I feel like I need to start this review of A Sharper, More Lasting Pain by Alex Harvey-Rivas (they/them) with an unusual amount of personal context, stemming from this quoted passage: “Nine months is a long time,” she echoes. And, in this moment, it feels like a lifetime. The line stopped me short because I’m just overRead More
A World-Bending Mystery of Impossible Choices: The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso Review
This book came to me as a metaphorically dog-eared suggestion from my friend Eliot, and I’m so glad they suggested it; it’s just the sort of book I love. In The Last Hour Between Worlds, the latest release from Melissa Caruso, the author builds up catastrophes like a clockmaker who’s bent on breaking time. SheRead More
Sapphic Love in Defiance of Dictatorship: Cantoras by Caro de Robertis
The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heardRead More
An Exploration of Queer Muslim Diasporic Identity: The Last One by Fatima Daas
I snagged Fatima Daas’s The Last One because someone—I forget both where and who—mentioned it had won France’s Prix de Flore. Look, I’ll admit it, I’m a magpie for any book that makes the French literary crowd uncomfortable enough to shower it with accolades. What blindsided me? Three hours hunched over the book in my café’s corner,Read More
A Messy Love Story in Verse: Couplets by Maggie Millner
Maggie Millner’s Couplets is a novel-in-verse that explores the fierce intensity of falling in love and how it affects one’s expression, especially when the initial excitement begins to falter and fail. This debut reads like a challenge to form itself: can desire, betrayal, and queer longing be woven into the rigid dance of couplets without dulling theirRead More
Social Bureaucracy as Utopia Building: Quill & Still by Aaron Sofaer Review
To read Quill & Still by Aaron Sofaer (she/her) is to discover a revolution fought not with swords or spells, but with intake forms and breakfast routines—a village where every stone house stands by mutual agreement (and where the enchanted toilets probably have union representation). Whatever Sophie expected, what she gets is smaller and stranger:Read More
A Quietly Mythic Coming-of-Age Novel: The Archer by Shruti Swamy Review
The Archer moves with the methodical, recurring, and emotionally controlled intensity of mastered movement. In this debut novel, Shruti Swamy resists spectacle in favour of scrutiny—of the body, of memory, and of the hidden labour of becoming someone you were assured you couldn’t be. Set in mid-century Bombay, The Archer follows Vidya, a girl drawn to kathak dancingRead More
A Queer Diasporic Matrilineal Epic: Amma by Saraid de Silva Review
Some silences are so profound that they become part of the landscape, not just heard but inhabited. Amma knows that terrain—how silence gets passed down not just through forgetting but through a caring that has been cornered. In this debut novel from Saraid de Silva, the unspoken doesn’t just haunt the margins of the characters’Read More
When the Past Won’t Stay Quiet: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Review
Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. LouisRead More