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.

Queer Communion: Religion in Appalachia
Edited by Davis Shoulders
University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 168 pages
$19.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

“If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him” (James Baldwin, 1962).

From the start, this collection makes clear a shared experience of being harmed by the people we love the most, in the name of God and love, and the complications that arise when you continue to love the people who seem to swing between loving you and hating you. Each work in the compilation wrestles with what it means to have faith, both in God and the people around us, beginning with, “effectively all rural queer Appalachians and Southerners have loved people who hated them—or at least parts of them, parts that can’t be divided out” (x). While Queer Communion leans more into a positive connection with faith, it doesn’t shy away from harm either; it just shows ways in which people have re-shaped or found a different way of worship, which I appreciated.

The collection reiterates the idea of making one’s religion in nearly every segment, piecing together queerness with Appalachian identity, religious views (from Catholicism to strict protestant evangelicalism), and how this “holiness” exists apart from exclusionary beliefs. Davis Shoulders writes, “I attend a church of my own making. At any place where a sense of knowing is felt” (128). And Jarred Johnson says, “Faith seems like it should be life-transforming, not a set of strictures by which to abide” (118). Savannah Sipple defines love and holiness well, writing:

There are moments in our lives when we know we’re confident in the person we are, in the things we know to be true about ourselves. . . What would my grandmother say about this granddaughter of hers who now has a wife, who now has a love whose arms open wide enough to call me home? I’d like to think she’d call that holy (13).

I agree that faith is about finding a place of honesty, where one can be fully themselves. Julie Rae Powers calls queerness “spiritual in its own right” (21). The theme of queer acceptance is constant in the collection; for example, John Golden’s piece begins by discussing baptism as a moment of queer acceptance, which I appreciated for its beautiful symbolism.

Golden’s work took an interesting turn, though, when they told a story about arguing with a right-wing man, and in a moment of anger, told him he’s removed from the grace of God. Later, they expressed regret, and I was a bit conflicted. Hateful people tell queer folks all the time that God condemns them. Why should this hateful guy get mercy? I suppose it’s complicated. Golden’s piece forces you to sit with the question of whether anyone gets to say who’s beyond redemption.

Conflict is part of what makes the collection so wonderful, though, because it’s honest and, in many cases, doesn’t tie everything up neatly. It recognises the pain of religion, deep and complicated that it is. Some of the essays lean into faith and find peace in it, while others walk away from it entirely. The collection makes space for both. Mack Rogers’ piece offers insight into how a faith that emphasises control and worship, conditional love, and operates as a tool for manipulation can impact us. Then, it compares this religious control with defining one’s own joy. Emma Cieslik sums up the conflict well, writing, “many queer people like myself feel the same urgency of ‘choice’ or being pushed to ‘decide’ between living as their authentic selves and drinking the Kool-Aid of the church” (45).

I finished the work with the takeaway that each author had built something sacred for themselves, even in spaces where they were told they didn’t belong. Shoulders describes the struggle of situating Appalachian identity given others’ exclusionary beliefs, saying, “They’ve imagined it to be a place where a person like me shouldn’t belong” (132). And yet every author has dispelled aspects of those imaginings. Appalachia is and always has been a space where everyone belongs; the people who hate don’t get to define God, the land, and who is welcome, no matter how hard they might try.

Allison Quinlan is a nonprofit manager in Scotland, originally from the rural southern United States.

Sunburn
Chloe Michelle Howarth
Verve Books, 2023, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Jules Gellert

Sunburn is a coming-of-age story set in 1990s rural Ireland, following Lucy as she faces her love for her friend Susannah over the course of several years. The catalyst of her infatuation is spending time with Susannah the summer before their final year of school, a summer spent sunbathing in the yard of Susannah’s absent parents’ home. By the end of the summer, the two girls are unable to deny their interest in each other. They begin a secret relationship that slowly deteriorates as they prepare for the rest of their lives.

When Lucy’s mother catches the girls together, Lucy begins to publicly date her best friend, Martin, to prove to her mother that she is “moving in the right direction” (229). Lucy finds herself forced down the same pipeline her mother and every other woman she knows has gone through. She must choose whether to follow the well-trodden path of domesticity in order to preserve the conditional love of her mother, friends, and community, or to follow her love for Susannah.

While Sunburn covers topics perhaps overdone within the queer coming-of-age genre, such as the role of religion and guilt in self-acceptance, Howarth dives much deeper both through her excellent writing and her discussion of the impact of shame on those outside the individual experiencing it. In making her choices between Susannah and Martin, or her own happiness and the path set before her, Lucy wounds everyone around her. She tries to walk a tightrope between these options, but by trying to make everyone happy and avoid pain and rejection, she becomes selfish. Howarth explores these ideas through a perfect combination of tender, intense, and occasionally unsettling inner dialogue. Lucy’s love for Susannah is not sappy, but all-consuming and incredibly honest. For some readers, this may be a bit off-putting—but for many, it will make the story more sincere and profound.

Lucy’s story requires patience, like that which a good friend offers. Following her story is painful and frustrating, but also deeply moving. As a reader, you might struggle with the characters in their questions such as: what is love worth and worth losing? Sunburn is a distinctive story about choices, shame, and love, perhaps best summarized by Susannah in a letter to Lucy: “I’ll marry you if you get past all the shame of being with me” (98). Despite the young age of its characters, this book is mature and good for anyone who wants to experience the overwhelming intensity and honesty of a first love.

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

Be Gay, Do Crime
Edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
Dzanc Books, 2025, 203 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Ash Lev

Be Gay, Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos is the second anthology by editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, a follow-up to Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women. The sixteen queer-authored short stories of Be Gay, Do Crime are less concerned with getting bogged down in the details of the law and more interested in exploring the catharsis, necessity, and queerness of rule-breaking. As someone who’s not a big reader of typical crime or heist novels, this struck the perfect balance for me. From stealing dogs and drugs to shooting politicians, every morally objectionable act performed by these characters offers an unexpected thrill, echoing the sentiment of the John Waters quote in the book’s early pages, “You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book” (v).

I was hooked from the title alone, immediately recognizing the phrase from its frequent use in online queer circles. The sentiment is an important reminder, especially at a point in time when queer and trans existence is increasingly criminalized, that the law was not made with our safety or wellbeing in mind. With its equally delightful title and cover, Be Gay, Do Crime is a celebration of a new generation of queer anarchism. As Myriam Lacroix writes in the opening story, “The Meaning of Life,” “They loved breaking the rules in the name of their love, and they especially liked getting away with it” (7).

“It’s a Cruel World For Empaths Like Us” by Soula Emmanuel is told entirely in second-person perspective—almost as if to challenge John Waters’ earlier quote—and forces readers to walk a mile in the criminal protagonist’s pinching, too-tight shoes. The story opens with a jolt of pain as “you,” an unnamed trans woman, undergo a round of laser hair removal. The treatment intended to ease the distress of gender dysphoria only worsens it when it leaves behind a painfully obvious facial rash. When you are dismissed by a customer service representative after expressing concern about said rash, you decide to retaliate. Your weapon of choice? Hoax threats.

So near and so far, it is, so nothing and yet so everything, so diminutive and yet so responsible for a small but significant portion of your problems. You endeavor to deepen your voice, in the hope that it will give you a kind of ambient authority, although it’s been so long that you can barely do it without sounding like you are doing a bad impression of yourself. You find the phone number and you dial, careful first to turn off the caller ID.
But you don’t complain (26).

In another case of dysphoria-driven crime, Aurora Mattia’s “Wild and Blue” tells the story of Peach and Sandy, who are on the run with a stolen vial of Dysphorable™. This fictional hallucinogenic drug was manufactured by a private pharmaceutical company with the intent of mass market distribution, but had not yet received FDA approval. Desperate, dysphoric, and drunk in love, the couple use the drug carelessly, and soon learn the consequences.

[Peach] was a woman. It was so simple. She was a woman because she was in love. It could be enough. One day it could be enough because she was a woman and it didn’t matter if Sandy was a man or a woman or some kind of secret thing. She was Sandy’s woman and it was enough (110).

Among its many strengths, Be Gay, Do Crime succeeds in portraying trans people not as sad, helpless victims, but as relatable, resourceful, rightfully angry, and ready to fight back.

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

Daughters of Chaos
Jen Fawkes
The Overlook Press, 2024, 288 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Jen Fawkes is an award-winning author with a literary style that is at times lavish and stunning. I particularly enjoyed her periodic aphorisms reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.

For the most part, Daughters of Chaos is an epistolary novel told from multiple first-person perspectives of a set of twins, Silas and Sylvie. The narratives include their childhood and letters from their teen years onward. A major part of the story is about the Civil War, during 1862, and looking back on the events from 1877. The book is multilayered, while the story is advanced in sequence from the beginning to the end of Sylvie’s life. Historical figures are interspersed with fiction. The tale is more than simply a story of letters—it also includes encyclopedia entries, a translated play, news articles, and more. It synthesizes history, myth, and sheer invention, incorporating stories along with periodic jumps into ancient Greek drama. For me, these additional layers made the novel harder to follow. Nonetheless, the writing is engaging and well-crafted.

The story starts with the twins’ pregnant, unwed mother, Brigitte, and their tinkering, unavailable father. As children, they are abandoned by their mother and older sister and left alone with their father. While we see them from childhood, the lion’s share of the book takes place in Silas’ and Sylvie’s young adulthood. After the father’s death, Silvie’s brother leaves her, and we hear from him in letters which contain stories of his Confederate adventures in submarine construction and maintenance. Close to adulthood, Sylvie runs away to Nashville in search of her sister, Marina. There, she joins a Ladies Aid Society, a Union spy’s secret society of magical women disguised as prostitutes, secretly supporting the Union cause. These public women are all part of an ancient cult dedicated to trouble-making and the worship of Chaos. They work together toward a golden era of female sovereignty. Sylvie is tasked with translating the final, lost comedy of Aristophanes, and with the help of a dozen Priestesses of Chaos, works on it daily from the time she arrives in Nashville.

In an especially interesting section, we are told that real prostitutes nearly defeated the Union army due to syphilis. The authorities in Nashville recognize this prostitution problem and decide to round up all of these women and ship them elsewhere to rid Nashville of the disease. The prostitutes are put on a ship, and in a long, grueling trip, go from one port to the next, rejected each time until, unbathed, dehydrated, hungry, and some dead from suicide, they return to Nashville, where new laws are made to make prostitution legal. Working women are licensed and must have physicals that render them clean of disease. Early on, Sylvie tells us, “The fact that you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” This sets up the reader for the speculative nature of the novel. Incredibly, we encounter a creature like Ray Bradbury’s Fog Horn, with silver scales, who is Silvie’s long-lost sister.

My problem with this novel is the scattershot structure. I wish I could tell you the whole thing comes together like a puzzle, but if so, I didn’t see it. The novel weaves together Greek mythology, Civil War history, sisterhood, fire, sex, and love. There are layers of text, journal entries, letters, narratives, play performances, as well as side stories told by other women. One in particular that will stick in my mind is about a woman who wants to murder her daughter because, despite appearances, she believes the girl isn’t hers. The father stops his wife several times and finally kills her. Then, because he loves her and couldn’t live without her, he kills himself. However, these bits and pieces take the reader in and out of the narrative.

While some lesbian attraction develops, only at the end does it come to fruition. The bewitching Hannah and Sylvie eventually ride off together toward California, into the sunset, one might say, where Sylvie gives birth to twins. Silvie puts the scraps of her life together in a book, and she also, like her sister, becomes a leviathan. In the end, we find Sylvie ready to teach her daughters how to belong to themselves.

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.