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.

How to Sleep at Night
Elizabeth Harris
William Morrow, 2025, 304 pages
$23.19

Reviewed by Evelyn C. White

In How To Sleep At Night, Elizabeth Harris, an openly lesbian New York Times reporter, delivers a dynamic cast of characters working to reconcile their ambitions with the vagaries of life. A successful lawyer and public high school teacher, respectively, Ethan and Gabe are gay, married parents to Chloe, their five-year-old daughter.

Their suburban New Jersey world is upended when Ethan, a once-moderate Republican, decides to run for Congress. Gabe, a lifelong Democrat, sees “red.”

“Ethan had always been to Gabe’s right politically, and twenty years ago when they started dating, that was fine,” Harris writes, in her debut novel. “Gabe was so liberal there wasn’t much on his left anyway. . . But over time, Ethan’s views had shifted. . . As he became more conservative, the overlapping ground between them narrowed. Today, there was almost nothing left.”

In a move that evokes then Senator Barack Obama’s “I won’t run for President without your blessing” pledge to his skeptical wife, Ethan solicits his husband’s support before taking the plunge. “Gabe sat at their dining room table, still, and silent, panicking,” Harris continues.

The outcome? Roll tape for Ethan’s cadre of campaign managers, image consultants, and swank fundraisers for ultra-right-wing Republican donors. Then add Fang, an albino milk snake that Chloe receives as “compensation” because her aspiring Congressman dad (glad-handing 24/7) is no longer free to take her to school. Cue Gabe doing double-duty.

Overwhelmed by the upheaval in their home, Gabe declines when Ethan invites him to join a strategy session about his campaign. “It would be rude to add that he’d rather crawl across the West Side Highway blindfolded,” Harris writes with the arch humor that infuses the novel.

Running on parallel tracks in the quick-paced narrative, readers find Kate. She’s a high-profile reporter at a major newspaper who happens to be a lesbian and. . . Ethan’s sister. In addition to the stress of office politics, Kate is on the rebound from a failed relationship. Ready for a refresh, she reconnects with Nicole, a former lover who has since married a man (with a penchant for golf), and become a stay-at-home mom in a town of McMansions.

Can you say lesbian drama? About their erotically charged meet-ups, on the down-low, Harris writes: “As their third round arrived, Kate excused herself to go to the bathroom. Alone in a crowd of strangers, Nicole had a moment to sit with the fact that her drinking buddy was someone with whom she used to have lots of illicit sex. She took out her phone to text [her husband], who had made the kids chicken tenders, toast, and apple slices for dinner and encouraged Nicole to stay in the city as late as she wanted.”

By the time the tale winds down, opposition research has unearthed an unsavory episode in Ethan’s past and Gabe’s LGBTQIA+ students have gotten a hate on him because of his mate. Kate is called to account at her newspaper for an alleged ethical breach. A “rogue” photo on Nicole’s cellphone triggers, as the Temptations crooned, a “ball of confusion.” As snakes are wont to do, Fang slithers hither and yon.

Elizabeth Harris keeps readers turning the pages in her skillfully crafted queer saga, How To Sleep At Night.

Originally published in The Bay Area Reporter

Evelyn C. White A former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, Evelyn C. White is the author of the acclaimed biography Alice Walker: A Life and Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships. She is also the editor of The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking For Ourselves.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics
Rupert Kinnard
Stacked Deck Press, 2025, 278 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Allow me to introduce to you Professor I. B. Gittendowne, otherwise known as Rupert Kinnard, the creator of the first Black gay and lesbian comic strip. The strip ran for over twenty years in a variety of alternative and queer periodicals, and now, Kinnard has collected these pointedly hilarious gems into a beautifully designed and produced 11 ¾” by 9 ¼” hardcover volume: Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics. Beginning with his first cartoon character, the Brown Bomber, Professor I. B. Gittendowne deploys the most effective and universally available persuasive tool—humor—to topple racist, sexist, and homophobic absurdities. The four-panel strip grew to feature two inimitable main characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Perpetually nineteen years old, the Brown Bomber (named after boxing champ Joe Louis) is an endearingly innocent, buff, single-gloved, non-violent gay superhero; his side-kick, Diva, is a Ph.D.-holding lesbian educator—honoring, Kinnard tells us, the many strong, intelligent women in his life. Together, the two create a depth of social analysis and action that could not have been achieved by a single character.

In 278 lavishly-illustrated pages, Kinnard tells the story of how he developed the strip over the years. A native of Chicago, Kinnard began his artistic career as a student at Cornell College, a small liberal arts school in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. At first, the strip’s only regular character was the Brown Bomber (B.B.), who appeared in the weekly student newspaper, addressing various institutional problems. B.B. was joined at times by the Vanilla Cremepuff, a barely disguised college president, viewed askance for clueless inaction on racial issues. After three and a half years—and wildly-successful campus Brown Bomber T-shirt sales—the Brown Bomber came out as gay.

After graduating in 1979 and moving to Portland, Oregon, Kinnard began publishing Brown Bomber strips in a short-lived local gay and lesbian newspaper, the NW Fountain. A few years later, the Brown Bomber began gracing the pages of a new queer publication, Just Out, where he was soon joined by Diva Touché Flambé, who offered transformative visions and actions to assuage the Brown Bomber’s dismay at the irrationality he often encountered. In addition to occasionally displaying certain mystical powers when nothing else would suffice—e.g., turning an unrepentant LA police officer into a pig—Diva introduces a therapeutic device called slapthology, promoting clear thinking in the recalcitrant with a slap upside the head. “Wow!” says a character, post-slap, “My mind feels as fresh as a breath mint! I guess most written history has centered around the accomplishments of white people!” Kinnard reflects, “I saw myself as being part Diva and part Bomber.”

A job loss in Portland led Kinnard to move to the Bay Area, where Cathartic Comics flourished in the SF Weekly, an alternative paper, for seven years. During this time, Kinnard reinvented his author persona as Prof. I. B. Gittendowne. When the SF Weekly changed hands, ending that paper’s run of Cathartic Comics, Kinnard returned to Portland. Kinnard’s involvement in a life-changing car accident brought the weekly strip to a close, but did not alter the enthusiasm of his fan base or change Kinnard’s dedication to the persuasive use of art and humor as an avenue to social justice. We can only be grateful that he has spent his recent years compiling and designing this celebration of B.B. and the Diva.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! features hundreds of Cathartic Comics strips which otherwise would have vanished along with the newsprint on which they appeared. The artistry is superb, every panel full of energy as characters interact with each other and react to their world’s latest outrages. The Brown Bomber almost always looks the same—wearing the same tennis shoes and over-sized athletic socks, the same shorts, same cape, same boxing glove on his right hand, same scarf tied on his head. The elegant Diva, however, rarely wears the same outfit twice.

In the text accompanying the strips and other illustrations, Kinnard describes both his choices of drawing tools and his artistic and graphic design education. He narrates the development of Cathartic Comics from his childhood to 2025, providing explanatory detail for strips that comment on events with which some readers may not be familiar, such as Ronald Reagan’s gaffe during the 1988 Republican National Convention when he tried to say, “facts are stubborn things,” but actually said, “facts are stupid things.”

Occasionally, I found myself losing the thread of the narrative text as I immersed myself in strip after strip from a given era. Later, I discovered two compact chronologies near the end of the book. I’d suggest that readers look at these first for an overview, then read from the beginning. I should also add that some typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors have crept into the text, but, while unfortunate, they do not lead to misreadings.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! offers hours of joyful reading, just when we need it.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.

Where Shadows Meet
Patrice Caldwell
Wednesday Books, 2025, 320 pages
$20.00

Reviewed by Mandee Loney

Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell is a young adult novel perfect for lovers of vampires and those looking for a Black lesbian romantasy. Though the book falls into the YA category, it deals with some adult themes, as described by the author:

“Please know that this story contains depictions of blood (including the drinking of blood), death (including that of multiple family members), kidnapping, psychological abuse, murder, systems of oppression (pulling from my family’s history in the American South and the use of enslaved Black people as disposable labor but of course unfortunately relating to many different people across the world), and violence of all sorts. There’s also a character who has self-harmed and the showing of, and reference to, those scars. The actual self-harm occurred years prior and is not depicted.”

While these themes can be heavy, each develops both characters and plot. One character, Najja, experiences multiple deeply traumatic events that spur her into action, and Caldwell handles each instance with care and makes sure to not glorify them. Caldwell’s family history adds another layer to the text, as this history informs the world Caldwell creates.

The story follows the point of view of three main characters: Favre, Leyla, and Najja. A fourth character, Thana, appears in many of Favre’s chapters, but does not have any written from her perspective. Caldwell hooks readers immediately with a captivating fairytale-esque narrative of two young goddesses meeting in an enchanted forest. Favre, who is a touch naive, encounters Thana, who seemingly has ulterior motives.

The narrative then skips to over a thousand years later, when we are introduced to Najja, a girl born with the gift of prophecy, and Leyla, soon to be Queen of the Mnaran vampires. In the first half of the novel, Caldwell’s focus is the careful development of each character with nuanced personalities.

The plot can be somewhat difficult to follow at times, as there are frequent shifts between both time and characters’ points of view. However, readers who untangle the timeline will be rewarded with rich parallels between the pair of characters in each time period. Caldwell juxtaposes the somewhat toxic relationship between Thana and Favre with the blossoming relationship between Najja and Leyla, prompting readers to question—what should someone sacrifice in the name of love?

While the pacing of Where Shadows Meet feels a little off-kilter at times, Caldwell has crafted a compelling premise with room to build on the foundation of this mythical world. This sapphic take on the vampire origin story plays the incredibly important role of centering Black lesbian characters in a genre that often excludes them.

Mandee Loney interned with Sinister Wisdom and is continuing her pursuit of a career in editing and publishing.

The Lamb
Lucy Rose
Harper, 2025, 336 pages
$22.39

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

Lucy Rose’s debut novel, The Lamb, blends elements of folktale, horror, and coming-of-age genres to craft a deeply original story about cannibalism and what it can metaphorically represent. The use of cannibalism as a metaphor in art and literature dates back to Greek mythology and early modern literature, but it has experienced a resurgence in recent years with works like Yellowjackets, Bones and All, Fresh, A Certain Hunger, and Tender Is the Flesh.

I approached the novel with some skepticism, concerned it might be derivative or capitalizing on a trend. Instead, I found it to be one of the most allegorically rich interpretations of this trope.
The story follows Margot, a young girl living on a homestead near the wilderness, raised in a household where cannibalism is the norm. Her mother, Mama, takes in strays—lost and wandering travelers—makes them comfortable, then kills them to use as food. When another woman, Eden, stumbles upon the homestead and embeds herself into the family, the dynamic Margot is used to begins to shift. As the story unfolds, tension builds toward an inevitable conclusion.

Both Margot and Mama grapple with inner conflicts that linger throughout the novel. Margot begins to question the morality of Mama’s actions, while also confronting her own emerging sexuality. Mama, on the other hand, struggles with her identity as a mother and the tension between that role and her personal autonomy. These internal battles are reflected in their relationships with consumption. Margot, for instance, eats a strand of her crush’s hair, hoping it will keep her close, while Mama’s relentless hunger mirrors her desire for independence and selfhood.

The novel also offers a compelling exploration of the theoretical concept of abjection. Coined by philosopher Julia Kristeva and often used in horror analysis, abjection refers to the human response of horror or disgust when faced with a breakdown in meaning—typically when social order collapses or the boundary between self and other disintegrates. These boundaries form the foundation of identity, morality, and stability, so their dissolution provokes deep psychological discomfort.

Cannibalism is perhaps the most taboo, and therefore abject, subject in horror. To make it more palatable or comprehensible, narratives often depict the cannibal as animalistic or the victim as less than human. The Lamb employs both: Mama sees her victims—the strays—as subhuman, while Margot increasingly views Mama as monstrous for her actions.

The most powerful aspect of the novel is the atmosphere and setting that Rose constructs through deliberate ambiguity. Much like a fairytale, The Lamb takes place in an unspecified time and location—an ambiguous part of England. The homestead feels otherworldly in its descriptions, yet occasional references to televisions or telephones snap the reader back to a recognizable reality. About a quarter of the book occurs at Margot’s school or during her bus rides, further grounding the story and amplifying its tragedy through contrast with the everyday world.

The novel is also highly readable. With around seventy chapters, each only three to five pages long, it’s easy to move through quickly—I finished it in about two days. While this structure may reflect a broader cultural shift toward shorter attention spans, it also builds a strong sense of momentum and looming dread as the story progresses.

The Lamb is a dark, genre-defying, and thought-provoking novel that will keep you on edge from beginning to end.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician currently interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera. You can find more of her ramblings regarding music, art, and culture on her Substack, Salome’s Veil.

In Thrall
Jane DeLynn
Semiotext(e), 2024, 272 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Lindsey Blaser

“Of course not, my dear, every quiver of your feverish sensibility holds me in thrall (143).”

Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a delicious read charting the affair between a budding lesbain and her English teacher in 1960s New York. While the inappropriate dynamic of the pair’s relationship is the hook, it’s far from the purpose of this novel.

Our hopelessly tragic protagonist, Lynn, is a timeless representation of many queer women’s experiences. Dismaying moments of forgetting to breathe, not being able to eat her Milky Way breakfasts anymore, and inexplicably being drawn to someone no one else understands—are niche experiences that broadly hold familiarity for the vast majority of queer youth.

The novel avoids delving into the intricacies of the couple’s relationship, especially their sexual encounters, and focuses instead on transferrable moments of Lynn’s queer adolescence. Lynn speaks only of unsavory experiences with her clumsy boyfriend, Wolf, so that all we read is of jamming fingers and coercion. When Lynn and Miss Maxfield enter the bedroom, it feels like a curtain closes, and the reader is left with a privacy which feels respectful, non-sexualized, and tender.

Miss Maxfield, having multiple student affairs in the past, is most objectively a predator. But it doesn’t feel that way as you read it. DeLynn wrote a novel in which bits of their interactions feel special and Miss Maxfield seems nurturing, which is conflicting as a reader. One is left to wrestle with the question of whether or not any part of their relationship is endorsable. And of course, it isn’t. Why the women are even attracted to one another is a mystery, feeling underdeveloped and vague, as if some otherworldly force is drawing the two together. What is it Lynn even likes about her? What do we, as readers, even like about Lynn?

Quippy remarks with her friends, an unbreachable wall up with her parents, and new vocabulary flaunted as soon as she learns it, are features that make Lynn relatable. The reader regresses to feeling like a teenage girl, especially one unraveling her sexuality. Lynn jumps to tragic extremes, finds her boyfriend disgusting (yet keeps him on the side), and panics when she reads fear-mongering homophobic texts. Basking in a tragic hero state, she believes a life of loneliness, crew cuts, and wearing green on Mondays is all that awaits her as lesbian. It’s almost healing to read this in 2025 and say, “My dear. . . ” alongside Miss Maxfield. How good things will become for us all!

Therein lies the draw to Miss Maxfield, someone who can offer assurance that Lynn’s identity isn’t life-ruining. She is someone who we, as twenty-first-century readers, view as a lifeline, while Lynn toys with the idea of throwing herself off a roof. Miss Maxfield is a voice of queer reason, giving Lynn grounds to believe it is more than okay to be gay. I just wish she was 16, too.

Lindsey Blaser holds a bachelor’s degree in Critical Diversity Studies from the University of San Francisco, and is a Sinister Wisdom intern based in New Jersey.

Living at Night
Mariana Romo-Carmona
Spinsters Ink, 1997, 257 pages
$8.00 (used)

Reviewed by Mel Oliver

Living at Night brings us into the intimate and brutal world of Erica García, a young, working-class Puerto Rican lesbian navigating life in a white, suburban Connecticut institution. Through clear, honest prose, the novel exposes the violence of care systems, where patients are heavily sedated—their bodies regulated and recorded with cold precision—yet remain defiantly human. Erica’s role as a worker within this system reveals not just the cruelty of institutional control but also the ways women of color survive, adapt, and quietly resist within oppressive structures. Though Erica cannot save everyone, she comes to a pivotal understanding: she can reclaim her own life.

This story deeply resonated with me, as two of my aunties spent decades working in hospice and state-run institutions similar to the one described in the novel. Their labor—quiet, often invisible, and profoundly gendered—carries emotional weight and historical silence. Reading about Erica felt like reading about them, and I couldn’t help but wonder what liberation they might have imagined for themselves had they encountered this book, not just in terms of sexuality, but in terms of self-worth, bodily autonomy, and the possibility of a life beyond survival. One of my aunts, a Christian lesbian, has endured abuse in both heterosexual and same-gender relationships. I see now how she may have clung to her work not just out of duty, but in search of the care she herself was denied, perhaps imagining that love and tenderness might be found in the act of caregiving. My other aunt, who left an abusive marriage and retired from institutional work, may have found a rare form of agency and control in that setting, something the rest of her life never offered.

I grieve the silence between them, the solitude they endured. If only they had known their shared pain could be a bridge, not a wall. This novel is more than fiction—it is a mirror for the generations of women who have labored, loved, and lost in silence. It invites us to imagine what liberation might look like for the caregivers, not just the cared-for. And it insists that working-class women, especially queer women of color, deserve stories that reflect their complexity, their courage, and their right to be seen.

Mel Oliver is a Black Indian (Choctaw heritage with Munsee roots), environmental educator, poet, researcher, and lover of crafts, dogs/dingos, and music! https://melsorbit.carrd.co/

Lowest Common Denominator
Pirkko Saisio, translated by Mia Spangenberg
Two Lines Press, 2024, 312 pages
$23.00

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Lowest Common Denominator is a fictionalized memoir from the well-known Finnish lesbian author and actor, Pirkko Saisio. As part of her Helsinki trilogy, Saisio tells the story of her early childhood as the only child of communist parents in the years following World War II, as well as the Winter and Continuation Wars between Finland and the Soviet Union. Through the eyes of the young narrator, readers see her confusion in trying to understand the adults around her and concepts such as religion, gender, and class. The story also jumps to the narrator in the present day, which follows her as she copes with her father’s death. This book functions like a stream of memories, bouncing between the past and present and different views of the self. Saisio explores her self-image through her character in the novel, playing with the first- and third-person points of view, almost as a voyeur to her own thoughts and memories.

Translated by Mia Spangenberg, Lowest Common Denominator is written beautifully and fluidly. Though the pace is slow and sometimes contains anecdotes that I did not find particularly useful or interesting, the book overall uniquely captures the narrator’s childhood and its connections to her adult life. The original title of the book, Pienin yhteinen jaettava, literally translated as “smallest common factor,” might better represent the young narrator’s experiences as a foundation for her adult self, depicted as a more conventional—though lesbian—woman and mother. Saisio discusses gender and sexuality through her childhood gaze, from her learning about Jesus, who “isn’t a man or a woman” (p. 200), to her devotion to Miss Lunova, an announcer at the amusement park. Despite the lack of a more explicit exploration and focus on gender and sexuality, for readers interested in a very personal book about childhood amid political crises and a slowly changing culture—especially regarding the status of women—it is definitely worth the read. Though the book is approachable, I recommend doing a quick read on the political climate of this time period in Finland to better understand the driving forces behind the story.

Jules Gellert is currently a master’s student in Helsinki and a Sinister Wisdom intern for the summer of 2025. She spends her time reading, studying, and making art.

Hungerstone
Kat Dunn
Zando, 2025, 336 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

“What is a monster but a creature of agency?” (237). This is the central question posed by Kat Dunn’s Hungerstone. A retelling of the 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, Dunn’s novel takes the gothic and sapphic essence of the original and expands it into a fully-fledged, well-rounded work that draws the reader in with its elegant prose and brooding atmosphere.

The novel follows Lenore, an aristocratic woman burdened by past tragedy and discontent in her present life and marriage. When she travels north, to Sheffield, to prepare her husband’s manor for a hunting party, she encounters a mysterious woman named Carmilla, who has suffered a carriage accident. As their relationship deepens, Carmilla challenges Lenore to confront what she truly desires—and demands that she pursue it. The further Lenore falls under Carmilla’s spell, the more the border between agency and monstrosity blurs, leaving the reader to ponder what is right and wrong in the case of revenge, liberation, and forbidden love.

Dunn skillfully explores the dichotomy between fear and desire, using the constrained agency of Victorian women as a lens through which to examine sapphic longing. Lenore’s character wants more in life; she wants to have more power than presiding over houses, staff, and guests, but she also feels a longing that is deeper, more personal, and more taboo. The novel includes questions of repression, identity, and whether reclaiming control over one’s life—especially as a woman in a patriarchal world—can ever be free from violence.

At times, the novel suffers from over-explanation, particularly concerning Lenore’s backstory and how it informs her current behavior. The occasional flashbacks often feel out of place, not adding much to the story and occasionally interrupting the narrative momentum. Additionally, the supporting characters can feel one-dimensional, serving more as props than participants. However, this also allows Carmilla’s seductive and enigmatic presence to stand out as a true highlight, drawing the reader in just as she draws Lenore in.

Rich in atmosphere and emotional complexity, the novel oozes with darkness, longing, and seduction, making Hungerstone a worthy and haunting successor to the Carmilla story.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera.