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.