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Wild Shrew Literary Review
Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) publishes online book reviews. While WSLR is book-focused, we are open to accepting reviews of other media such as films, art exhibits, and author Q&As. Reviews should be about 400-700 words if on a single book, 1,300-1,500 words if on 3-5 books, 1,200-1,500 words if it’s a book excerpt, and up to 2,000 words if it’s an author Q&A. For monthly lists of new books available to review, see this page. Please contact the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger (chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org) if you would like to write a review or if you have any questions.
You can view this book review template to get a sense of what you should include in the review.
Please refer to the Sinister Snapshot Style Manual, as the WSLR style is similar.
Welcome to Wild Shrew Literary Review!
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Reviews by Genre:
Latest Reviews:
Ruby Stefanucci Reviews Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen
“The collection explores and excavates the intricacies of friendship, lesbian love, relationships, and environmental and sociopolitical crises.”
Pippin Lapish Reviews The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles
“Reading Eileen Myles is the experience of discovering language. . . Myles handles words with both reverence and a deeply personal sense of play.”
Allison Quinlan Reviews Country Queers: A Love Letter by Rae Garringer
“The work is stunning visually, with each page showcasing beautiful artwork and photography, but the real heart of the work is the platforming of queer stories. Garringer’s work tenderly immortalizes queer rural lives.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel
“Wild Geese grapples with the deep human longing for connection and explores how one can evade loneliness in such a diverse, globalized world.”
Bailey Hosfelt Reviews On Strike Against God by Joanna Russ, edited by Alec Pollak
“On Strike Against God is equal parts rage against the machine and a vulnerable study of the courage necessary to let one’s guard down and come fully alive. This makes it essential, luminescent lesbian fiction for anyone who has articulated and embodied a language they once feared was impossible.”
Chloe Weber Reviews Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary
“Thirst is an ambitious novel that hits the ground running with gore and chaos and transforms into a profound philosophical lamentation on grief.”
Pelaya Arapakis Reviews Disembark: Stories by Jen Currin
“Currin showcases the breadth and depth of queer relationships—from platonic intimacies to romantic intimacies and the emotional territories in between—exploring the nuances of queer love against the backdrop of urban life.”
Roberta Arnold Reviews These Letters End in Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere
“This beautifully written novel is a treatise on culture, politics, and caste wrapped in a love story. Xaviere parses connections between opposites in a way that startles the heart and challenges thought.”
Roberta Arnold Reviews Hotel Impala by Pat Spears
“Hotel Impala teaches us how survival in an impossible system is a constant struggle of grace and grit.”
Martha Miller Reviews Untethered by Shelley Thrasher
“I look for stories about older lesbians because I know there are still a lot of adventures and things left to settle this late in life.”
Sarah Parsons Reviews Beaver Girl by Cassie Premo Steele
“In Beaver Girl, a digestible and compelling dystopian novel, Cassie Premo Steele makes it clear that climate fiction is more present and engaging than ever.”
Sandra Butler Interviews Penelope Starr
“I respect landdykes’ courage to create an alternative culture and to live it fully, both in comfortable collaboration as well as in discomfort and disagreement. They celebrated woman-ness every day by choosing to separate themselves from the patriarchy and aimed to live in harmony with Mother Earth.”
Kelsey McGarry Reviews Nest of Matches by Amie Whittemore
“The collection reads like a sweet walk through both earthly and astral meadows. Whittemore creates a natural world so appealing that it feels like a dreamworld.”
Catherine Horowitz Reviews Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke
“Many books attempt the challenge of authentically capturing what it is to be a young queer person alive in the twenty-first century. It’s a difficult thing to convey, but Burke does it beautifully.”
Kelsey McGarry Reviews Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn
“Anna Dorn both pays homage and gives new life to a classic queer genre, lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s.”
Mimi Wheatwind and Olivia DelGandio Interview Judith Barrington
“I want to write good stories, but a memoir isn’t just the subject matter. It’s the language, the angle it’s told from, how it’s structured, what the writer makes of it, etc. It’s meant to give the reader pleasure in the reading and also, ideally, a window into a world that’s new to them and hopefully, too, a flash of self-recognition.”
Allison Quinlan Reviews poyums by Len Pennie
“Pennie not only introduces readers to an inside view of survivorship but also introduces many to a vulnerable language, Scots.”
Michaela Hayes Reviews A Bookshop of One’s Own: How a group of women set out to change the world by Jane Cholmeley
“The strength of the book lies in the details. Cholmeley is a self-professed ‘numbers guy’ and, as a result, leads the reader through the nitty gritty of feminist bookselling that might otherwise remain unknown to us.”
Grace Gaynor Reviews Felt in the Jaw by Kristen N. Arnett, Sarahland by Sam Cohen, and Rainbow Rainbow: Stories by Lydi Conklin
“Retellings, recastings, and refusals support the queer power of these collections.”
Rae Theodore Reviews Still Alive by LJ Pemberton
“Pemberton’s prose is both lyrical and incisive, capturing the dynamics of love, heartbreak, and obsession. I found myself going back and re-reading sentences to let the words roll around on my tongue a little longer.”
Lya Hennel Reviews Your Dazzling Death: Poems by Cass Donish
“These poems are at once an ode to queer love, transness, and infinite transformation through the process of grief.”
Lara Mae Simpson Reviews The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao
“There is a deep romance running through the novel—inherent in the art of writing letters, of course—and the moments of fondness and longing from across countries and time zones are often touching.”
Bailey Hosfelt Reviews Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility by Hannah Murphy Winter, photographed by Billie Winter
“Murphy Winter’s journalistic chops draw out stimulating meditations from the interview subjects on what it means to step outside the confines of heteronormativity, while Winter’s photography provides tender insight into the couples’ lives and loves.”
Sara Youngblood Gregory Reviews The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager
“Rather than focus on the material pursuits of apocalypse—like food or pollution or gathering supplies—Drager is concerned with emotional and linguistic sustenance.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews The Land is Holy by noam keim
“noam keim crafts lyrical essays, each braided with profound metaphors containing miles of connections across generations and geography.”
Bell Pitkin Reviews Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between by Gemma Rolls-Bentley
“Of the more than two hundred artists included in Queer Art, each has used their creativity to explore their identity, share their unique perspectives, and advocate for their community.”
Margaret Zanmiller Reviews All In: Cancer, Near Death, New Life by Caitlin Breedlove
“Breedlove encourages us to understand the cycles of our lives, be in communion with our ancestors and community, embrace change, and move forward with radical honesty.”
Catherine Horowitz Reviews Private Rites by Julia Armfield
“Private Rites is a thoughtful, moving book that intertwines a personal story with a larger climate catastrophe.”
Dot Persica Reviews How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler
“With each creature, the concepts of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are redefined—each creature is a key unlocking a facet of the human experience.”
Darla Tejada Reviews Cecilia by K-Ming Chang
“Chang triumphs in how she depicts and weaves together those forces in our lives that live just beyond the tangible.”
Pelaya Arapakis Reviews How It Works Out by Myriam Lacroix
“How It Works Out is an intoxicating and visceral journey filled with queer possibility.”
Iam Monroe Reviews Pariah Directed by Dee Rees
“Pariah is a true rarity in its portrayal of the turbulent, tender, and othering experiences and relationships that characterize coming of age as a young Black stud.”
Marilyn DuHamel Reviews Difficult Beauty: Rambles, Rants and Intimate Conversations by Lauren Crux
“I found myself—sometimes in the course of a single page—chortling, tearing up, raising my eyebrows, putting my hand on my heart, or pausing as I gazed upwards, savoring an unexpected insight.”
Darla Tejada Reviews Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead by Hayley Singer
“As Abandon Every Hope traverses the boundaries segregating human and animal, presence and absence, life and death, it challenges the ‘immunitary defence(s) against animality’ we’ve used to impose—and justify—our supremacy.”
Sara Ricci Reviews Palimpsest by Courtney Heidorn
“What emerges in Heidorn’s work, in their ‘touching, searching,’ is the inherent need to be discovered, understood, and desired.”
Sandra Butler Reviews Desert Haven by Penelope Starr
“Starr is a lesbian equipped not with theories, hypotheses, or assumptions but with curiosity and admiration for the choices and experiences of the landdykes who come to life on these pages.”
Henri Bensussen Reviews The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand, Daughter by Maureen Eppstein, and woke up no light: poems by Leila Mottley
“These are poems of resilience and hope that nurture us with life and comfort us even in death.”
Grace Gaynor Reviews Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans
“In her stunning collection, Jasmine Mans utilizes poetry to reveal the intricacies, triumphs, and struggles associated with Black girlhood in a way that Black girls and women deserve.”
Chloe Weber Reviews Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
“What modern-day readers should take away from Carmilla is that their lesbianism is not a supernatural curse and that they may live freely and openly rather than live in fear of their identity.”
Judith Barrington Reviews A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces that Shaped Queer Women’s Culture by June Thomas
“The spaces so clearly described in Thomas’s book were places of refuge, places of friendship, and places in which to foment revolution.”
Karen Poppy Reviews The Glass Studio by Sandra Yannone
“Within Yannone’s collection, we find family and patriarchal myths pieced together. The myths, like the stained glass, fused and shimmering, are dangerous and alluring in their creation and perpetuation, but an art form of liberation when we act in their dismantling.”
Darla Tejada Reviews Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion by Eleanor Medhurst
“Unsuitable weaves a powerful story of a lesbian fashion past that leaves readers hopeful for the future.”
Allison Quinlan Reviews Dragstripping: Poems by Jan Beatty
“Dragstripping is a testament to poetry’s power to excavate the depths of human experience. Beatty’s work invites readers to witness the complexities of identity and resilience after trauma.”
Laura Gibbs Reviews The Burning Key: New & Selected Poems (1973-2023) by Beatrix Gates
“The collection comes to feel like a museum of a life–its artifacts are displayed with precise curatorial care so as to best reflect the visionary wisdom that blazes through even Gates’s shortest poems.”
Dot Persica Reviews Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones
“The incessant search for the real truth behind the accepted, dogmatic ‘truth’ defines this book and the queer experience: what are we if not love’s archaeologists, tirelessly digging for proof that we aren’t the first or the only people to have loved the way we love?”
Catherine Horowitz Reviews Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash
“Woven within the twists and turns of the book are the complex discussions of queer identity, sex, love, family, and other more serious topics. Perhaps, most importantly, it is a moving criticism of the American justice system.”
Henri Bensussen Reviews When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
“When Women Kill was as entertaining and informative as reading a literary, engaging mystery. Like a good mystery, each woman’s story ends with a surprise.”
Roberta Arnold Reviews Blessed Water: A Sister Holiday Mystery by Margot Douaihy
“Douaihy unfurls sentences with life lessons through language that ranges from the sensate to the sublime.”
Julia M. Allen Reviews Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s by Bettina Aptheker
“In an elegant, seamless fusion of memoir, oral history, and archival research, Bettina Aptheker offers us and future generations the gift of our history.”
Rose Norman Reviews Águila: The Vision, Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Two-Spirit Shaman in the Ozark Mountains by María Cristina Moroles and Lauri Umansky
“Águila is a story of resilience and healing on women’s land. We have few books about women’s land communities. This is an important one.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews Women! In! Peril! by Jessie Ren Marshall
“There is something for every reader in Jessie Ren Marshall’s short stories: robot girlfriends, sapphic ballerinas, lesbian co-parents, and women flying through space.”
Emily L. Quint Freeman Reviews Jewcy: Jewish Queer Lesbian Feminisms for the Twenty-First Century Edited by Marla Brettschneider
“The umbrella of self can be difficult to navigate. This book offers ideas and stories of Jewish lesbians seeking acceptance rather than marginalization.”
Sarah Horner Interviews Dianna Hunter
“As a young lesbian, I took myself to the land to heal and grow, and at seventy-four, I still look to nature for these gifts. My duty as a writer is to give back, to contribute to the restoration of the earth and to help foster a just and loving human community.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews Age Brings Them Home to Me by windflower
“windflower uses the perspective from Mother Earth to see everything life offers: family, love, self-actualization, and justice.”
Judith Katz Reviews Grace Period by Elisabeth Nonas
“Nonas has created an affable first-person narrator with Hannah. She spends the bulk of her grieving (and this novel) trying to figure out who she is and what she is meant to do now that Grace is gone.”
Pelaya Arapakis Reviews The Jolt: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich by Julie Weiss
“The Jolt is a dazzling poetic collection that revels in the majesty and resilience of lesbian love.”
Sisel Gelman Reviews unalone by Jessica Jacobs
“This poetry collection insists there is something powerful and elevated in the spiritual realm, and through study and reflection, we might attain a fraction of it. This fraction will guide and heal us.”
Kali Herbst Minino and Darla Tejada Review My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert
“Artfully covering topics of independence, the writing process, aging, and familial and romantic relationships, the collection of essays is about much more than the title suggests—her legs.”
Sarah Parsons Reviews Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland
“Readers who enjoy journeys of self-discovery and adventure will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of Alvina Chamberland.”
Catherine Horowitz Reviews City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter
“It is hard to truly pull off a sweeping epic like this one, but Fruchter’s debut novel is continuously riveting, insightful, and poignant, leaving readers all at once satisfied and curious about what the future holds.”
Henri Bensussen Reviews The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America by Katherine Turk
“Read this fascinating book to learn about the controversies that NOW became known for, how they were settled, the history of the women who directed it, and how they did it.”
Ella Stern Interviews Penny Mickelbury
“We not only want to hear from you, we need to hear from you. Most of us don’t have children and grandchildren. Unless we teach, we have no idea what you all are thinking, or what you’re feeling, or what you’re reading, or what you think about what we write.”
Mikayla Hamilton Interviews Ben Negin (Benadryl) of Boone Barbies
“I am driven to perform because it serves as an outlet for creativity, expression, activism, and emotions.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volume II by Julie Weiss
“Breath Ablaze is imbued with subtle storytelling, powdered sugar longing, and a thread of timelessness that delivers Weiss’s poems straight to the heart of any sapphic reader, young or old.”
Henri Bensussen Reviews Poor Things Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“In this film, Emma Stone becomes Bella, portraying so naturally her behavior and emotions that I felt like I was there, pondering the oddness of this child, watching her grow into a young woman.”
Judith Katz Reviews Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston
“Archangels of Funk is the most hopeful book about a coming dystopia this reader could ever imagine.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews American Queers: Poems by Jesse Marvo Diamond
“Jesse Mavro Diamond creates a guiltless queer kingdom of historiography and reclamation.”
Emily L. Quint Freeman Reviews “Nelly & Nadine” Directed by Magnus Gertten
“It was one of those films that stays with you, makes you think, makes you remember, makes you well up with tears.”
Courtney Heidorn Reviews The Weight of Survival by Tina Biello
“The collection is primarily, and poignantly, a love letter to Biello's ancestry, her mother country, and her childhood home of British Columbia.”
Yeva Johnson Reviews Floating Bones by Rae Diamond
“Rae Diamond’s Floating Bones is a magnificent multisensory experience fitting for this hybrid book of poetry, art, and essays. I invite any reader to enjoy it as I did from the first touch to the last page.”
Yeva Johnson Reviews The Price of a Small Hot Fire by E.F. Schraeder
“It was an act of bravery for me to dive into Schraeder’s poetic world without rules, where no topic was off limits. Luckily, my bravery was handsomely rewarded.”
Yeva Johnson Reviews Next Time You Come Home by Lisa Dordal and Milly Dordal
“Next Time You Come Home is a beautiful collection that transforms a mother and daughter’s correspondence into a lyrical tour de force on grief and connection while spotlighting big and tender moments of the last part of the twentieth century.”
Masthead
"Empowerment comes from ideas."
― Charlene Carruthers
"Your silence will not protect you."
— Tourmaline
"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."
— Leila Raven