “super” as an adverb as much as a noun. It introduces a world of supers—superheroes, supervillains—who are super dangerous to normies (non-powered humans) and super helpful to the forces of gentrification. Main character Riley has simple desires: earn enough money for therapy,Read More
When We Find Our Bodies in the Cornfield: What Stalks Among Us by Sarah Hollowell
Bookshop.org Affiliate Link I don’t know if this book will be for everyone, but it was a perfect read for me. The premise of this YA horror novel is that two friends get lost in an ever-shifting corn maze, and then they find their own dead bodies in the maze and have to figure outRead More
Ambitious, Brutal, and Brilliant Trans Sapphic Horror: Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link I’ve been having a good run with horror lately, and Alison Rumfitt’s stunning work of trans horror Tell Me I’m Worthless kept that streak up. The pull quote on the front cover advertises it as “ambitious, brutal, and brilliant,” and I think that’s a good starting point forRead More
Nat reviews Pack of Her Own by Elena Abbott
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link I picked up this li’l werewolf book off of a Twitter recommendation – vampires, ghouls, shifters – I expected something of a campy read. Who knew we would be exploring identity, found family, and processing trauma from various angles? If you plopped down a literary fiction tome andRead More