Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


January 2026 Featured Books:
1. Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
2. Red and the Wolves: A Graphic Novel by Cherry Zong
3. Genderqueer Menopause: Navigating Menopause for Trans, Gender-Nonconforming, Genderfluid, and Other Queer-Bodied Folx by Lasara Firefox Allen
4. Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar
5. Coltswood by Jules Revel
6. Meet Me There, Another Time: Letters To Places That Queer and Trans People Left Behind edited by Lexie Bean
7. Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows by Megan Milks
8. Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich
9. On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield
10. Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary by Camille Benda


Book descriptions:

Persona by Aoife Josie Clements: A trans woman discovers pornography of herself she has no memory of making, only to find herself led to an unimaginably deeper evil.

“The best book I’ve read in years.” —Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt

A feral shut-in discovers a disturbing internet porn video of what seems to be herself. A seance of coked-up artists summons unearthly forces in a studio apartment. The staircase of an exurban marketing company descends endlessly beneath the earth.

In Aoife Josie Clements’ electric, nightmarish, intricately layered novel, the impossibility of goodness crowds in upon two young trans women barely surviving on sex work and zero-hours contracts. Below the familiar evils of capitalism and the bottomless depths of internet culture, a darker horror awaits. What curse follows these women? What are they escaping? What are they running towards?

Red and the Wolves: A Graphic Novel by Cherry Zong: For lovers of Through the Woods, Blackwater, and Squad, comes a dark, sapphic retelling of a classic tale.

Red, a fiercely loyal hunter, has dedicated her life to protecting her witch Grand Mother. Monsters have been roaming the forest that they call home, bringing forth a mysterious illness that has devastated the land and chased every living soul away. Until Red stumbles upon an injured wolf-girl named Sil.

Red is cautiously optimistic to befriend someone new, but the more their relationship deepens, the more she begins to uncover the sinister truths behind everything she’s ever known.

Red must make the difficult decision of who to defend, before catastrophe consumes them all. This graphic novel that’s an apocalyptic fantasy meets queer love story turns the classic Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale on its head.

Genderqueer Menopause: Navigating Menopause for Trans, Gender-Nonconforming, Genderfluid, and Other Queer-Bodied Folx by Lasara Firefox Allen: For readers of What Fresh Hell is This? and Next Level, a queer, gender-affirming guide to navigating menopause—find gender euphoria, learn how to advocate for your healthcare, and empower yourself.

Prompts, tools, and expert wisdom for living well through menopause and beyond.

The diverse menopause experiences of nonbinary, trans, and other queerbodied individuals have been overlooked—and actively invisibilized—for far too long. Genderqueer Menopause is an indisputable and empowering resource for those navigating symptoms and seeking gender-affirming care during the menopause transition.

Author, menopause doula and coach, and genderqueer educator Lasara Firefox Allen, MSW, pushes back against the norms of mainstream menopause care, asserting that menopause should not—and will not—be suffered in silence. They help you:
• Gain tools to enhance your awareness of premenopausal, perimenopausal, menopausal, and postmenopausal life
• Reframe negative beliefs and internalized bias
• Push back against heteronormative medical standards of care
• Manage symptoms like brain fog, sleep problems, and genitourinary and menstrual changes
• Hear from the voices of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people
• Demystify menopause and define your own experience

Allen’s perspective centers the genderqueer experience and the community’s needs from an affirming frame. Genderqueer Menopause challenges conventional narratives surrounding menopause and guides readers through this life transition using practical resources and exercises.

Genderqueer Menopause is a powerful resource for gender expansive folx to empower themselves, find relief, and gain support. Menopause can be a time of both grief and celebration for many of those in the trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer communities. Use this book to ease the process and live well.

Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar: Bestselling author Thrity Umrigar returns with a tense and twisty thriller about a woman who goes missing on a morning run, and the wife who must find her and clear her own name.

One night after a party, old grievances surface between married couple Aliya and Sam and the night ends badly with a heated argument. Sam goes for a run early the next morning to clear her head—and doesn’t come back.

Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay, Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can’t escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as nearly everyone doubts her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. All the while, Sam is being held captive, terrified that she won’t get out alive. Aliya must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for them even after Sam is freed?

A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today’s political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being Brown and queer in America.

Coltswood by Jules Revel: When academician and artist Belinda Coltswood comes face-to-face with a colleague from her younger years, old feelings and painful memories rise to the surface in uncomfortable and potentially transformative ways.

Professor Belinda Coltswood has made a name for herself. As the recent winner of a prestigious art prize and the object of lingering rumors that nearly ended her career, Coltswood walks a fine line between celebrity and outcast. Though seemingly immune to both censure and accolades, Coltswood’s capacity for cool indifference dissolves in a rip tide of memory when she finds herself face-to-face with a woman from her past. A woman she knew only as Wolf. While the Wolf in her office is hardly the same fierce young AIDS activist Coltswood remembers, this meeting has the potential to alter their lives in radical ways.

Meet Me There, Another Time: Letters To Places That Queer and Trans People Left Behind edited by Lexie Bean: Even before trans bathroom bans, queer book bans, healthcare bans forcing rainbow families to cross state lines, many of us in the community have been on the run. . .

These are the letters to the places we carry within us, places left behind - homes, cities, states, and countries - even the people and bodies where we’ve found a place to rest, or a place to flee.

Edited by Lamda Literary award finalist Lexie Bean, and replete with moments of grief, longing, anger, and satisfaction, this urgent and raw collection is a testimony of continued queer and and trans existence and a powerful imagined landscape of rendezvous and reconciliation with places that have been lost.

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows by Megan Milks: A sparkling, funny, and often wrenching portrait-in-essays on the dairy industry, queer intimacy, family, fluidity, whiteness, and cows.

For decades, Megan Milks has wondered what it means to share a last name with the classic white American beverage. Now, Milks takes on their namesake subject in all its dimensions, venturing into the worlds of small dairies, bovine genetics, and manure while also turning their eye on their family and themself. The resulting essays connect the dots between human lactation, Big Dairy, being queer and lonely, climate change, transmasculinity, the bull semen industry, the milky roots of white supremacy, and the best practices for giving and receiving a hug. With Mega Milk, Megan Milks confirms their place as one of our most exciting queer thinkers and writers.

Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich: On the longest night of a milk-dark Berlin winter, a doomed couple sit side by side on their bed. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, the narrator from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.

The lights are off. Neither speak.

In their silence, a century of Ukrainian and Russian history resurfaces: forgotten literary characters, Yiddish maxims, contraband jokes, LGBT life in the post-Soviet bloc, Jewish diaspora to Israel, beauty vlogs, shaken sanity, hidden messages in Russian pop music, resistance in Odessa, Moscow club raids, and the death of a beloved friend.

The requiem inside the narrator’s head circles the question pinned within the darkness: What does it mean to hold onto Nadezhda, whose name means “hope”? And is holding it enough?

On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield: Lone Women meets Sorrowland in this surreal Southern Gothic debut in which a woman escapes into the uncanny woods of northern Georgia and is forced to contend with ghosts, haints, and most dangerous of all, the truth about herself.

When Judith Rice fled her childhood home, she thought she’d severed her abusive mother’s hold on her. She didn’t have a plan or destination, just a desperate need to escape. Drawn to the forests of northern Georgia, Jude finds shelter in a house as haunted by its violent history as she is by her own.

Jude embraces the eccentricities of the dilapidated house, soothing its ghosts and haunts, honoring its blood-soaked land. And over the next thirteen years, Jude blossoms from her bitter beginnings into a wisewoman, a healer.

But her hard-won peace is threatened when an enigmatic woman shows up on her doorstep. The woman is beautiful but unsettling, captivating but uncanny. Ensnared by her desire for this stranger, Jude is caught off guard by brutal urges suddenly simmering beneath her skin. As the woman stirs up memories of her escape years ago, Jude must confront the calls of violence rooted in her bloodline.

Haunting and thought-provoking, On Sunday She Picked Flowers explores retribution, family trauma, and the power of building oneself back up after breaking down.

Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary Camille Benda: Bending the Rules combines insightful text that is both engaging and deeply researched with distinctive custom graphics, timelines, and photography to explore identity and gender through fashion and dress.

Bending the Rules is a visual exploration of identity and gender throughout history. Using the lens of dress, costume, fashion, and body image, the book will highlight how we make space in society and culture for human expression. Clothing and the physical body interact intimately, so dress is a non-verbal, powerful way to delve into the boundaries that frame our views of self, identity, and gender. Fashion and dress criss-cross all parts of our experience, meaning clothes can show both serious and playful aspects of selfhood and identity: joy, longing, aspiration, power, fear, negotiation, happiness, community, fun.

In the West, a wide cultural shift has been happening in body identity, sizeism, gender pronouns, access and personal rights. In traditional, indigenous cultures, space has existed for centuries for flexible identity, gender roles, and personal definition. The gap is narrowing, but clothing, fashion and body image can show us how the West is wrestling with these global concepts while indigenous cultures are conserving or reviving ancient identity practices.

The book will feature a rich range of resources—from art to sculpture, original illustrations to designer’s doodles, embroidery to social media. Archive and museum research, combined with first person interviews, never-before-seen photographs, and images, and newly photographed and documented extant dress will spur the reader’s imagination and seamlessly weave together the cutting edge and historical.