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.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
V. E. Schwab
Tor Books, 2025, 544 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

In her latest novel, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a queer vampire romance, Schwab enchants readers once again—especially those who fell in love with the aching beauty of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Bury Our Bones follows the lives of three female protagonists across centuries, across lives and dreams left behind, as they are born anew. Sabine, whom we are first introduced to, is a whirring storm through the text, born with a natural hunger for freedom and a heart that takes without regret. Alice is a melancholic junior, searching for meaning in her mourning and revenge for those who changed her. Lottie captures our hearts with her softness across time, chased by a past she cannot outrun. We watch Schwab’s characters grow into women who flee, love, dream, and navigate the costs of choosing to live forever.

Schwab entices us from her first chapter, reminding us how effortlessly she creates worlds and imperfect characters within her text. In Bury Our Bones, she forms a story intertwined through centuries, spaces, and places that simultaneously build the lives of her characters. Weaving back and forth in time, Schwab marks the centuries, lessons, and lovers her characters experience over the years. Throughout her works, Schwab uses the history and upbringing of her characters as a way for readers to understand their motives and desires. Her characters are individual, they come alive within the pages, through the years and places they inhabit and through their presence in each other’s lives.

At first glance, Bury Our Bones seems YA-queer-vampire romance-esque, but the nuances of Schwab’s characters, their challenges, and their morals extend into the adult genre. The novel contrasts themes of youthful fantasies against the darkness of mortality and power imbalances. Schwab depicts feminine hunger and female desire in human and immortal lives and shows readers what happens when hunger is never satisfied.

Schwab does not shy away from capturing female queerness, conveyed through each lesbian protagonist in their perception of people, spaces, and self. Her queer romances explore the intricacies of lesbian relationships as they defy conformity over centuries, showcase the beauty and terror of navigating fantasy realms, and capture the erotic desire and cravings of sapphic attraction. Depicting this in the fantasy vampire genre heightens the yearning and craving, as expressed in: “because I like you. . . Because I want you. Because there are too many kinds of hunger, and I can’t pick them apart. Because I’m afraid” (212). Here, Schwab exhilarates readers with this interdependent hunger.

Brought to life by complex queer protagonists, Bury Our Bones is a provocative, haunting exploration of desire, hunger, and the cost of immortality. Schwab compels us to question how far we would go for freedom and whether we could trade our souls for it—or how women might survive without it.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She recently completed her undergraduate studies, double-majoring 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.

In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado
Graywolf Press, 2019, 272 pages
$26.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Content Warning: Abuse

My first encounter with Machado’s In the Dream House was when I worked in domestic abuse services and research. One of the women I was speaking to described what she had survived and asked if I had read Machado’s work; she shared a segment from the book to describe her experiences. The book gave her the words to describe what happened and what she needed to help her healing process, and I remember thinking, “This is something I should read.” This story is non-fiction. This narrative is Machado’s lived reality. Her recount is powerful, both in its content and in its presentation. She splits the narrative between ‘I’ and ‘You’ (‘I’ being the author now and ‘You’ being the author during the abuse). Suddenly, you’re reading about emotions and situations that ‘you’ experience as a victim-survivor, and empathy becomes ingrained.

She avoids explicit details of the abuse, but is clear about her survival of sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological violence. The woman in the dream house (the abuser) can be both exceptionally ‘loving’ and, the next instant, violent and terrifying. This duality mirrors the complicated realities of intimate partner violence (IPV): the person you love isn’t always bad all the time; it can be hard to realise a situation is abusive when you’re being love-bombed between the violence. Machado is clear—having survived and writing this from the perspective of someone who escaped—that no matter how ‘good’ an abuser can seem at times, it never excuses their abuse.

Lesbian IPV often goes unrecognised by both support services and survivors themselves, in part due to misalignment with heteronormative scripts of abuse (cis male abuser/cis female victim: white, thin, physically abused). Machado writes, “Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat” (156), and rightly explains how even within the queer community, gender rhetoric has been used as “a way of absolving queer women from responsibility for domestic abuse” (230). She shares the story of Debra Reid, a Black lesbian woman who killed her abuser in self-defence (see the Framingham Eight). Reid’s case was reframed as ‘mutual battering’ and her sentence was never commuted like those of all the other women in the Framingham Eight. Machado concludes, “Narratives about abuse in queer relationships—whether acutely violent or not—are tricky in this same way. . . Our culture does not have an investment in helping queer folks understand what their experiences mean” (161).

There is also the complexity of reporting abuse in the queer community: Machado reiterates concerns about reinforcing negative lesbian stereotypes by sharing her experiences. She writes about this complication, noting, “queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind” (51-52). When reflecting on the abuse, she muses on what she’d say to her abuser: “For fuck’s sake, stop making us [lesbians] look bad” (145). The reality is that abuse can exist in all relationships, and if we avoid speaking out about it, it continues to go unaddressed, unexplored, and leaves queer communities vulnerable.

Machado’s work is incredibly important, but readers should be aware that the content can be difficult at times. This difficulty doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage, but I would encourage readers to make sure they have space to work through any issues that may arise while reading. If any of the content mirrors your relationship or experiences (current or past), or if something doesn’t feel right in your relationship, reach out to a number below. Contacting doesn’t mean you’re in an abusive relationship, but it never hurts to speak to someone about an experience you feel uncomfortable with. Your feelings and experiences are real and deserve respect, validation, and support. Your partner(s) should respect you and make you feel safe.

Help is available:
RAINN (US): 800 656 4673
Lada Nacional Gratuita (MX): 800 822 4460
Canada Crisis Lines
Galop (UK): 0800 999 5428
1800Respect (AUS): 1800 737 732
WAVE Helplines (EU): 116 016

Allison Quinlan is a former support service provider and current PhD student working with adult LGBTQ+ survivors of IPV in Scotland.

Trans Femme Futures: An Abolitionist Ethic for Transfeminist Worlds
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
Pluto Press, 2024, 256 pages
$22.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

I received a free copy of Trans Femme Futures in late 2024, shortly after For Women Scotland, funded in large part by famed TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) Joanne K. Rowling, defeated the Scottish Government in the High Court, forcing them to define ‘woman’ based solely on ‘biology.’ Trans individuals were not consulted, did not testify, and were not considered when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued guidance to practitioners following the decision. Effectively, rights were stripped from trans, nonbinary, intersex, and non-‘normative’ women across the country, including rights to support services following abuse, as well as the ECHR issuing toilet bans. Trans men were seemingly not targeted in the guidance, only trans women. So, Pluto Press offered Trans Femme Futures to help us understand how transfemme individuals are perceived socially and invited us to imagine a world where existence is not criminalised, erased, or constantly threatened.

From the start, Trans Femme Futures outlines the importance of rejecting ideas giving legitimacy solely to individuals who fit social ideas of transness—in their words, “a body that is legibly and visibly trans, in public or in private.” As they note throughout the work, multiple factors influence individuals’ presentations and how they are perceived based on race, ability and health, access to healthcare, size, and more. Breaking out of these assigned femme ideals is as much a method of active disruption as it is of creating an existence that is one’s own, rejecting conformity to yet another gendered expectation. Following the thread of self-expression outside assigned ideals, the work discusses assimilation and respectability politics regarding sexuality:

Like queer liberalism before it, the sanitised reframing of trans and non-binary folks might make some of us more respectable, but often at the expense of those of us who wear our sexualities upon our sleeves, or those of us who are objectified and hyper-sexualised (most often Black and Brown trans women and other trans people of colour).

After establishing the dynamics of heteronormative and cisnormative social interactions in conversation with transfemme lives, bodies, and spaces, the work moves on to the theme of community, which is present throughout the rest of the work. The authors explore the differences between a community (group members have something in common but don’t necessarily know everyone) and a collective (existence through direct relations), and how these can contribute to organising for a better future. However, they warn against experience-led organising creating an obligation to participate, and emphasise the importance of holding differences within organising spaces, noting that care should be mutual.

Across the chapters, the authors argue that trans liberation won’t be granted by the structures that currently oppress us, and they take an abolitionist, grassroots approach to building a future. Community and collective struggle stay at the core of their roadmap for trans femme futures:

Part of the work of overcoming oppressions, including internalised oppressions, entails countering the voices and affective economies that claim we are not worthy of support, while building the social infrastructures and worlds that can open the space to articulate one’s needs—in a way that is couched in consent.

Solidarity, which aims for total liberation, is the path forward. In a time when courts write trans erasure into policy, Trans Femme Futures insists we’re already forming a better future collectively. The work comes to a close, centering joy: “In the end, it’s all about the joy of living our lives and the pleasure of shaping them together.”

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and quite angry at people who continue to buy Harry Potter. At least learn to pirate!

Leaving Home at 83
Sandra Butler
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 178 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Martha Miller

In this memoir, after a series of illnesses, Sandra Butler decides to leave home after fifty years and move to Phoenix to a residential home for seniors called Desert Manor, where she longs to have the details of her life taken care of. This is a funny but honest account of her adjustment period, where her desires are lined up against reality. For example, she wants to eat prepared meals in the dining room with other lodgers. But it doesn’t work out. She learns that the food isn’t that good, and the tables have assigned seats. She doesn’t fit in and is told as much, so she ends up buying food and eating in her apartment alone. One of her reasons for moving to Phoenix is that she will be close to her daughters. That doesn’t work out the way she thinks it will, either. She seldom sees her children.

Butler thought, “We have to have our paradise while we’re alive” (117) and hoped that Desert Manor would be one step toward it. However, she’d only seen pictures of her apartment before she moved, although she was offered a tour. When she enters the apartment, she finds pigeons have taken over her balcony. Then, when she has cleaned it, she has to block off the birds’ return with plastic wrap. So, there’s no sitting out there and enjoying the desert views.

Butler considers herself a lesbian activist, and even though she tries to be as open as possible, she doesn’t find a single person like her. Unexpectedly, she finds her way to the hearts of other residents through her Judaism. She asks residents about themselves and eventually wins them over as they tell their stories. It is only in the end, when she gets to talk about herself, that she can say she’s made some friends. Each friend she makes, she must do so by accepting their quirky personalities. She learns to live in an environment that she originally wanted to change. And in the end, she becomes satisfied with it.

At Desert Manor, Butler must confront her age more than ever. At one point, an Avon Lady comes, and she buys a bunch of makeup that renders her smooth and unidentifiable. Before the makeup, “My hair was thinning, my hips were thickening, my eyes were dimming, and my teeth appeared to be shifting. There was no cute part left anywhere on my body” (70). She quickly washes the stuff off her face and puts it away forever. She finds that she prefers the wrinkles and brown spots she’s developed over the years. “The primary identity here [Desert Manor] was old. Everything. . . collapsed into that” (113).

Along with the other residents, Butler feels sad that there’s no longer anyone who knows her history. One night at a dance, she discovers she can no longer dance through a whole record and determines to dance on her feet as long as she can and then dance from her seat. Accepting this, she says, “When I moved to Phoenix, I’d longed to have the details of my life taken care of, which they weren’t” (138), but she develops attainable new desires.

This is a well-written, humorous book. We find that while Butler must work to adjust to things at Desert Manor, she becomes friends with most residents, and they adjust to her. She is the leader of more than one Jewish group and works to include other residents. Meetings that were four or five people became more than thirty. We learn, as Butler learns, that she is more than a lesbian activist.

I felt the book started slowly while detailing her illnesses, but it was worth continuing. When she moved to her new home, the conflicts were interesting and often amusing. I wondered if young people would enjoy this book. There is no wild sex or walks on the beach. But I certainly enjoyed this short 178 pages, where I found truths about aging, things that I identified with, and things that had me worried. I am a few years short of 83, but suddenly that age doesn’t seem so scary to me.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

The Night Alphabet
Joelle Taylor
riverrun, 2024, 432 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Within the last couple of years, it feels like all of my favorite poets are releasing their debut novels—Kaveh Akbar with Martyr!, Ocean Vuong with The Emperor of Gladness, and Joelle Taylor with The Night Alphabet. Like Akbar and Vuong, Taylor’s debut is nothing if not poetic and experimental.

The Night Alphabet follows a young girl, Jones, who learns that she can embody other people’s lives across time—a coal miner, an incel, a eugenist—and then finds out that her mother and grandmother can do the same. This embodied time travel (or “rememberings,” as she calls it) comes to a head when Jones walks into a tattoo parlor in Hackney, London, in the year 2233. Covered head-to-toe in tattoos that commemorate her journeys, she asks the tattoo artists, Small and Cass, to connect her journeys with ink. The artists hesitantly tattoo her weathered body as Jones tells them about her rememberings, tattoo by tattoo.

The Night Alphabet feels disorienting in the most exciting way, especially due to its form: the novel almost reads like a short story collection of Jones’ rememberings, with every other chapter returning to the present timeline at the tattoo parlor with Small and Cass. As complicated as the concept for this novel is, the core of Joelle Taylor’s strange tale is remembrance, storytelling as empathy, and visibility.

Each time Jones recounts a remembering, there is a gorgeous black and white illustration at the start of the chapter. These illustrations are her tattoos, but also the wounds of her experiences. She explains that “every tattoo is a door into a new country,” and that her rememberings are like falling into another life (46). The core question throughout the novel is: What is experience, and empathy gained from experience, if not a constant growing pain? Her tattoos represent that pain “is a birthing place as much as a site of grieving” (338). What, then, is the true cost of empathy?

Taylor leans into storytelling in The Night Alphabet. Each remembering is a different genre, tone, and style, which reflects Jones’ core learning: “Empathy is the root of intelligence” (232). Taylor invites the reader into this experiment—the constant tone shifts are jarring, but also an exercise in true understanding. These rememberings are hard to read at times. An incel who murders women on camera and a eugenist participating in sex trafficking were particularly tough sections to read from the perpetrator’s perspective. However, through Jones’ journeys, she learns that “you must be everyone in the story to understand the story” (413). It is a challenging, yet necessary lesson.

The Night Alphabet wouldn’t be a Joelle Taylor work if it weren’t full of rowdy women. It is no mistake that the only people in the novel who can fall into these “rememberings” are women. Invisibility versus visibility threads throughout the entire novel, but is especially present in the lesbian bar chapter. Jones reflects, “I have sat in dyke bars across continents, each of them stuffed with sweating, gorgeous, ferocious, invisible women” (321). Intriguing implications of embodiment and visibility are core concerns for Taylor in this novel. Considering this work is primarily concerned with women, Taylor provides a vessel for female agency through Jones’ rememberings.

The Night Alphabet is no ordinary tale. If you want an exercise in empathy, a kaleidoscope of short stories, and a rolodex of unruly women, Joelle Taylor’s debut novel is for you.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an associate editor-at-large for Chestnut Review and holds a BA in English from Azusa Pacific University. They are a regular book reviewer for Wild Shrew Literary Review with Sinister Wisdom. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

Sympathy for Wild Girls
Demree McGhee
Feminist Press, 2025, 216 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

In Sympathy for Wild Girls, experiences and knowledges associated with Black, queer womanhood are expertly infused into subtly surreal stories. Described as “Confident and poetic” by the Chicago Review of Books, Demree McGhee’s exacting and vibrant debut is a stunning, cohesive meditation on otherness, connection, and identity. Each story encapsulates a world of social systems, tenuous relationships, and underlying dreams and desires. This encapsulation allows the collection to meticulously analyze, synthesize, and dissect social mechanisms and influences. Engaging with the sharply rendered world of Sympathy for Wild Girls is like looking at our own through a magnifying glass—parts that are often ignored or brushed over are made visible and put on display. Throughout the collection, characters fall in and out of belonging, search for safety from hostility, become and transform, and come to terms with their otherworldliness while navigating societal rejection and girlhood’s treacherous terrain.

With stories articulated in multiple registers and encompassing varying degrees of reality, Sympathy for Wild Girls could be defined by its versatility. Stories like “Scratching” interrogate the boundaries surrounding death and life in its focus on grief and love, while stories like “Valerie” investigate the arduous task of unfurling repressed desire. Wry humor and sharp pop culture references intertwine with chilling, devastating meditations on what it means to experience discrimination, evoking the way harm and violence are inherent aspects of every part of marginalized lives.

Sympathy for Wild Girls could also be defined by its deft analysis of the emotions and feelings that influence actions and reactions to being chronically othered. As a result, the collection simmers with the sense of fear that comes with being mistreated and abused in the context of Black womanhood and girlhood. Each narrative is imbued accordingly with a fear of being wrong, replaced, or the recipient of violence. In addition, McGhee’s compelling storytelling and vivid imagery coalesce to create deeply resonant depictions of this fear—characters often change, shrink, hide, disguise, or distance themselves for fear of societal and personal fallout. For instance, narratives like “Thinning” revolve around a fear of seeming out of place or mismatched. In this way, fear as a survival response to trauma and discrimination pulses throughout this book, acting as a foundation for the stories.

For those who must fight to be seen, heard, and understood, who have felt alienated by expectations associated with womanhood and girlhood, who are familiar with the self-loathing and longing that accompany a life lived in the margins, Sympathy for Wild Girls is a collection of stories that will resonate, affirm, and inspire.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She is an assistant poetry editor for Noemi Press, an editorial intern at Electric Literature, a Feminist Press apprentice, and a poetry reader for Bicoastal Review. She studied English and GWS at Hollins University and earned an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Scribner, 2025, 480 pages
$31.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a book divided into two parts. The first is the life of Gertrude Stein when she came to Paris with her brother Leo, who was interested in art, and the beginnings of her art collection. What follows is twenty-some years of their lives through some of the greatest history of literature and two wars in Paris, as Stein meets and befriends Alice B. Toklas, falls out with Leo, and during World War II hides out with Toklas in a small French town—writing, living, and loving. The second part begins with Stein’s death and Toklas’ efforts to publish Stein’s prolific unpublished writings. Toklas worked with scholars and powers that be at Yale, where Stein’s papers had been donated, for twenty years as she aged and finally died. In an effort to save Stein’s papers, Toklas accidentally sent a scholar not only books, but notebooks containing hers and Stein’s personal lives. Thus Stein and Toklas’ personal life became public. An unpublished book titled Q.E.D. that contained the events of Stein’s first lesbian affair, before she met Toklas, a secret for which Toklas never quite forgave her, was published under another title. It’s hard to reduce Wade’s book, which is so rich in information, into the length of a review. While a great deal of An Afterlife is written in academic passages, in fact, it’s not a difficult read. There’s something about it that compels the reader forward.

When Stein died in 1946, the bulk of her writing was unpublished. Her work, Wade claims, was all her life “spurred by her scientific background” (3). Trained in medicine as a young woman in the US, this influence is clear later on in her writing. Stein asked questions about how perception worked, how words made meaning and embody the essence of people, places, things, and existence. She saw words as living things with physical properties, like materials a painter or sculptor might use to shape something new. Stein did with words what an artist does with paint.

Stein may be called less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. As a woman with a wife, I liked the phrase, “My wife my life is my life is my wife,” (105). I admit that before reading Wade’s book, the most I knew about Stein was ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ which I discovered was so well known that Toklas had it embroidered on several objects in their home. I knew that Stein was an overweight lesbian who wrote in repetition and was often difficult to read. Her process was sleeping late and writing, and then Toklas typed up the writing the next day. She loved reading mysteries and often read one a day. In later years, during a trip to America, she wanted to meet Dashiell Hammett. One thing I think most know about her is she entertained visitors in her room with walls covered with paintings. The studio gatherings consisted of painters, modernist writers, and their wives. Stein entertained the artists and Toklas the wives. I actually started to wonder if Stein had not been an overweight, openly lesbian female, her writing might have been considered on a level of Joyce, Faulkner, and other experimental writers of the modernist or post-modernist era. The truth was, “Stein always made people uncomfortable” (375).

Stein’s second book, The Making of Americans was completed in 1912 when Stein was 38. It was a reparative classic immigrant narrative. New people make new existences out of old lives. Stein did not make a profit from her writing even though the women self-published five titles under the trade name of The Plain Editions between 1930 and 1933. She and Toklas financed the books by selling a Picasso. Whenever money was tight, they looked toward the many paintings in their studio. Nevertheless, Stein soon started to make a little money from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published in 1932, and an opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for which she wrote the words and Vergil Thompson wrote the music. One very interesting part of Stein and Toklas’ life was World War II when, as two aging Jewish women, they left Paris and stayed in the country. Paris was invaded and eventually so was the small town where they hid. But they survived to return to Paris.

Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946 of uterine cancer, leaving Alice B. Toklas a widow for the next twenty years, with four hundred dollars a month and a mission. All property, including stocks, bonds, $82,000 cash, royalties, and the high-priced paintings from the studio, belonged to Stein’s nephew, whom neither woman was close to. Four hundred dollars a month in 1946 may have been adequate for living expenses, but as the next twenty years passed, the compensation paid for less and less. As time passed, Toklas frequently borrowed money from friends just to get by. After Stein’s death, only two books made money. The first was Q.E.D., the second was We Eat: A Cook Book, by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, which Stein wrote most of. These royalties went to Stein’s nephew.

Scholars who worked with Stein’s writing discovered that it changed over the years; in the beginning she used syntax to explore the inner process of emotions, and later she used language from literary conventions to explore her own feelings. With Q.E.D., Toklas pondered the final success of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt which after several rejections she finally published in pulp. Q.E.D. was published and a success. Toklas never abandoned her mission to get the rest of Stein’s writing published. Thanks to her, more of Stein’s writing was published after her death than before.

While the beginning of the book was an exciting love story, this later part was sad, as Toklas’ health went downhill. She died March 7, 1967 and was buried in the same grave as Gertrude Stein. Here the story is well written and interesting, and is also heartbreaking, for as Toklas became old and ill, much of her life was told from the point of view of scholars and publishers who worked with Toklas and watched her struggle.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is full of pictures and illustrations that support the story. I found this a well-written and easy-to-read book about a well-known modernist literary figure and a better-known early-twentieth-century lesbian couple. Their devotion to art and literature as well as to each other is remarkable.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. Her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Miller_(author).