reviewsA collection of 16 posts

Originally written for lesbrary.com 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’ lives; it forms their foundation. The narrative follows three women—Josephina, Sithara, and Annie—across time and place, not to est…

There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language. I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in…

Originally written for The Lesbrary, here. 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. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly…

History murmurs beneath waves, slow waters shaping silently, a quiet riot of ambition, rhythms rewriting stone and soil, kingdoms softly spun, undone in echoes louder than their rise, cycles swift as shifting tides. Characters tread shadowed roads, footsteps fading, heavy with desire, edges sharp yet known, familiar, mirrors revealing clearer truths— fragments reflecting regret, shadows stretching, breaking, guiding gently by the hand toward understanding. Parker-Chan’s prose flows softly, sli…

Question: What happens when someone studies history and says, "this is cool, but what if it were infinitely queerer, significantly more ruthless, and with about 300% more emotional devastation? Answer: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan And truly? It really works. Parker-Chan imbues historical fantasy with sufficient ambition, gender chaos, and existential turmoil to power a medium-sized dynasty. Let's face it, "destined to achieve greatness" sounds far nicer than "destined to... w…

Marisa Crane's speculative fiction book I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is exactly as fascinating—and rather delightfully odd—as its title. Crane creates a story that creeps carefully beneath your skin and puts down roots by fusing speculative components with profoundly human vulnerability. Crane invites us to a universe where criminal punishment is demonstrated physically as extra shadows—visible reminders of guilt and shame—and she does so with language that moves between poetic tenderness a…