Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


March 2025 Featured Books:
1. Baby Blue by Bim Eriksson
2. Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
3. Buzzkill Clamshell by Amber Dawn
4. The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes
5. We’re Gonna Get Through This Together by Z. Hanna
6. Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front by JEB
7. Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin
8. The body is where it all begins by Marcy Rae Henry
9. Tomatoes Beverly by Alix Perry
10. Reclaiming Southside by M. J. Coll


Book descriptions:

Baby Blue by Bim Eriksson: This haunting dystopian thriller graphic novel explores themes of mental health, queer identity, and the dangers of unchecked fascism.

In the not-so-distant future, twenty-something Betty lives in a fascistic society that menacingly polices mental health. When she is caught crying in public, the Peacekeepers take her to an Orwellian health facility to control her emotions. There, she meets the defiant Berina, who opens her eyes to an alternative reality: the Resistance. If Betty can navigate a rollicking underworld, where all manner of queerness is celebrated, she just might have a chance to strike back against the regime.

Deliciously twisted, fiercely contemporary, and backed by a Swedish pop soundtrack, Baby Blue is the dynamic graphic novel debut of comics artist Bim Eriksson. A vital manifesto about the need to express your unique identity in a chillingly conformist world.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One by Kristen Arnett: From the New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things, a sparkling and funny new novel of entertainment, ambition, art, and love.

Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers.

Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life, and has a slick, successful career to prove it. With Margot’s mentorship and industry connections, Cherry is sure to take her art to the next level. Plus, Margot is sexy as hell. It’s not long before Cherry must decide how much she’s willing to risk for Margot and for her own explosive new act—and what kind of clown she wants to be under her suit.

Equal parts bravado, tenderness, and humor, and bursting with misfits, magicians, musicians, and mimes, Stop Me If You've Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.

Buzzkill Clamshell by Amber Dawn: Amber Dawn's latest poetry collection flaunts the chronically pained body as a source of lewd feminine power

As a novelist, memoirist, and poet, Amber Dawn regularly lays her heart bare in work that is fiery, raw, and intensely personal. In Buzzkill Clamshell, her third poetry collection, Amber Dawn circumvents the expectations of so-called confessional poetry, offering twisted mythmaking, extreme hyperbole, and lyrical gutter-mouthing that explore themes of sick and disabled queerness, aging, and desire.

With poems populated by severed heads, domme swan maidens, horny oracles, and other horrible purveyors of pleasure, Buzzkill Clamshell reads as if a leather dyke and a demonic goat had a baby - gleefully embracing the perverse while stomping its way through chronic pain and complex PTSD.

Already acclaimed for her candid and often kinky verse, Amber Dawn pushes further into trauma-informed eroticism with self-assured irreverence and uncomfortable abjectivity. Beneath her brilliant, carnivalesque imagery lies a prayer - not for the pain to end, but for finding fantastic new ways to cope with pain.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes: Inspired by true events, a thrilling Depression-era novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books about a woman’s quest to uncover a mystery surrounding a local librarian and the Boxcar Library—a converted mining train that brought books to isolated rural towns in Montana.

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.

Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.

Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.

The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide: what happened to Colette Durand.

Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most.

We’re Gonna Get Through This Together by Z. Hanna: We're Gonna Get Through This Together is a sharp and affecting debut story collection that takes a discerning look at what happens when people search for connection in an alienating world. Blending satire, realism, and speculative fiction, Z. Hanna writes incisively about race, class, gender, sexuality, art, and activism -- exploring the forces that bring people together and drive them apart. In the titular story, a white antiracist consultant tries to figure out how to sustain her work after her Mexican-American girlfriend abandons their coaching practice. "A Little to the Left" tells the story of a lesbian home from college who recruits a boy she knew in high school to help her become more queer. A supervisor at an "elective prison" in "The Birmingham Effect" struggles to motivate his team as the company navigates a public scandal. In "Heroes' Journey," a trans couple attends a psychedelic retreat for climate activists while trying to heal their relationship. Scintillating, funny, and heart-rending, We're Gonna Get Through This Together invites readers to investigate what separates us, while encouraging all of us to find a path forward together.

Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front by JEB: JEB (Joan E. Biren) first introduced viewers to her photographs in 1979 when she published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, a groundbreaking celebration of women loving women. In the years that followed, JEB collaborated with poets, musicians, filmmakers, elected officials, healthcare providers, factory workers, spiritual leaders, and others who built communities and worked for political change. Her second book Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, published in 1987, depicts the spirit and energy of this movement in more than a hundred emotionally resonant photographs that take us from passionate activism to thoughtful solitude, while remarks and remembrances from each woman photographed deepen the historic record. This reissue of Making a Way adds insightful new essays by Cheryl Clarke and JD Samson, resulting in an essential document of an era whose impact continues to be felt across our society today.

Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin: From debut author Emily Yu-Xuan Qin comes a snarky urban fantasy novel inspired by Chinese and First Nation mythology and bursting with wit, compelling characters, and LGBTQIA+ representation

Tam hasn’t eaten anyone in years.

She is now Mama’s soft-spoken, vegan daughter—everything dangerous about her is cut out.

But when Tam’s estranged Aunt Tigress is found murdered and skinned, Tam inherits an undead fox in a shoebox, and an ensemble of old enemies.

The demons, the ghosts, the gods running coffee shops by the river? Fine. The tentacled thing stalking Tam across the city? Absolutely not. And when Tam realizes the girl she’s falling in love with might be yet another loose end from her past? That’s just the brassy, beautiful cherry on top.

Because no matter how quietly she lives, Tam can’t hide from her voracious upbringing, nor the suffering she caused. As she navigates romance, redemption, and the end of the world, she can’t help but wonder…

Do monsters even deserve happy endings?

With worldbuilding inspired by Chinese folklore and the Siksiká Nation in Canada, LGBTQIA+ representation, and a sapphic romance, Aunt Tigress is at once familiar and breathtakingly innovative.

The body is where it all begins by Marcy Rae Henry: Marcy Rae Henry sings so much more than the body electric; she sings a cuerpo bilingue, a body gone awry amid perimenopause, a body nevertheless moonbright and halfnaked among the sagebrush. Henry peppers the poems of this scintillating chapbook with evocative housings and tangible accoutrements: a golden scarab in Egypt, the telltale signs of downsized childhood ("dry foods, frozen fruit, / packets of vegetable soup"), the "pastel art and fake plants" of a mammogram waiting room. Henry's lyrics bridge English and Spanish like the open-ended promise of a multilingual lifespan, which is to say they are pointed and timely and yield surprising portmanteaus: "vaccine which is vacuna / in Spanish and sounds like a cow in a cradle." Her speakers confuse want for want ("quiero querer means i want to want / but could also mean i want to love") and wound (as in "tightly") for wound (as in "painful"). They traverse the planet in search of—and escaping from—lovers like time-traveling globetrotters, arriving finally in a tightly composed ekphrasis in response to Dieter Roth's Karnickelköttelkarnickel, a poem that centers around the reappearance of an ex and the summer solstice in Iceland, where the "midnight sun stayed in the sky the way a flag stays on the moon." Whether luminously celestial or seared into the heart's memory, Marcy Rae Henry reminds us that "the body is where it all begins."

Tomatoes Beverly by Alix Perry: Over the course of 25 poems, Tomatoes Beverly explores the connection between the written word and the auditory environment of its creation. Intentionally curating a single-artist soundtrack for each poem, Perry underscores the otherwise subconscious influence our surroundings have on what we put back into the world. Throughout the collection, these musical influences cast their shadows on Perry's usual obsessions-isolation, longing, and visions of their alleviation-within the forests, beaches, and technological dystopias of the Pacific Northwest.

Reclaiming Southside by M. J. Coll: M.J. Coll grew up imagining herself as like her father’s son, but 1950’s Richmond, Virginia, wasn’t a welcoming environment for her to come of age. Venturing to the Midwest for college, M. J. came into her own as a lesbian feminist in her twenties, exploring relationships with other women, participating in Vietnam War protests, and advocating for citizens in crisis. But when her mother got sick, M. J. found herself back in Richmond, the city that she both loved and struggled to understand. Caring for her mother and reconciling with her father left her with no choice but to reclaim Southside, the neighborhood she grew up in and had sought so desperately to flee in her teens and twenties.

This collection of vignettes and poems about coming of age in the South speak both to M. J.’s personal experience as a young lesbian and the movements of the latter half of the twentieth century that have shaped America today. A testament to both how far we have come since the fifties yet how far we still need to go in our search for equality for the LGBTQIA+ community, M. J.’s story is both personal and political.

Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


February 2025 Featured Books:
1. Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor
2. Planeta by Ana Oncina
3. No One's Leaving by Raki Kopernik
4. Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana
5. But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo
6. All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari
7. Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang
8. Ridykeulous Presents: Ridykes Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos by Ridykeulous
9. Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell
10. Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South by Jayme N. Canty


Book descriptions:

Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World by Sarah Ensor: What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse

What does it mean to be at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? To be “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, but what would it mean if only the lasting remained? When faced with the abrupt end to the continuities of ecology and nature, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the ‘future.’ Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She turns to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.

Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—persisting and ending—are constitutively intertwined, Sarah Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s spread of the AIDS epidemic, which threatened the total loss of gay lives and specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its many-shaded intimacy with death, offers us a rich archive to produce new ways of thinking through our environmental cataclysm. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the paradigms that environmentalism avoids, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.

Planeta by Ana Oncina: A sci-fi lesbian romance taking place in two possible realities: a cozy little cabin on modern Earth, or the distant planet Nebulon ruled by technological advances far beyond our time. This unique and thought-provoking graphic novel by acclaimed Spanish artist Ana Oncina features a variety of color palettes contrasting between each setting, creating a soft-hued, dreamy atmosphere for this story about searching for one’s place in the world.

Nature-loving loner Valentina lives in a small, cozy cabin in the middle of the forest with her dog Sopa. Every night, she has a dream: she lives isolated on another planet with Ane, her partner. And although everything is too strange, too white and too silent, it seems that Ane and Valentina are made for each other. But is Ane real? To what extent is this alternative reality a dream?

No One's Leaving by Raki Kopernik: A young woman travels through Europe in the late nineties after she learns of her ex-girlfriend's suicide, whose ghost follows her around. She meets an array of people, including a tarot reader, a gay farmer, an expat trans woman, and a French lesbian with a dreamy pit bull. Discovering new love and friendship while remembering the struggles of her past relationship, the story weaves between the narrator's present-day adventures and coming-of-age love, sewn together by existential conversations with the ghost of her ex.

No One’s Leaving is curated to a soundtrack of Gen X music—from Jane's Addiction to The Cranberries to PJ Harvey—and touches on themes of queer love, heartbreak, grief, and mental health.

Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba by M. Myrta Leslie Santana: How drag performance transforms the social landscape of Cuba and illuminates the island’s racial, sexual, and economic inequalities

In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, drag performance is now a state-sponsored event. Transformismo suggests that these performances make critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba’s postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island’s tourism economy and has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women’s creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital.

But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo: The Shape of Water meets Mexican Gothic in this sapphic monster romance novella wrapped in gothic fantasy trappings

The old keeper of the keys is dead, and the creature who ate her is the volatile Lady of the Capricious House⁠—Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides.

Dália, the old keeper’s protégée, must take up her duties, locking and unlocking the little drawers in which Anatema keeps her memories. And if she can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor's execution, Dália might just be able to survive long enough to grow into her new role.

But there’s a gaping hole in Dália’s plan that she refuses to see: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she eventually devours every single bride that crosses her path.

All the Parts We Exile by Roza Nozari: From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, insightful memoir that traces her journey toward radical self-acceptance and of exile from her ancestral home.

As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents’ emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her early years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with its sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother’s happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure.   

As Roza grew older, this longing for home transformed into a desire for inner understanding and liberation. She was lit up by the feminist texts in her women’s studies courses, and shared radical ideas with her mother—who in turn shared more of her past, from protesting for the Islamic revolution to her ambivalence about getting married. In this memoir, Roza braids the narrative of her mother’s life together with her own on-going story of self, as she arrives at, then rejects, her queer identity, eventually finds belonging in queer spaces and within queer Iranian histories, and learns the truth about her family’s move to Canada.

All the Parts We Exile is a memoir of dualities: mother and daughter, home and away, shame and self-acceptance, conflict and peace, love and pain—and the stories that exist within and between them. In sharp, emotionally honest and funny prose, Roza tenderly explores the grief around the parts we exile and the joy of those we hold close in order to be true to our deepest selves.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion by Mia Arias Tsang: “Your world never ends how you think it will.”

In this dazzling debut collection, Mia Arias Tsang explores the complexity and torture of queer heartbreak with an urgency that will leave you gasping. Flash nonfiction, fragmented vignettes and personal narrative combine to tell the almost-love stories of her young adulthood. From dusty university libraries to Boston-bound BoltBuses, and the icy grief of Somerville to the smoggy shores of Venice Beach, Fragments of Wasted Devotion spans a country of desire, a galaxy of yearning, and seven years of failing, losing, and finding oneself in love. Featuring original illustrations by Levi Wells.

Ridykeulous Presents: Ridykes Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos by Ridykeulous: The first exhibition catalogue of the acclaimed queer, feminist curatorial initiative Ridykeulous, marking the occasion of their first institutional presentation in Europe at Nottingham Contemporary.

Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous mounts exhibitions and events primarily concerned with queer and feminist art. This publication will be the first exhibition catalogue by Ridykeulous, joined by Sam Roeck, and will accompany the fall 2023 exhibition Ridykes' Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos at Nottingham Contemporary. With newly commissioned texts by curator Lia Gangitano and Alexandro Segade of the artist collective My Barbarian, the catalogue will be complemented by a conversation between Ridykeulous members Nicole Eisenman, A.L. Steiner and Sam Roeck, providing insights into the collective's thinking, politics, behind-the-scenes notations, and methods of exploration, as well as an introduction by Nottingham Contemporary's Chief Curator Nicole Yip.

Using humor to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at-large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns—composing communiqués, screeds, and diatribes across various media. The exhibition features an intergenerational mix of 30 contemporary visual artists working across film, video installation, sculpture, and performance. Playfully proposing queer fabulosity as a critical intervention in the capitalist spectacle, the exhibition seeks to erode the secondary positioning of LGBTQ+ art and artists as “alternative.” Designed by the Zürich-based Studio Marie Lusa, the publication will evoke the textual feeling of a zine, with over 100 full-color and black-and-white image plates.

Millie Wilson: The Museum of Lesbian Dreams edited by David Evans Frantz and Amy L. Powell: Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of Millie Wilson’s work, this publication delves into the influential, yet underrecognized, artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at the California Institute of the Arts and whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness, and the historical erasure of such positions from institutions of art.

Uniting major loans from museums, private collections, and the artist, the project contextualizes Wilson’s substantial work, influential pedagogy, and legacy. Alongside her peers such as Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Lorna Simpson, Wilson joined 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s. Her work reflects a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades. Featuring newly commissioned scholarly essays by curator David Evans Frantz and scholar Jill H. Casid; a conversation among artists who studied with Wilson; and extensive new photographic documentation of Wilson’s work, the catalogue explores Wilson’s consistent appropriation of museum display practices and institutional authority, her art historical references to dada and surrealism, her sharp attention to gendered portrayals of sexual deviance in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and sexology, and her longstanding interest in bodies as contested sites.

Snapping Beans: Voices of a Black Queer Lesbian South by Jayme N. Canty: Explores the role of the South in Black queer lesbian experiences of hurting and healing

Snapping Beans offers a collective narrative of Southern queer lesbian women and gender-nonconforming persons. Throughout the text, the American South acts as both a region and a main character, one that can shame and condemn but also serve as a site of reconciliation. Blending autoethnography and oral histories, Jayme N. Canty explores how both geographic location and social spaces, such as the Church, intersect with categories such as race, gender, and sexuality to shape and mark identity. Just as the intergenerational practice of snapping beans provides an opportunity to slow down, Canty enables readers to make space and to hear a new Southern narrative. Filled with both hurt and healing, Snapping Beans chronicles a multivocal journey of coming out, ultimately revealing a South where Black queer lesbians not only live but also, more importantly, thrive.

Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


January 2025 Featured Books:
1. Trans and Disabled: An Anthology of Identities and Experiences edited by Alex Iantaffi
2. elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham
3. The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan
4. We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin
5. Ring by Michelle Lerner
6. Motheater by Linda H. Codega
7. The Good War by Elizabeth Costello
8. Those Fatal Flowers by Shannon Ives
9. Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul by C. Marshall St. John
10. The Spirit Circle by Tara Calaby


Book descriptions:

Trans and Disabled: An Anthology of Identities and Experiences Edited by Alex Iantaffi: To be trans and disabled means to have experienced harassment, discrimination, loneliness, often poverty, to have struggled with feeling unworthy of love.

To be trans and disabled means experiencing ableism within our trans communities and transphobia within our disabled communities.

To be trans and disabled means to love our fellow trans and disabled people harder than we could ever love ourselves.

This anthology brings together vulnerable stories, poems, plays, drawings, and personal essays. They explore how we make sense of ourselves, our intersections of identities and experiences, of how we are treated, and how much love we are capable of, sometimes even for ourselves.

elseship: an unrequited affair by Tree Abraham: When Tree Abraham falls in love with her housemate who does not reciprocate the feeling, instead of breaking up, they keep going. This story begins where most end. elseship deftly and courageously recounts the starts and stops of a transitioning relationship. Having recorded the experience in real time, Abraham combines personal entries with illustrations, photos, and mind maps all organized within eight ancient Greek categories of love.

For readers of Maggie Nelson, Sheila Heti, and Carmen Maria Machado, elseship deconstructs the heteronormative canon to explore the bittersweet, lonely, uncharted territories of the heart. It is a deeply specific yet universal story of modern love that will accompany and enlighten anyone who’s been in any kind of complicated “ship”.

“elseship is a kaleidoscopic exploration of all that can exist between two people caught between friendship and unrequited love. It’s a gorgeous and delicately rendered tapestry of desires—and a bracing examination of what happens when feelings break the boxes and labels meant to neatly contain them.” —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.

We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin: A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.

Ring by Michelle Lerner: A Winter Walk Towards the Unknown
Ring takes you on an unforgettable odyssey through the depths of human emotion, from the hollows of grief to the heights of newfound hope. In the backdrop of a snow-covered sanctuary designed to aid the dying, Lee, a middle-aged non-binary person from the Midwest, grapples with the unbearable weight of losing their young adult daughter. Abandoning their previous life and even the comfort of a longtime spouse, Lee is driven by a quest for closure—or an end to it all.

Enter Ring, a seemingly ordinary dog with an extraordinary role. Brought by Robert, a terminally ill man preparing to make his final walk through the sanctuary's Seven Pillars, Ring becomes the catalyst for Lee's own rebirth. As Lee befriends other souls at the sanctuary, each embroiled in their own battles—from Catherine and Samu, the spiritual leaders, to Viviana, a war veteran scarred by trauma—they are nudged toward a revelation that challenges their initial reasons for coming to this remote haven.

The novel deftly weaves themes of loss, hope, and healing, set against the spirituality-infused environment of the sanctuary. It presents a compassionate view on suicide, grappling with the complex questions it raises about the value and sanctity of life. As Lee engages with mindfulness practices and meditation, the story emerges as an enlightening guide for anyone walking the fine line between despair and hope.

Don't miss this emotional journey that tackles the raw, intricate facets of grief, and leaves you pondering the restorative powers of companionship and the human spirit. Ideal for readers coping with loss, struggling with suicidal thoughts, or seeking a deeply spiritual narrative, Ring promises to resonate long after the last page is turned.

Motheater by Linda H. Codega: In this nuanced queer fantasy set amid the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia, the last witch of the Ridge must choose sides in a clash between industry and nature.

After her best friend dies in a coal mine, Benethea “Bennie” Mattox sacrifices her job, her relationship, and her reputation to uncover what’s killing miners on Kire Mountain. When she finds a half-drowned white woman in a dirty mine slough, Bennie takes her in because it’s right—but also because she hopes this odd, magnetic stranger can lead her to the proof she needs.

Instead, she brings more questions. The woman called Motheater can’t remember her true name, or how she ended up inside the mountain. She knows only that she’s a witch of Appalachia, bound to tor and holler, possum and snake, with power in her hands and Scripture on her tongue. But the mystery of her fate, her doomed quest to keep industry off Kire Mountain, and the promises she bent and broke have followed her a century and half into the future. And now, the choices Motheater and Bennie make together could change the face of the town itself.

“[A] unique tale of love and magic, of a curse to be undone and an environmental disaster to be averted. Motheater will enchant all readers!” —Louisa Morgan, Endeavor Award finalist for A Secret History of Witches

The Good War by Elizabeth Costello: In 1948, Louise Galle, a chemist and former Rosie-the-Riveter, is pursued by a wounded veteran who, with her deceased husband, was a prisoner in the Philippines during World War II. In New York City in 1964, Louise’s daughter Charlotte falls for the butch next door and receives an undeniable call to make art. The Good War unfolds over the course of watershed summers in the lives of two very different women who share a desire to make it new even as they reckon with painful truths. Atmospheric, lyrical, and psychologically astute, The Good War is for anyone who knows that there is always more to the story of what America was and is.

Those Fatal Flowers by Shannon Ives: Greco-Roman mythology and the mystery of the vanished Roanoke colony collide in this epic adventure filled with sapphic longing and female rage—a debut novel for fans of Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Natalie Haynes.

Before, Scopuli. It has been centuries since Thelia made the mistake that cost her the woman she loved—Proserpina, the goddess of spring. As the handmaidens charged with protecting Proserpina when she was kidnapped, Thelia and her sisters are banished to the island of Scopuli and cursed to live as sirens—winged half-woman, half-bird creatures. In luring sailors to their deaths with an irresistible song, the sisters hope to gain favor from the gods who could free them. But then ships stop coming, and Thelia fears a fate worse than the Underworld. Just as time begins to run out, a voice emerges, Proserpina’s voice, and what she asks of Thelia will spark a dangerous quest for their freedom.

Now, Roanoke. Thelia can’t bear to reflect on her last moments in Scopuli. After weeks drifting at sea alone, Thelia’s renewed human body—a result of her last devastating sacrifice on Scopuli—is close to death. Luckily, an unfamiliar island appears on the horizon: Roanoke. Posing as a princess arriving on a sailboat filled with riches, Thelia infiltrates the small English colony. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that this place is dangerous, especially for women. As she grows closer to a beautiful settler who mysteriously resembles her former love, Thelia formulates a plan to save her sisters and enact revenge on the violent men she’s come to despise. But is she willing to go back to Scopuli and face the consequences of her past decisions? And will Proserpina forgive her for all that she’s done?

Told in alternating timelines, Those Fatal Flowers is a powerful, passionate, and wildly cathartic love letter to femininity and the monstrous power within us all.

Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul by C. Marshall St. John: Meet Joanna "John" Montolivet as she discovers the nature of the world and God's existence from her infancy to juvenescence. John dreams of the erotic and splendid, expressing her yearning through writing, reading great books of literature, and admiring the female figure and sensibility. Coming of age in a discordant family with a "famine" in her heart, she longs for love and passion, leading her to Catholicism, and most importantly, a desire for women. The desire for same-sex attraction meets at the intersection of the physical and the spiritual in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul. First published under the male pseudonym Christopher St. John in 1915, Christabel Marshall's work is regarded as the first Catholic lesbian novel. Unlike lesbian novels of the fin de siè cle and The New Woman Movement, John's journey of sapphic spirituality and sexuality is not a phase, but the beginning of a lifelong reverence of women. Written at a time of violent censorship and sexual oppression, Marshall's characters represent lesbian, trans, and androgynous people, thinly masked as cisgender and heterosexual. In this publication of Hungerheart, twenty-first-century readers can enjoy Marshall's deeply spiritual love of women in its full glory.

The Spirit Circle by Tara Calaby: For Ellen Whitfield, the betrothal of her dear friend Harriet to Ellen’s brother has brought both loss and solace. But when Harriet suddenly breaks off the engagement, ostensibly at the insistence of her deceased mother, Ellen is bewildered. And when she learns that Harriet is involved with a spiritualist group led by the charismatic Caroline McLeod, she fears losing her friend altogether.

So it is that practical, sceptical Ellen moves into the gloomy East Melbourne mansion where Caroline, along with her enigmatic daughter Grace, has assembled a motley court of the bereaved. Ellen’s intention is to expose the simple trickery—the hidden cabinets and rigged seances, the levers and wires—that must surely lie behind these visits from the departed.

What she discovers is altogether more complicated.

Tara Calaby weaves a compelling and richly detailed narrative around the romance of old Melbourne in this intriguing, possibly supernatural, historical mystery.

Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


December 2024 Featured Books:
1. The Blessed by Anne Shade
2. Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe
3. The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn
4. Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
5. Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty by Louise Siddons
6. Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France by Tamara Chaplin
7. S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt
8. How to Be Heard by Roxane Gay


Book descriptions:

The Blessed by Anne Shade: Suri Daniels, a beautiful and troubled woman, is the descendant of a family of supernaturally gifted women, known as the Blessed, and literally holds keys to gateways between the earthly plane and seven powerful gods. A series of tragic losses and a stipulation in her grandmother’s will has her returning to the family’s home in New Orleans, unaware that she will need to step into the role of Orisha priestess and escape the attention of a powerful demon. To top it all off, she must accept the help of a Cambion--Lyla Jefferies, a dark supernatural being she has spent her life avoiding. What’s worse? She can’t help being drawn to Layla in ways she doesn’t understand.

Being the love child of a top-tier demon and a human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For the past two hundred years, Layla Jefferies has lived a life of quietude. When an unknown force draws her out of seclusion, the pull is too strong to ignore. Layla is tasked to assist with protecting the gateways and saving Suri from becoming a vengeful demon’s avatar. Falling in love with her is definitely not part of the plan.

Layla and Suri are brought together by fate to defeat the darkness threatening to tear their world apart. What they don’t expect to discover is a love that might set them free.

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe: A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters—one in New York, one in Singapore—who are bound by an ancient secret Sisterhood is difficult for Su and Emerald. Su leads a sheltered, moneyed life as the picture-perfect wife of a conservative politician in Singapore. Emerald is a nihilistic sugar baby in New York, living from whim to whim and using her charms to make ends meet. But they share a secret: once, they were snakes, basking under a full moon in Tang dynasty China.

A thousand years later, their mysterious history is the only thing still binding them together. When Emerald experiences a violent encounter in Central Park and Su boards the next flight to New York, the two reach a tenuous reconciliation for the first time in decades. Su convinces Emerald to move to Singapore so she can keep an eye on her—but she soon begins to worry that Emerald’s irrepressible behavior will out them both, in a sparkling, affluent city where everything runs like clockwork and any deviation from the norm is automatically suspect.

Razor-sharp, hilarious, and raw in emotion, Sister Snake explores chosen family, queerness, passing, and the struggle against conformity. Reimagining the Chinese folktale “The Legend of the White Snake,” this is a novel about being seen for who you are—and, ultimately, how to live free.

The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn: A brilliant queer dystopian novel from the author of Yours for the Taking, following a cast of characters on the margins of a strange and exclusive new society.

The year is 2041, and it’s a dangerous time to be a woman driving across the United States alone. Deadly storms and uncontrollable wildfires are pummeling the country while political tensions are rising. But Kelly’s on the road anyway; she desperately needs to get back to her daughter, who she left seven years ago for a cause that she’s no longer sure she believes in.

Almost 40 years later, another mother, Ava, and her daughter Brook are on the run as well, from the climate change relief program known as The Inside Project, where they’ve spent the past 22 years being treated as lab rats. When they encounter a woman from Ava’s past on the side of the highway, the three continue on in a journey that will take them into the depths of what remains of humanity out in the wilderness.

At the same time, way up North, weather conditions continue to worsen and a settlement departs in search of greener pastures, leaving behind only two members, drawn together by a circumstance and a mystery they are destined to unravel together.

Set in the world of Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking, The Shutouts tells the captivating story of those who have been shut out from Inside, their fight to survive, and an interconnectedness larger than all of them.

Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot: How deviant materials figure resistance by Kyla Wazana Tompkins: Yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition.

Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories— gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication—to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art.

Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.

Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty by Louise Siddons: What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?

A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can white artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navajo to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.

Gilpin was a New York–trained fine arts photographer who started working with Navajo people when her partner accepted a job as a nurse in Arizona. She spent more than three decades documenting Navajo life and creating her book in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. Framing her lesbian identity and her long relationship with the Navajo people around questions of allyship, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon addresses the long and problematic history of White photographers capturing images of Native life. Simultaneously, Siddons uses Gilpin’s work to explore the limitations of White advocacy in a political moment that emphasized the need for Indigenous visibility and voices.

Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon introduces contemporary Diné (Navajo) artists as interlocutors, critics, and activists whose work embodies and extends the cultural sovereignty politics of earlier generations and makes visible the queerness often left implicit in Gilpin’s photographs. Siddons puts their work in conversation with Gilpin’s, taking up her mandate to viewers and readers of The Enduring Navajo to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their own terms.

Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France by Tamara Chaplin: A landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire.

In Becoming Lesbian, historian Tamara Chaplin argues that the history of female same-sex intimacy is central to understanding the struggle to control the public sphere. This monumental study draws on undiscovered sources culled from cabaret culture, sexology, police files, radio, TV, photography, the Minitel (an early form of internet), and private letters, as well as over one hundred interviews filmed by the author. Becoming Lesbian demonstrates how women of diverse classes and races came to define themselves as lesbian and used public spaces and public media to exert claims on the world around them in ways that made possible new forms of gendered and sexual citizenship. Chaplin begins in the sapphic cabarets of interwar Paris. These venues, she shows, exploited female same-sex desire for profit while simultaneously launching an incipient queer female counterpublic. Refuting claims that World War II destroyed this female world, Chaplin reveals instead how prewar sapphic subcultures flourished in the postwar period, laying crucial groundwork for the politicization of lesbian identity into the twenty-first century.

Becoming Lesbian is filled with colorful vignettes about female cabaret owners, singers, TV personalities, writers, and activists, all brought to life to make larger points about rights, belonging, and citizenship. As a history of lesbianism, this book represents a major contribution to modern French history, queer studies, and genealogies of the media and its publics.

S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt: In this series of poetic vignettes, award-winning poet Minnie Bruce Pratt explores the fluidity, capaciousness, unpredictability, malleability, and shifting everyday terrains of sex and gender.

As memoir, S/HE challenges oppressive frames of respectability and womanhood, tracing Pratt’ s circuitous path through sex, gender, and sexuality. S/HE also narrates one of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century, providing an intimate portrayal of how Pratt and Leslie Feinberg met, fell in love, and built a life together.

Examining the porous boundaries between masculinity and femininity and noting that liberation requires one to question and cross these binaries, Pratt theorizes sex and gender as not only grids for legibility and surveillance but also as spaces for freedom and pleasure. By drawing on the splendid ordinariness of everyday life and quotidian encounters, Pratt gives “theory flesh and breath.” S/HE imagines new queer, feminist engagements in bodies, in politics, and in the messy contradictions of sex and gender.

How to Be Heard by Roxane Gay: Roxane Gay, the prominent novelist, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist, cultural critic, and columnist provides practical guidance for everyone who wants to use their voice to write powerful work to share with the world.

All writing advice is terrible, Roxane Gay states early in How to Be Heard. And still, with her latest book, she steps forward with practical writing advice for aspiring and established writers alike. Roxane is often asked questions that can be boiled down to, “Will you please read my work and tell me if I have the talent to pursue writing?” What these hopeful wordsmiths all seek is encouragement and validation in a culture that is eager to reject creativity and those who pursue it, especially artists from underrepresented communities. These fans are desperate for someone to say, “Yes, you are good enough.” They are looking for permission to use their voice.

In this invaluable guide, Gay provides realistic, frank, and humorous advice for inexperienced writers and those who aspire to the writing life, giving readers the confidence and practical tools they need to find their voice, use it, and be heard. In short chapters, Gay covers topics like “How to write a short story,” “How to write sex,” “How to revise your writing,” “How to handle criticism,” and “How to write about the world we live in,” with irreverence, warmth, and practicality. She also writes, about the business of writing, a topic all too often neglected in writing instruction.

How to Be Heard will give writers the tools, guidance, and inspiration that will ultimately add their work to the rich tapestry of American and world culture—widening readers’ perspectives and deepening their understanding of how to be heard.