Desert Haven
Penelope Starr
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 234 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Sandra Butler

Penelope Starr is a gatherer of stories. Founder of Odyssey Storytelling, a community storytelling event now celebrating its twentieth year, she understands how our stories illuminate the commonalities of our lesbian lives while leaving lots of room for the unique and distinct way each woman makes and lives her choices. I was grateful to enter the world of women’s land with her as my guide. 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.

There has been much written analyzing, theorizing, and assessing the history of lesbians returning to live on the land, but very little from inside the lived experience of the lesbians themselves. The fifteen stories in Desert Haven introduce us to a wonderfully varied mix of women, each deserving of their own novel, and together, they blend into an ever-shifting patchwork of personalities, relationships, and communal life.

Originally conceived as a documentary film for which Starr did dozens of in-depth interviews, the means to create the documentary fell through; several of the women died or moved away, and others decided they didn’t want to be public. Starr took the raw material she had gathered and wrote a novel, Desert Haven, inspired by these lesbians and told their stories to a readership eager for them. She introduces us to this constantly shifting cast of characters in a series of first-person stories, helping us understand their motivations and need to be part of an all-lesbian environment that would support and nurture their lives.

The work at Desert Haven was unrelenting, and the resources were few. The decision to choose a financially marginal, physically demanding, and fiercely idealistic life took courage. Why did they come? What had they left behind, and what did they find in this new community with other women who had moved off the conventional grid to a life entirely away from the dominant culture in a world of their own making?

Some were fleeing abusive family lives, searching for direction and meaning; others were passionately separatist dykes, women who wanted a world without men and were hungry to come to rest in an all-women’s space. Some women moved to Desert Haven, put down roots and pulled them up again after a few seasons to move on to their next adventure. Each was dedicated to living life on her own terms and prepared to pay whatever price was required to do that. We watch them move in and out of relationships, fall fiercely in love, become friends, break up, or form lasting family bonds. We listen to their firmly held beliefs about equalizing resources and responsibilities and differing opinions about trans women on the land. Community meetings were alternately cooperative and contentious, and rituals were revered by some and dismissed by others. The honoring of Mother Earth was an organizing principle, even as the land was in an ongoing state of order and disorder.

The scaffolding for these stories is provided by JoJo, the welcoming and stabilizing woman who bought this piece of land and held it for any lesbian who needed to be there. We follow the ever-changing cast of characters from Dee, who arrived in 1977, to JoJo’s death in 2014 when her daughter-by-choice inherits this historic bit of land and is left to imagine what the future might look like. Luckily for us, Starr is working on that!

I remember those days in my own lesbian-feminist life. The urgency, the passion, and the commitment to making a life that would honor, value, and support every woman–whether we agreed with her or not! It was hard work then and continues to be hard work now. Yet it’s what is required of us as we dykes dream and imagine and create. I am grateful for Starr’s stories and these women. I saw a bit of myself in nearly all of them and marveled at their doggedness, their trust in one another, and the ways they created the dream of a different future in their lives.

Sandra Butler writes about whatever is still unspoken in women’s lives. The Kitchen is Closed: And Other Benefits Of Being Old is a collection of the musings of an old lesbian-feminist. Leaving Home at 83 will be published in October 2024.

Carmilla
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Carmen Maria Machado
Lanternfish Press, 2019, 160 pages
$17.00
Originally published in The Dark Blue, 1871-1872, 139 pages

Reviewed by Chloe Weber

You may be familiar with the “lesbian vampire” narrative, one repeated in numerous books, films, and other forms of media. But from where did this narrative originate? Many argue that Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu set the stage for many of the lesbian and sapphic vampires we see today.

Carmilla, originally published as a serial in the London-based literary magazine The Dark Blue and later reprinted by Le Fanu in In A Glass Darkly (1872), predates its more famous counterpart, Dracula, by over twenty years. This novel is set in nineteenth-century Styria, a federal state of Austria, and follows teen protagonist Laura as she becomes acquainted with a strange new houseguest, Carmilla.

However, before the story begins, in the prologue of Carmilla, we learn that Laura has already passed away. This story is recounted as a case study by a man named Doctor Hesselius, who claims he corresponded with Laura, where she spoke in detail about her experiences with the vampire Carmilla. This correspondence was long presumed fictional until 1973, when Dr. Jane Leight uncovered within LeFanu’s study a stack of correspondence between a doctor and a woman called only “V.”

If we assume Laura and Doctor Hesselius are real, what of the vampire Carmilla, and what of the obviously queer relationship between the two women? Most scholars would say the lesbianism of Laura and Carmilla is no fiction. In fact, the letters written by V. are said to contain even more detail of her desire for Carmilla than what made it into Le Fanu’s manuscript. The truth is much more devastating: Carmilla is a story about “a young woman’s sexual awakening; [and] the senseless slaughter of her supposed defiler” (Carmen Maria Machado, vi).

Going into the novel with these considerations, I found Carmilla read less like a gothic horror and more like a story about queerness itself, with lesbianism as the focus. Carmilla lays her claim on Laura only moments after their first meeting, seeing it as fate bringing them together once more, as they both recall a shared “dream” of meeting as children. What follows is a tale in which Laura attempts to resist Carmilla’s various charms and claims on her life, brushing off her declarations of love as simple hysteria. Laura prefers to view Carmilla’s love as part of her weak countenance rather than accept her lesbianism. Carmilla experiences hours of apathy followed by ones of intense love, which she inflicts upon Laura, saying, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.” Laura describes the behavior, “like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me…” (37).

Laura’s eventual sexual awakening towards Carmilla comes when she is pierced in the breast by a beastly figure, later revealed to be Carmilla in a vampiric form. Following this strange occurrence, Laura believes her health is declining rapidly, and she describes attraction towards Carmilla as one of her primary symptoms. Laura even describes an orgasm experienced in a dreamlike state as she imagines sensations of a woman kissing up to her throat (69).

The only solution to Laura’s afflicted state is to eliminate the source of her woes, as she discovers evidence that Carmilla is actually an immortal vampire named Millarca. Laura still longs to find Carmilla safe, despite the evidence and even as the object of her desire is staked and beheaded. This confirms that Laura’s lesbianism is not something that will go away, and it cannot be cured as if it were some malicious malady.

It is not a far-fetched assumption that the real Carmilla, a woman named Marcia, was not a vampire as described by V. but a simple lesbian. Thanks to Le Fanu, Marcia is immortalized as a vampiric monster rather than just a human who stole a wealthy girl’s affection.

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. Laura’s, or V.’s, suppression of desire caused an unnatural amount of pain: it is possible that if these two women had embraced their love instead, their story might have ended differently.

Chloe Weber is a Sinister Wisdom intern for the May 2024 season, located remotely in Montclair, New Jersey. She attends Macalester College as a student of English and Anthropology, always on the hunt to expand her literary knowledge.

Cities of Women
Kathleen B. Jones
Keylight Books, 2024, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones begins with a beautiful premise: it is a book dedicated to all the women artists who have been made invisible. Her love for and commitment to historic lesbians is clear and indubitable from the very beginning, and it shapes her narration.

Jones has much in common with Verity Frazier, the protagonist—a disillusioned academic whose curiosity is rekindled by Christine de Pizan, or rather by the suspicion that the hand responsible for the artwork in her manuscripts may have belonged to a woman artist called Anastasia. This idea propels a journey in search of the truth (as a native Italian speaker, the choice to name her Verity, veritas, is a little bit on the nose, but I imagine for readers who aren’t accustomed to Latinisms this is more subtle), as Verity is dying to unearth tangible proof of her theory.

What counts as fact is open to question—Verity speaks these words to her ex, Regina, with whom she has a strange (alas normal in lesbian terms) friendship. 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, in the face of the world telling us that we are solitary exceptions?

Some descriptions of Verity’s amazement when interacting with valuable artifacts during her research reminded me of my experience at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—to touch the texture of the past, as Kathleen B. Jones says, provides a closeness to the subject that just can’t compare to simply reading about it, and the author succeeds in describing it as an almost religious experience.

Readers are accompanied back and forth between Verity’s present day and Christine’s late medieval Europe, both studded with political considerations about two eras that at first glance couldn’t seem more different but have much in common, touching on modern gentrification and its predecessors, the ever-present corruption of Church and State, and misogyny. The narration spans multiple characters’ points of view: an ambitious choice which is definitely called for in a book like this, though it’s not always executed smoothly.

To me, the author seemed more comfortable and truthful when writing in heightened language, leaving me with a feeling that she was holding back, almost restraining herself when writing in a more modern style. This made me yearn to be catapulted back into the thirteenth century.

Altogether, I thought the concept was wonderful, though very difficult to concretize.

I did not think it was unrealistic for Verity to encounter someone with the same name as the woman she was researching: Anastasia. As a lesbian whose existence is constantly altered by unbelievable coincidences, and who has observed the same in her lesbian friends’ lives, I found this a perfectly accurate, reasonable, and frankly quite brilliant form of representation.

As lesbians, every event in our existence is somehow brought on by strange forces we can’t define, and maybe it’s none other than our Lesbian Ancestors having their way with our little lives. I think this book captures that.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with a vague dance background; they have experience directing opera, helping out here and there on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a co-founder of the Italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA*, with which they have organized community events, raised funds, and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.

Rainbow Black
Maggie Thrash
Harper Perennial, 2024, 416 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash is a riveting thriller that blends dark comedy, romance, and murder mystery. It is mostly set in the summer of 1990, when Lacey, a middle schooler living on a farm in New Hampshire, and her parents, who run a daycare from their home, become caught up in the Satanic Panic sweeping the nation. Her parents are arrested and accused of a number of fictionalized crimes, mostly Satanic child abuse rituals. As her family’s situation worsens inside and outside the courtroom, Lacey’s life spirals further out of control, pushing her to make decisions that will follow her far into the future.

Rainbow Black is wildly gripping and always entertaining despite its dark themes. As a reader, you know it’s not going to end well, largely because the book is told from a retrospective point of view, with narration from an older version of Lacey, who alludes to future events. Despite this looming sense of doom, Thrash always keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The book is often over-the-top and sometimes even absurd, mirroring the pulpy, mind-numbing entertainment that it often discusses. During the summer of their parents’ trial, Lacey and her older sister watch Days of Our Lives religiously, becoming increasingly drawn in as the plot becomes more and more ridiculous and outlandish. This provides a mind-numbing escape from the real world for them and mirrors their own lives, which are quickly becoming equally unbelievable.

This absurdity is why the book works, excessive as it may be. As Lacey watches fever dream-esque Kool-Aid commercials and thinks, “No wonder [her parents’ students] were having psychotic delusions,” newspapers write sensationalist headlines about her family that are equally outlandish. Her lawyer argues that the hedonism and consumerism of the late twentieth century, especially in the media, both make people’s lives worse and cause them to expect outrageous entertainment in real life, too. The book serves as another statement on entertainment and media and how they can blur the lines between authenticity and fiction.

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, painting a picture that feels all too real of how it can hurt people by dragging them into false narratives.

At its core, Rainbow Black succeeds because its protagonist, Lacey, is a compelling character whose thoughts and feelings consistently feel vivid, earnest, and true. Despite knowing how things will end, you can’t help but hope for her to end up all right. The love story in the book’s second half also provides a surprising respite from its dark themes, ultimately becoming a central force that keeps its protagonists going. This all makes for an enthralling story that is, at its core, about love, relationships, and a quest to stay oneself in the midst of uncontrollable chaos.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Blessed Water: A Sister Holiday Mystery
Margot Douaihy
Zando, Gillian Flynn Books, 2024, 288 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Roberta Arnold

Punk rocker nun sleuth Sister Holiday is on the case again in this brilliant sequel to Scorched Earth. Blessed Water is rife with fluid language and water imagery; one dead priest is fished out of the Mississippi, and the ominous photo of another missing priest slides under the door in a polaroid. Sister Holiday and her lead-footed ex-fire inspector partner, Magnolia Riveaux, snake their way over turbulent floodwaters to find Father Nathan, the quiet Black priest who, like Sister Holiday, can’t get over the loss of his mother. Douaihy is an accomplished poet with four published books of poetry under her belt, and she unfurls sentences with life lessons through language that ranges from the sensate to the sublime.

Sister Holiday’s partner, Riveaux, wears mom jeans and a tight ponytail and has recently rid herself of a white guy–and a pill addiction acquired from a broken back. Sister Holiday joined the Parish school and convent to find redemption from the sins of her past–a past that includes the unforgivable in her mind. She finds poetic justice poking at barbaric hierarchical structures to see what shakes out. Holiday and Riveaux both have an unusual style reserved for those who live on the margins and know how to look in the places between things–a gap or crevice more easily seen by those who live outside the norm: a haunted lesbian nun covered in tattoo ink and a beautifully brazen Black ex-cop who embraces the little things in life that inspire awe.

While not fitting into any prescribed family model, Sister Holiday paradoxically daydreams about growing old with her one true love, Nina. In the first Sister Holiday book, love-making between the two exploded off the pages with unbound lesbian desire. Holiday’s past resurfaces in Blessed Water through the character of her brother, who turns up unexpectedly–the Moose to her Goose, two nicknames defined by the symbiosis of their childhood play. One-liners spark in flinty propulsion and invariably move the story along or toss it up in the air, delivering devil-may-care chutzpah to the saints and sinners of New Orleans.

In the acknowledgements, Douaihy recognizes the harm done by the Catholic church and colonialist rule. Douaihy’s writing takes its redemption with the strident knowledge that two opposing things simultaneously can be true, similar to a marginalized lesbian finding redemption in Catholicism. The stories and writing offer up pictures of life as vehicles of insight, wisdom, and humor not to be missed.

“My insides churned. Riveaux and I walked back to the truck to the soundtrack of Riveaux’s cane and my muttering. Hail Mary, full of Grace. Let the afterlife be a lesbian separatist commune. Amen.”

Roberta Arnold is a Sinister Wisdom board member and volunteer who reads and writes and walks in awe of nature every day. She lives in the mountains of SW Virginia near to her sister, her dog, and her cat, none of whom really belong to her.

Women! In! Peril!
Jessie Ren Marshall
Bloomsbury, 2024, 288 pages
$17.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

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. Marshall writes in several genres—romance, sci-fi, young adult, and more. Yet, the collection remains unified with exclusively female narrators and the truth that these women are, in fact, in peril. The most memorable perils to note are big tech controlling women’s bodies, divorced women grieving awful men, and pseudo-spiritual sapphic stories.

Stories like “Annie 2” and the titular story “Women! In! Peril!” display Marshall’s commentary on sexism, especially in the context of late-stage capitalism and rapid technological advancements. Annie is a female life-like robot who does housework and, when desired, is a sex toy. She says that robots like her are “not capable of wanting anything for [themselves], other than to be useful and used” (25). Annie is a robot, so this is in her design. However, Annie represents the pigeon-holed patriarchal roles assigned to women. With this in mind, Marshall cleverly gives Annie a bit of humanity—she cares for the other appliances and household items, like cleaning the toaster or shining shoes. Although her human owners control her, Marshall gives Annie agency within her captivity to care for other items destined to be thrown out and forgotten.

Marshall writes several stories that involve divorce, and almost all of them involve the female protagonists finding their way after their marriages end, as well as grappling with the reality that their previous male partners were, in fact, terrible. In “Dogs,” the narrator’s husband leaves her on a whim for one of his clients at his veterinary practice. The story consists of her in the early stages of grief—she can barely shower or leave the house. Marshall employs a dog motif throughout the story, and by the end, the reader realizes that she is likening the ex-husband to a dog. The speaker is going for a drive, and she sees a dog in the road and contemplates rescuing it, but it runs away. She says, “I could turn the car around, take the one I love and try to save him, but I know it wouldn’t work. The dog has made his choice” (99). Her ex-husband has made his choice, and she can do nothing. Marshall’s wit allows her to create metaphors that work well emotionally, but they also successfully take digs at awful men.

There are a few sapphic stories in this collection, and I can only describe them as spiritual—their themes go beyond what is tangible and knowable. In “My Immaculate Girlfriend,” the protagonist’s girlfriend gets pregnant, to both of their surprise, and the girlfriend believes it was God who impregnated her. The story ends with the protagonist’s acceptance of faith and doubles down on her love for her girlfriend: “I would never leave her. I would never let her go” (51). In “Late Girl,” we follow a dance student’s traumatic accident that leaves her with memory loss. However, her body remembers her dance choreography even when her mind is blank. It is revealed that her body remembers more than just dance moves; it also remembers her intimate relations with an unexpected character. When her mind catches up with her body, she does “the most honest thing a body can do. It gave her this mouth, this tummy, these thighs and cheeks and hands” (147). Marshall’s sapphic stories are dreamy, warm, and very well executed.

Each reader will see themselves in Marshall’s impressively nuanced, flawed characters. The diversity in storytelling and genre in Women! In! Peril! is genuinely impressive and very fun to witness. Picking up Women! In! Peril! is a great way to celebrate AAPI voices this month and always.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in their chapbook, Palimpsest, from Bottlecap Press and at CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press.

Grace Period
Elisabeth Nonas
Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2024, 286 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Elisabeth Nonas’ lovely fourth novel, Grace Period, starts with a funeral—and a standup comedy act. The funeral is for Grace Black, an art history professor at a small college in Ithaca, New York. The comedienne filling us in on the details of the funeral is Grace’s partner of 25 years, 70-year-old Hannah Greene, who is on the edge of retiring from her position in the English department of that same college.

Grace was ten years Hannah’s junior. She died of a stroke on the way to Hannah’s retirement party, just weeks away from the start of her sabbatical. Going back and forth in time, Hannah traces the stories of her past and present life with Grace and the dashed hopes of what was to be their future. 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.

Nonas has created an affable first-person narrator with Hannah. She’s a funny and self-deprecating Jewish butch whose sartorial choices run to polos, tees, shorts, and sweats.

Grace was the cook in the family and the gardener, too. When left to her own devices, Hannah feels lost in the beautifully appointed kitchen the couple designed together to meet Grace’s exacting specifications. Days into her grieving, Hannah is barely able to make herself a cup of espresso as she finds herself at odds with a newfangled coffee maker clearly purchased by Grace before her accident. Hannah can’t even figure out what to eat for dinner or, once having done that, how to prepare it.

Friends reach out, offer dinner and coffee dates, and even suggest she get a dog. But Hannah seems committed to her isolation. To establish some order in her life, Hannah begins to consult the imaginary Grace for advice about what to do next. She makes lists and slowly begins to follow them, heating up soup and eventually getting herself to eat it.

Hannah’s isolation doesn’t last for long. A few days after the funeral, a dusty Subaru, like the one Grace used to drive, roars up to the house. Out pop Cristina, the new instructor to the Art History department that Grace had hired, and Nicole, her lover. Unaware of Grace’s death, the two are caught off guard, but Hannah graciously offers them a temporary place to stay with the caveat that she won’t be very good company. The women reluctantly take Hannah up on her offer, and she seems to reluctantly welcome them in.

All the while, Hannah struggles to find solid memories of her life with Grace. Yes, there are souvenirs of their various trips together, like a particular bottle of wine that lets her reminisce. But none of these things seem sufficient. It isn’t until she finds herself cleaning out Grace’s office at the college where they both worked that Hannah finally stumbles onto evidence of something concrete that raises a memory. It’s precisely the kind of recollection a surviving partner would much rather forget, and yet, this hint of an event (which may or may not have happened) is exactly the thing that eventually brings Hannah toward a real sense of grieving and the core of her love for Grace.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels, and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying
Alvina Chamberland
Noemi Press, 2024, 274 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Sarah Parsons

Towards the middle of Alvina Chamberland’s autofiction novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying, the narrator takes the reader on a journey through a fever-induced fantasy of a life with footballer Ronaldo Nazário, in which she imagines herself “Queen Yoko Ono–Feminist Havoc-Wreaker Of The Football World!” By this point, the reader is well-acquainted with Chamberland’s uniquely humorous voice, which often takes the text into delightful surrealist territory. Love the World, Chamberland’s English-language debut, is a confessional story of one woman’s journey through Iceland, continental Europe, and California (sometimes in the moment, sometimes through memory). If Love the World is an adventure novel, then the reader serves as a sidekick of sorts. It often feels as though there is a dialogue taking place between reader and narrator, with Alvina tending the conversation, not unlike daily updates to a personal blog.

The novel buoys between hugely external moments in packed gay bars and Icelandic fjords, as well as more internal moments, reflecting on memory and life within the imagination. We are guided by Alvina’s inner monologue, which swings from dark humor to unexpected glee. Layered within the humor is a sense of solemnity; this is a book about survival, too, and the ongoing struggle to survive as a transgender woman. The reader experiences the world through Alvina’s eyes, as she encounters men who view her as an object of conditional desire all while she searches for a deeper, kinder love. Alvina meditates often on the subject of her own death: when it might come and how. She lives in a state of precarity, not by her own making, but by that of a patriarchal and transphobic culture. Alvina is a woman with a thirst for life–ever the intrepid traveler, she runs across the Icelandic countryside, bathes under waterfalls, and dreams up futures for herself with strangers. Yet, she has experienced great sorrow and pain. “Why,” she asks the reader, “does a male Buddhist monk write a book titled In Love With the World while a trans woman names her novel Love the World or Get Killed Trying?” This is the question at the heart of the novel.

Readers who enjoy journeys of self-discovery and adventure will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of Alvina Chamberland. As the novel unfolds, its depth becomes apparent, and the reader will likely find themselves growing fond of the narrator and her idiosyncratic voice. This novel spans countries, oceans, and years of Alvina’s life. It is an ambitious piece of literature that I imagine will leave readers with the same burning sense of desire for existence that Alvina lives by. As Chamberland writes, “I have decided to cast my vote for a life governed by the principle that everything is meaningful.” This book affords a great deal of care to the full range of moments in a day and a life.

Sarah Parsons is a Sinister Wisdom intern and writer based in Oregon whose work can be found online in Paperbark Magazine.

City of Laughter
Temim Fruchter
Grove Atlantic, 2024, 384 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

What a strange coincidence it was that I, a queer Jew from Silver Spring, Maryland, who has lost my father, ended up unknowingly reviewing a book whose main character shares the same experiences. And yet, after reading Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter, which encourages us to read things as fate, to insist on prescribing deeper meanings, I suppose I should consider that it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

In her moving, thought-provoking debut novel, Fruchter explores ideas of storytelling, intergenerational identity, and memory. City of Laughter primarily follows Shiva, a student who embarks on a quest to uncover the mysteries of her family that her mother, Hannah, seldom talks about. Newly recovering from both a breakup and her father’s death, Shiva’s research on her family and a web of Jewish folklorists takes her across the world and through time.

City of Laughter is told through many loose threads: four different generations of a family, all exploring their own questions of personal and familial identity. Hannah grapples with her strained relationship with her mother. Hannah’s mother has a collection of mysterious notes and is superstitious and distant. Her grandmother lives in a village in Poland, is deemed cursed, and attempts to understand the strange forces within herself. All are haunted by an immortal, ghostly being who seems to hold the answers they search for, but whom they can never truly wrap their minds around.

There is no real moment of tying all these threads together or of resolving all the narrative’s major questions; often it feels like when one is resolved, another is created. Instead of solutions, Fruchter leaves each character with more possibilities and unanswered questions. City of Laughter encourages lingering in these threads, in open questions, and embracing the fact that they may never be fully answered.

Much of City of Laughter is about Shiva’s research on S. An-sky, a twentieth-century folklorist best known for his play The Dybbuk. Shiva becomes fascinated by An-sky’s ethnographic survey about Jewish daily life in the Pale of Settlement. Although the survey has no answers, its questions speak for themselves, asking about specific rituals, customs, and folklore. It’s these unanswered questions that Shiva decides to focus on; instead of searching for neat conclusions in her research, she embraces the inevitable gaps and uncertainty in the pieces of history that we can access, which, in her words, “necessitate invention.”

In addition to following the story of Shiva’s family, City of Laughter is a collection of real and invented folktales, superstitions, and mythology, complementing the bits and pieces of history Shiva begins piecing together. Some stories have full arcs and tie thematically into the rest of the book. Some are incomplete stories with no resolution. Some even feel random, placed as interludes to the narrative without an obvious parallel. These stories intertwine with letters, memories, and past and present scenes from characters’ lives, all woven together into a sweeping tapestry.

City of Laughter is also a truthful, sincere exploration of identity. Shiva’s exploration of queerness goes hand in hand with her exploration of family history. To Shiva, both studies represent a potential for personal clarity and discovering underlying truths about herself. Fruchter discusses the process of forging a relationship to queerness, of feeling simultaneously out of place and at home in queer communities, of finding the words, the places, the ways of presenting yourself that make you feel most grounded, with an honesty and specificity unique to someone who personally understands this experience. Shiva treats queerness as an ongoing process, similar to her research on her family—something she will continue to investigate and grow into.

Shiva explores intergenerational queerness as well, wondering whether it is something she shares with her ancestors and the subjects of her research. She first looks for conclusive proof, jumping at small indications, but in the final stretches of the book interprets the loose ends in her family and An-sky as their own kind of queerness:

“Some part of her wanted to face S. An-sky himself more than anything, to take him by the shoulders, to ask, Well, were you? But queerness laughed in the face of proof. Queerness was not about a body of evidence but about layers of presence; a cumulative kind of hereness, insistent and glittering. A vertical line, even, lives and lives stacked on top of lives. Renegade desire that left no evidence behind; only a kind of residue that flickered in its wake.”

Ultimately, City of Laughter is not just a poignant exploration of personal identity and family; it is meticulous and thoroughly researched, sometimes feeling like an entire academic thesis told through fiction. It includes painstaking details about Shiva’s research and ultimately functions as a real collection of research on Jewish history and folklore, offering an entire framework on approaching historical queerness that intertwines with the lives and stories of Shiva’s family.

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.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Archangels of Funk
Andrea Hairston
Tordotcom Books, 2024, 384 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Archangels of Funk is the most hopeful book about a coming dystopia this reader could ever imagine. Andrea Hairston’s rambunctious third novel in a series that follows the adventures of Cinnamon Jones, self-proclaimed “Scientist, Artiste, and Hoodoo Conjurer,” alongside her community and ancestors, is a joy to read.

Honestly—I’m not a regular reader of sci-fi or techno catastrophe fiction. The last book like that I read and followed (and then just barely) was Marge Piercy’s He She and It from 1991. But the world Hairston invents here, set in a version of Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley in the near future, sometime after a catastrophe known as “the water wars,” is so complete, so vivid, so rich, that not only could I picture it all, I couldn’t put the book down.

We first meet Cinnamon Jones, led by her trusty pooch, Bruja, speeding down a bike path, searching for a bot called Shooting-Star. Attached to her bicycle is a Wheel-Wizard trailer, loaded with her three circus bots—transformers who contain, we soon find out, the spirits, energies, and talents of her late elders Redwood and Iris Phipps and Aidan Wildfire. The emergency? Cinnamon needs to find her lost or stolen bot soon because the annual valley New World Festival—a theatrical Mardi Gras where food and spectacular entertainment are free and all are welcome—is set to begin the next day.

The search for Shooting-Star is just the start of a saga that draws together water spirits, cyber criminals, old friendships, romantic betrayals, sage robots, an ancient musician, and a wide array of plant-based communal meals, all delivered in the shell of a deserted mall, repurposed as a community center and school. In addition to Cinnamon and her bots, readers are treated to a beautifully drawn cast of human and spirit characters—street kids, security folks, actors, acrobats, and performers—some masked, many queer, some intent on hacking Cinnamon’s exquisitely programmed bots, while she is bound and determined to keep them all safe.

Is there violence in this future world? Yes. Is there intrigue? Also yes. But really this novel is full of enchantment, humor, fabulous costumes, and best of all, daring acts of theatre and resistance.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels, and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.