First Love: Essays on Friendship
Lilly Dancyger
The Dial Press, 2024, 224 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Leslie Lopez

“To nurture and care for another person, to provide them with tenderness and emotional shelter from the world that mostly doesn’t give a shit about them. To love so fiercely and with such unrestraint that the recipient of that love feels sustained by it, and never feels fully alone in the world. This is what my closest friends give to me, and what I try to give to them” (138).

Lilly Dancyger’s First Love: Essays on Friendship is an honoring of female friendship and the ways these relationships become early sites of platonic intimacy.

Dancyger opens this collection by sharing that her cousin, Sabina, was her first love. From being children who created new words to describe their love for each other to spending time together at different points in their adolescence, each anecdote shows the connection between them remaining strong despite the physical distance and circumstances of life. It’s not a surprise that Dancyger comes to see friendship as synonymous with vulnerability, deep love, and belonging.

But First Love is also about grief. When Sabina is brutally murdered a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, it’s the powerful friendships Dancyger has cultivated that keep her treading above water. These relationships are the basis for the fifteen essays, each one providing an additional cultural layer or personal memory that moves the collection along.

In “The Fire Escape,” Dancyger recounts living with her friend in a crammed East Village apartment. She goes on to describe how the rusted metal perch outside their kitchen window became a space for the friends to connect over cigarettes and alcohol, even after Sabina’s death. She goes on to say of her friends, “Not one of them tried to persuade me to come inside, and for that I loved them more than ever” (108). Thus, the fire escape provided Dancyger the freedom to grieve, exist, and be cared for in a time of tremendous pain.

Dancyger’s writing about friendship also includes a discussion of her fractured relationship with her mother and her indecision about becoming a parent. In “Mutual Mothering,” she shares, “What I do know is that when I imagine what kind of mother I would be, it’s the kind of friend I’ve been that allows me to see it clearly, and to believe I’d do it well” (161). It’s this honesty and unabashed importance of platonic relationships that feels refreshing, especially in a culture that puts romantic relationships on a pedestal and sells the narrative that traditional family is the only real source of care.

Reading First Love served as a reminder that grief can also be an exploration of what it means to have loved, been loved, and continue loving in a world as simultaneously scary and joyous as ours.

Leslie Lopez (she/they) is a Dallas-born, Chicago-based writer pursuing a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She can often be found crocheting (badly), laughing (loudly), and reviewing books on her Instagram, @anotherlesbrarian.

Missing Sam
Thrity Umrigar
Algonquin Books, 2026, 320 pages
$29.00

Reviewed by Kara L. Zajac

Missing Sam is a deeply moving story about the multifaceted depths of loss and the rebuilding of strength in relationships during recovery. In this gripping, suspenseful novel, Umrigar sheds light on moving past the trivial nuances that stagnate our lives, like going to bed angry, navigating the gender bias of traditional families, or trying to survive the bitter, spiteful criticism of social media as a queer, brown, Muslim in a supposedly liberal, open-minded suburb in Ohio.

After a fight the night before, Sam goes on a morning run all alone, leaving her wife, Ali, and her phone at home. When Sam doesn’t return home after several hours, Ali is unsure if Sam is trying to get even or if something terrible has happened. Thinking she must wait 48 hours before reporting her wife missing, Ali makes a few mistakes before going to the police, who ask why she waited so long. I can understand why she would want to delete the anger-fueled texts, those hurtful words spat back and forth that led to Sam sleeping in the guest bedroom the night before she disappeared. Fighting with your spouse could definitely appear incriminating in a missing persons case. Soon after, a grad student inappropriately obsessed with Sam oversteps boundaries with social media posts, and newspaper articles imply Ali could be doing more to aid the safe return of her wife, turning the local opinion against her. The media’s scrutiny is bringing the town’s Islamophobia, as well as their homophobia, bubbling to the surface as they criticize Ali’s every move and her intentions as an Indian-Muslim in the U.S., even canceling pending contracts with her interior design firm. Suddenly, Ali feels like a suspect and is caught defending herself when she should be trying to locate her wife.

In this untypical, don’t-know-what-you-have-until-it’s-gone story, we experience the power of forgiveness as Ali reaches out to both of their estranged families.

We will fight, we will make mistakes, we will say angry things to one another. But then as mysteriously as a flower blooming from a seed, as impossibly miraculous as an earth covered with flowers, we will find our way back to one another, we will recognize that we are both stranded in our own histories, that the only antidote for our difficult past is to double down on love, and we will forgive (303)

Using the strength of family bonds to get through the most difficult of times and learning that the unrelenting capacity to love doesn’t always mean forgetting, but understanding each other’s differences and choosing to love anyway, we see the character’s humanness grow with the story. “I’ve wasted all these years trying to change Ali, when all along, the only person I could’ve changed lived within me” (304). With relatable, yet flawed characters, the reader has no choice but to root for them. Umrigar’s lyrical, yet fast-paced writing will leave you wanting more, staying up later than your bedtime because you just can’t put it down. Missing Sam is a great, thought-provoking, heart-string-tugging read perfect for book clubs.

Kara Zajac is the author of The Significance of Curly Hair: A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss, which won the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Inspirational Nonfiction and was chosen for “The Best Books We Read in 2024” by the Independent Book Review. Its follow-up, The Special Recipe for Making Babies, was a finalist in 2022’s Charlotte Lit/ Lit South Awards for Nonfiction. Kara’s work has been published in Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian.com, Voraka Magazine, Story Circle Anthology, and Imperfect Life Magazine. She can be found at www.KaraZajac.com

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
Megan Milks
Feminist Press, 2026, 336 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything (12). So says Megan Milks in Mega Milk, a wide-ranging reflection on race, gender, size, species, and milk, a secretion that looms large in the U.S. corporate-cultural zeitgeist. Milk has undergone something of a transition in the decades since Milks’s childhood, shifting shape from a hallmark of the healthy, all-American, and notably white diet, into something of a commercial downward spiral, blame for which has been attributed to anything from Gen Z, to veganism, to allergies. With this fluidity in mind, Milks is invested in the “trans potentiality of milk” (28), the capacity of the fluid to shift shape and meaning not only in rhetoric, but in the bodyminds of those who produce, exchange, and consume it.

In approaching milk’s trans potentiality, Milks begins with what might be understood as the cis potential of milk, detailing the lives of cows subjected to abusive breeding and milking regimes, either as incubators or as inseminators. For Milks, the lived experience of cows is entangled both with life-giving (sustenance for their late cat, Claude) and life-taking (the premature killing of those cows that have outlived their “production value” [86] as well as the suffering of migrant workers, including children, forced to work on these farms). Likewise, they acknowledge that, as a formula-fed baby, cows have been something of a “foster mother” (132) to them—coming into uncomfortable proximity with the racialized and classed position of prior centuries’ wet nurses.

The trans potentiality of milk also emerges in its crossings from word, to name, to material necessity. “Milk,” as a word, summons “cow,” a term appended to fat, feminized people, Milks’s child-self included. Milk, and its absence, becomes symbolic of Milks’s disordered eating. Additionally, the material attachment of milk to the breast—and, by extension, to femininity, motherhood, and the concept of femaleness itself—is rich territory for trans exploration: in “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” Milks historicizes their relationship to a body coercively assigned female at birth; the complexities of binding, intimacy, and self-knowledge; and to the expectations and demands placed upon nursing parents.

Much like the contradictory expectations placed upon trans people—both to transition “fully” for legitimacy’s sake, and not to transition at all—nursing parents (understood as “mothers”) face dual pressure to embrace the “naturalness” of the breast and to embrace the science of formula so as to preserve their looks and properly nourish their children. This places people of marginalized genders, whether nursing or not, into what Milks correctly puns a “double-bind”: there is no way to fully satisfy a cisheteropatriarchal system in its insatiable hunger for subjugation across species, gender, and positionality.

Race, too, is implicated in the commercial and symbolic impacts of milk, particularly for the U.S. In the essay “MAGA Milk,” Milks quotes a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1923: “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race” (172). Indeed, the racialization of milk—not to mention its embeddedness in systems of white, christian supremacy—extend further back than U.S. empire: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, breastmilk was understood as excess menstrual blood, saved and transmuted in order to feed newborn babies. “Bad milk,” including milk contaminated by unsanitary dairy practices, was an affront not only to a baby’s health but to its selfhood, a kind of ontological contamination informed by racist, classist ideologies. Later, after a cultural flip spurred on by the American eugenics movement, healthy, “pure” milk became a hallmark of the fit family—once again, milk consumption (albeit of a different kind) was a prerequisite for purity, goodness, and normality.

It is no surprise, then, that Milks’s best moments in this collection are moments of profound impurity—moments where their thoughts cross from human to nonhuman, diluting the myths of fitness and purity the image of milk now offers. Milks, in escaping themself, escapes the inevitable inadequacies of anthropocentric interpretation when attempting to approach nonhuman ways of knowing. In the startling essay “Milking the Bull,” Milks decides to inseminate themself with the sperm of a bull, and in so doing, internalizes and ultimately reproduces his story in a queer, literary (re)birth. The latter pages of the essay are devoted not to Milks’s experiences, but the bull’s, and the reader follows the narrative to his life’s inevitable end. This essay—perhaps the most uncomfortable in the entire collection—is a highlight, both for its taboo subject matter and for the empathy and intentionality of its portrayal. In this moment, more than any other, Milks sits in the crevice between their body and another’s, and asks what it means to cross that boundary, to trans it, together.

As a constellation of essays on milk’s many meanings and potentialities, Mega Milk is deeply, powerfully uncomfortable. At times, I felt impatient with the text, eager to move from moments of observation and reflection to critical analysis, particularly regarding the nonhuman animals on whose bodily fluids the book relies. Particularly in moments where milk is present but its nonhuman producers, notably, are absent (such as in “Tres Leches”), it feels as though cows are a specter haunting a story that tries to be about something else—about gender, about economics, about family, about identity. While touching on the ethical and environmental urgency of critique, Mega Milk is persistently reflective in a way I did not expect, and struggle to collect my feelings about.

At the same time, Milks anticipates my critique, meets it before it escapes my mouth, or my hands, onto the page. “No, it’s personal essays,” they explain to a Hindu physical therapist, who asks if the collection is “making a case against dairy” (265). In a roundabout way, Milks has, throughout the course of the text, called out some of my own bona fides: whiteness and rurality of upbringing, transness and chosen distance from the “femaleness” yoked to us from birth, experiences of restrictive, disorderly eating. Then there is veganism, part of my life for twelve of my twenty-seven years, and the attendant expectations that this collection do the polemic work that it neither claims nor seeks to do. This is a trans book, a queer book, a book about openings and potentialities. There exist dozens of polemics describing accurately and in detail the evils of industrial animal agriculture, not to mention the white supremacist nationalisms embedded in American food production and distribution. So I let the text rest, took time to think. Let my thoughts gestate, squeeze out what remains. And at that ending is how I begin this review.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, and can be found online at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.

Big Swiss
Jen Beagin
Scribner, 2023, 352 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Kelsey McGarry

Beagin’s novel centers on Greta, a middle-aged woman in Hudson, New York, whose life has quietly drifted into an unusual orbit. Once a pharmacy technician, she now earns a living transcribing audio recordings for a spiritual sex coach. Through this job, Greta witnesses the private confessions of strangers, including Flavia, a Swiss gynecologist whose voice and story capture her attention. When Greta later encounters Flavia at a local dog park, recognition sparks a connection that soon deepens into an intimate relationship—one complicated by the knowledge Greta carries but cannot reveal.

The story follows these two women as they navigate the shadows of formative experiences they have never fully processed. Their relationship unfolds alongside a chorus of eccentric secondary figures and a stream of therapy transcripts, which inject rhythm into the narrative. As Greta’s own history gradually comes into focus, the novel reveals subtle textures in its settings and character dynamics, beautifully showcasing how inner lives shape the spaces people inhabit. With its distinctive voice, unconventional structure, and memorable protagonists, this book offers a bold and darkly playful exploration of intimacy, secrecy, and connection.

Stylistically, the novel is reminiscent of the popular theme in contemporary fiction of flawed women making arguably unlikeable choices.The book wastes no time introducing several key figures in Greta’s life, introducing Greta’s eccentric roommate, Sabine, who she has lived with since seemingly abruptly leaving her husband. Greta is both alienating and oddly relatable. She is impulsive, lonely, and driven by immediate desire rather than reflection. The reader quickly sees many idiosyncrasies in Greta’s current way of relating to people through her relationships with Sabine, the dogs and animals that they cohabitate with, the old dilapidated farmhouse they share in Hudson Valley, and the new community Greta drops into upon her cross-country move. The exaggerated personalities and situations help contribute to the book’s surreal atmosphere. However, I was left wanting slightly more from ancillary character development, because Sabine and Greta’s ex-husband characterizations are slightly underbaked.

As someone familiar with the impulse to destabilize a perfectly functional life, I recognized the emotional fallout this novel captures. Beagin understands how the body can move without or ahead of the mind, pulling you into situations you don’t yet have language for. I was most impressed by how the book suggests that whether you drift through life or fixate so intensely on the present that you ignore the past, you can still end up in the same unhealthy dynamics when too much about the past goes unspoken. The fact that the novel manages to explore all of this while remaining genuinely funny is a large part of its appeal, and a reminder of why I love reading fiction.

Overall, Big Swiss balances emotional weight and wit, using sharp dialogue and unexpected situations to keep the tone lively and engaging—an unconventional, often funny exploration of obsession, desire, and loneliness. Readers who enjoy awkward, character-driven narratives and dark humor will likely find it engaging, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Kelsey McGarry (she/her/hers) lives in Los Angeles, CA and loves spending time outdoors with their queer community.

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect
Koss
Diode Editions, 2024, 52 pages
$12.00

Reviewed by Jenny Wong

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist that takes the gritty scuffs and shapes of life and condenses them into twenty-eight poems which challenge the reader to observe what happens in the aftermath, the retrospect, and beyond.

The poem “A Modern Highway of Death,” although it may not have intentionally been written to describe the collection, sums it up well: “The world, you see/and don’t, is in flux between / Connections and short circuits.”

Words sparkle and spark with color, painting surreal scenes that bring to life human moments through a queer lens. Although the chapbook’s title feels playful, the weight of grief, suicide, abuse, and other traumas weave its way throughout. Titles such as “Things to Do When an Abuser Dies” and “Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway” forewarn of troubles to come. However, despite the darkness that unfolds within the boundaries of a page, Koss’ skill as a writer shines in what they choose to reveal and what is left obscured in the shadows. The language in this collection is both visual and visceral, blending the starkness of reality with a soft filter of the surreal. The collection never shies away from the truth of the experience, nor from the impacts of events that ripple and rebound into the current day.

There are several stunning list poems in the collection which is a form Koss adeptly uses to convey events, possibilities, and introspections. Listed items dialogue with each other, find humor in the aside, and use brevity to condense observation into its most potent form. One such example is the list poem “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead.” The first entry starts out swinging: “1. I was a victim more than once, but said no and no and no; I’m / the craggy boxing bitch, staggering through the bloodstream. / Dig my damn red lace-up boots, I wore them just for you.”

Peeking through the heaviness, Koss still manages to show a world of color and humor. Visuals dazzle and word choice challenges the reader to see something new in a scene that may or not be familiar. “A Dyke Cowgirl Takes Herself on a COVID Taco Bell Date,” sets the stage for a drive-thru encounter that Koss makes anything but mundane: “Hand a five to a large hairy man in glittery bunny ears fixed / to a plastic tiara, singing into his mask, hump dancing and / in-the-moment-happy. They work sixty hours with overtime / that inches them just out of the poverty bracket if you / discount health insurance.”

Throughout the collection, there are several poems with the word “Zuihitsu” appended between parentheses in their titles. Zuihitsu, which means “follow the brush,” is a genre in Japanese literature that focuses on the responses elicited by an environment. Koss shows us that although people and places can shape us, they do not define us. A person can choose to create their own colors and perceptions in order to transform past events into stories of survival, recovery, and an exploration of life itself.

Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. She is the author of Shiftings & Other Coordinates of Disorder (Pinhole Poetry, 2024) and resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains where she makes short poetry films and plans her next adventures. Find her on X, bluesky, and instagram @jenwithwords.

The Sea Gives Up the Dead
Molly Olguín
Red Hen Press, 2025, 152 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Cheyenne Stone

Molly Olguín’s The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a haunting collection of short stories that examine death, grief, and identity. Her stories feature attempted murders, drownings, natural disasters, terminal illnesses, car accidents, the violence of war, and the human response to the aftermath of these losses. Above all, however, Olguín examines the grief that comes from a loss of identity—and the hope that comes from embracing it.

Olguín’s collection begins with a series of tragic horror stories, creating a sense of dread in her reader as she leaves off just before the final scene of a tragic ending. “Seven Deaths” promises that the cycle of revenge will continue despite the blood already shed. “Devils Also Believe” promises that a little girl’s mother will die of the flu, leaving her alone in the world. “The Princess Wants for Company” promises death for a still-living creature in order to retrieve the already deceased baby in its stomach. “The Undertaker’s Dogs” promises that death will come for a young puppy at the hands of a woman who has failed to find a natural maternal instinct for it or its now deceased siblings. Olguín litters her stories with tragedy but withholds the narrative’s final tragic event from the text, leaving readers haunted by what must come next. This narrative choice provokes a powerful sense of dread in the reader, creating horror more effective than what could be achieved through gruesome violence on the page.

However, Olguín’s collection isn’t all tragic endings. “honey from the rock” provides a short examination on how even the mundane can leave its mark on a person, exploring expectations and assumptions versus reality. “Clara Aguilera’s Holy Lungs,” “My Husband and Me,” “Small Monuments,” and “Esther and the Voice” each explore the ways we can be haunted by a loss, whether it be a sister, a younger self, the ex-girlfriend we regret refusing to marry, or a wife lost too soon. These middle stories are melancholy but gripping, delving into technology gone too far, fantastical faith and religion, and balancing grief, resentment, and forgiveness.

The final stories, “Captain America’s Missing Fingers,” “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” and “Foam on the Waves,” bring the collection full circle, providing hope instead of tragedy, even as the stories are tinged with horror. Children disturbed by the violence of war reject an identification with the idealized notion of the noble American soldier. A mother who rejected and lost her son accepts and becomes reconciled with her daughter. A young girl refuses to commit a violent act and regains her voice, finding her heart’s desire as she creates her own identity. These stories show us what can be when what dies is our old, ill-fitting selves, our resentments, and our attachments to how we think things should be instead of how they could be. Olguín doesn’t show us these characters’ endings, the same as in her tragic stories, but the reader feels assured that their future is hopeful.

Reading this collection, what most interested me was Olguín’s exploration of identity. Many of the characters are struggling with their internal versus external identities, as normative assumptions about gender, class, and race have boxed them into roles that don’t seem to fit. Parents force their children to use names that don’t feel like their own. Women are expected to be natural nurturers and mothers, horror creeping into the story as they realize their lack of a real maternal instinct. A dead girl’s life is disregarded as she is sanctified in death, her afterimage as a holy saint more important than remembering who she actually was. These identities are ones imposed onto the characters despite their ill fit. The first several stories are tragic, one sad end after another as characters try to fit into the molds they’ve been placed in, and it is not until the characters begin to refuse these impositions that the endings begin to be more hopeful. The happy endings of “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” and “Foam on the Waves” are directly tied to a mother’s acceptance of her child’s gender identity and a young girl’s refusal to comply with her family’s heternormative expectations of her, respectively. Ending on these two stories, Olguín seems to suggest that the antidote to disappointment, anger, violence, and the tragedy they bring is acceptance of ourselves and others, allowing people to speak with their own voices and tell us who they are.

A tense, haunting, and mournful read, The Sea Gives Up the Dead is also at times hopeful and cathartic. The prose is dynamic and the characters are well-developed, compelling, strong personalities anchored in realistic problems and feelings, creating character-driven narratives that explore the intrinsically human—even if that exploration is set to a backdrop of dragons, futuristic AI cyborgs, or disembodied, breathing lungs.

Cheyenne Stone (she/her) is a writer and editor based in Huntsville, Alabama. She has a background in Shakespearean drama, queer literature, feminist criticism, and queer theory. Her research and creative works focus on understudied female characters and perspectives, events in queer history, and issues in gender and sexuality.

Baby Blue
Bim Eriksson, translated by Melissa Bowers
Fantagraphics, 2025, 264 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Ash Lev

From Stockholm-based writer and illustrator Bim Eriksson, Baby Blue is a graphic novel that tells the story of Betty, a citizen of a dystopian, fascist society where human emotion is heavily policed, and the underground world of resistance she finds herself involved with after violating the rules of the regime. Translated from the original Swedish text by Melissa Bowers, this is the first of Eriksson’s works to be available in English.

In the world of Baby Blue, any and all expressions of sadness—crying in public, Googling “how to be happy,” or even listening to a Lorde song—are strictly prohibited. This law is enforced by Peacekeepers, a Gestapo-esque force that surveils and eventually detains Betty after a public emotional outburst. What follows is a scene that reads as only a slight exaggeration of how it feels to seek mental health support from medical professionals. As she fidgets anxiously with her hands, Betty is asked to describe how she feels in detail, where she significantly downplays the depressive symptoms she has been experiencing. When the nurse calls her out for lying, Betty is belittled, threatened with institutionalization, and eventually forced into a suspicious twelve-week “treatment program.” This is where she meets Berina, a charismatic member of the resistance who takes Betty under her wing and helps open her eyes to the truth of their world. With Berina’s guidance, Betty learns not only how to rebel against their fascist leaders, but how to accept herself, sadness and all. As someone who often struggles to find the value in my negative emotions, Betty’s character arc is something that really stuck with me. I also particularly enjoyed that the story is set in Sweden, which allows for the dystopia to be read as a twisted satirization of Nordic exceptionalism.

The standout feature of the graphic novel is by far its unique visual style. With blue-ink illustrations, Eriksson creates uncanny characters with huge bodies and tiny heads that wear facial expressions so detailed that they’re almost grotesque. These same characters blow heart-shaped puffs of cigarette smoke and do drugs that look like crushed-up emojis. The world of Baby Blue is decorated with massive advertisements, smiley faces, and feel-good newspaper headlines like “Here Comes the Sun” and “GDP Hits Record High!!” (20), all used in an attempt to numb and redirect the minds of its citizens away from their own suffering. What the illustrations lack in variety of colour, they make up for in spades with depth and texture, placing Betty’s minimalist but distinct character design in front of elaborately detailed backdrops that seem to directly point to how out-of-place she feels in her environment.

Eriksson’s graphic novel is an imaginative, absurd, visually striking, read-in-one-sitting type of book, and exactly the thing I needed to get me out of my recent reading slump. Baby Blue is an unfortunately relevant story of how fascism thrives on implicit submission, but a much-needed reminder that a better world is always worth fighting for.

Ash Lev is a butch writer and photo-based artist currently living in Tkaronto. In Ash’s free time, you’ll find him kissing his cats’ heads, overanalyzing TV shows, or contemplating grad school.

The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
Avid Reader Press, 2024, 272 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

The Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted novel, The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden, is a visceral exploration of the relationships women hold, and the identity that keeps them tied to place. The novel, set fifteen years after World War II, follows Isabel (Isa), a reclusive young woman living alone at her family home, whose life is upended when her brother’s new girlfriend Eva must stay for the season. An exhilarating story unfolds in the summer heat as synergy between the two women unravels all that they know about themselves, and the spaces in which they exist.

The text navigates erotic desire and its development between Isa and Eva, who birth a new meaning of place through their relationship to one another. To achieve this, Van der Wouden traces the mundanity of sharing spaces, and heightens tension through the unbreakable obsession Isa has with Eva’s presence—her doing, her being, her existing. Attuned so deeply to the house, Isa cannot ignore the way Eva initially unsettles her. But as the novel continues, Eva rewrites Isa’s understanding of home, where “she would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind” (258). The building of their relationship in the domestic space becomes a shared creation of queer space, moulded by them, rather than the circumstances that force them together.

For most of the text, queer desire is unspoken. It teeters on the edge of repulsion, on agitation and torment, as Isa feels antagonised and exposed by the mere presence of Eva intruding on her solitude. Yet, over pages of discovery and unbecoming, their relationship softly falls into a romance that they never intended to pursue. It becomes a vulnerable connection with an unwavering tension under the surface, right to the end—when an even greater connection, tying the pair, is revealed.

Yael van der Wouden masterfully crafts a protagonist deeply masked by her isolation, her demand for control, and her identity. Isa is intimately tied to the walls, furniture, windows, and crockery of the home. Left amongst the ruins of her family, the home becomes a space of obsession for Isa, to define her existence through order and possession. Eva, nonchalant, irreverent, and tantalising, is the antithesis to Isa’s comfort. Her presence disrupts Isa, who “had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house. . . And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel. . .” (155).

The Safekeep does not shy away from confronting the aspects of social standing and gender roles that form the complexities of the characters. Isa and Eva, like Van der Wouden’s other characters, are layered. The lifestyle decisions of Isa’s brothers Louis and Hendrik, who are able to travel and philander, are privileges made possible by their status as Dutch men in a post-war world.

Their mobility contrasts the necessity of Isa’s attachment to the house “in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her” (33). Thus, Eva’s need to orchestrate and deceive in order to succeed in the world, as an unmarried queer woman.

Van der Wouden’s writing focuses on the intricacies of expression, dialogue, and circumstance that shape our relationship to spaces. The Safekeep ultimately follows two women softly becoming home to one another, a home crafted by their shared love and affection. The Safekeep left me reflecting on every word, every motif, every aspect of the writing, and is a uniquely brilliant work of literature that I will undoubtedly recommend.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in English and Classics, and was a fall 2024 intern with Sinister Wisdom. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

Sex Beyond “Yes”: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone
Quill R. Kukla
W. W. Norton & Company, 2025, 176 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“We need to talk to one another in order to explore what we want to do and how to do it well together.”

Kukla provides readers with vignettes of sexual encounters and breaks down the philosophical questions that arise surrounding pleasure, ethics, and desire in these encounters. As stated in the title, their examples do aim to include everyone: readers see queer stories, stories with older people, individuals with disabilities, neurodivergence, Black and brown individuals, and generally an avoidance of white, able-bodied, cishet stories. I appreciated this, as oftentimes material on sexuality can operate on assumptions of cisgenderness, heterosexuality, whiteness, and no disability. It’s important for a book/guide on good sex to actually be applicable.

The work acknowledges that discussions of sex often center on consent and how to prevent bad sex. Kukla makes clear, “This is a book about good sex. I want to explore how we can expand and protect our own and one another’s sexual agency and pleasure, and enjoy wanted, satisfying, ethically sound sex.” They explain that human flourishing necessitates opportunities to access and exercise sexual pleasure and agency, both safely and ethically. If our only understanding of sex rests on a yes/no binary, a binary of simply avoiding harm rather than exploring pleasure, we can miss the conversations, cues, invitations, curiosity, and mutual building that sexual relationships need to move into those safe and ethical experiences.

This is not to say the author rejects consent or the importance of avoiding harm; consent is defined at the outset and upheld as necessary at all times. A recurring concept in the work is “scaffolding,” which can be cultural, social, or interpersonal. The idea is that structures and systems will be set up to safeguard and reinforce autonomy. Examples include negotiations of safe words in advance (interpersonal) or having good sex education and access to contraceptives (social). Kukla writes, “Much of good sexual communication is not about asking questions or giving answers at all: We should be building fantasies together, flirting, expressing our concern and affection for one another, and establishing trust.”

I appreciated their efforts for practical guidance, and I enjoyed the work. I personally feel it needed more detail in the areas Kukla let us know were challenging, but the author still did a good job of engaging. My feelings may just be my own internal conflicts with ideas of consent and power.

You can watch an event Lighthouse Bookshop facilitated for the author online for free here!

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland.