bisexualbookshelf's Reviews (793)

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist

5.0

challenging emotional funny inspiring reflective medium-paced

I am taking the power to say out loud what happened. This power, it is mine and only mine to keep. Whoever is inconvenienced by it is, I know now, not as important as my need to say it.

Reading Faltas is to encounter a woman laying claim to her truth—not out of a desire for pity or resolution, but because some stories must be told simply to be laid down. In this blistering, tender, and genre-defying collection of letters, the late, beloved Cecilia Gentili writes directly to the people of her hometown in Galvez: her friends, her enemies, her mother, her abuser’s daughter—everyone except the man who raped her. The result is a radical reclamation of narrative, a transfemme survivor’s archive of pain, beauty, betrayal, and becoming.

Gentili’s voice is impossible to ignore. It’s sharp with wit, soaked in longing, and devastating in its clarity. Through a mosaic of memory, she maps the terrain of her childhood in poverty, tracing how systemic failures and intimate betrayals conspired to deny her safety and dignity—but never her brilliance. Her writing refuses clean arcs or easy redemption; instead, Faltas pulses with contradictions. She is furious and forgiving, full of grace and entirely unwilling to extend it where it hasn’t been earned.

Many of these letters center on the women in Gentili’s life—her mother, her grandmother, her friends—and the complex ways they upheld or challenged the violence around her. Womanhood, as portrayed in Faltas, is both sanctuary and snare. Cecilia learns early that femininity can be punished or performed, commodified or withheld—and that even being desired can feel like a kind of safety. And still, she shines through it all, demanding to be seen not as a symbol or a survivor or a cautionary tale, but as a girl who deserved love, and a woman who created herself from the wreckage.

This book is not easy, but it is essential. Gentili’s epistolary approach cracks open the confessional form and lets it bleed, defiant and unrepentant. She doesn’t write for the comfort of the reader—she writes because she has to, because she deserves to. Faltas is a triumph of voice, a fierce act of self-possession, and a necessary addition to any bookshelf that values trans truth-telling, survivor rage, and the power of language to name what others insist we forget.

Cecilia Gentili left behind more than a legacy—she left behind a challenge: to remember, to speak, and to love ourselves enough to tell it anyway.

Please check the content / trigger warnings and read with care 💌

📖 Read this if you love: pro-survivor memoirs, trans rage and resilience, dark humor in the face of trauma, and the works of Carmen Maria Machado or Vivek Shraya.

🔑 Key Themes: Childhood Sexual Abuse and Accountability, Trans Femme Identity and Longing, Poverty and Feminized Survival, Motherhood and Matrilineal Inheritance, Reclamation and Resistance Through Storytelling.

Content Warnings

We Contain Landscapes

Patrycja Humienik

5.0

emotional reflective tense fast-paced

Thank you so much to Tin House for the gifted copy! This collection was released in the US on March 18th, 2025.

I came from this theft / of what cannot be mine. Not time // or rivers. Even my devotions / refuse possession.

What does it mean to belong—to land, to lineage, to longing? In We Contain Landscapes, Patrycja Humienik doesn’t attempt to answer that question cleanly. Instead, she excavates its layers with a poet’s precision and a daughter’s ache, crafting a debut collection that is as haunted as it is humming with defiance. These poems are maps drawn in contradiction: devotion tangled with doubt, inheritance weighted with grief, queerness blooming through fractured soil.

Humienik writes from the liminal—between Poland and the U.S., between girlhood and womanhood, between being “shielded by whiteness” and aching in solidarity with the undocumented. Her speaker is the queer immigrant daughter who doesn’t quite fit the mythologies she’s been handed: of empire, of nation, of “a better life.” In poems like “Figuration” and “There's What I Think and What I Feel,” the pressures of assimilation and familial expectation coil tightly around the voice, only to be slowly unspooled with lyric tenderness and clarity. And in “Failed Essay on Repressed Sexuality,” one of my favorite pieces, Humienik distills queer grief and eroticism into something paradoxically sharp and soft—nihilistic, yet aching to be known.

Stylistically, the collection is elliptical and textured, with enjambments that mimic the movement of a restless, reaching mind. This is poetry that doesn’t resolve—it pulses, reverberates. “Cruel, how / beauty exists with no regard for goodness or the living,” the speaker observes, and this cruelty—of displacement, of memory, of want—is a current throughout. Still, these poems resist being undone by loss. They are dreamscapes and dirges. They are cracked open but not crumbling.

We Contain Landscapes is a book for anyone who’s ever lived inside a question. For the queer children of immigrants. For those of us who want to believe in something softer than borders. For those who, even in exile, are learning how to bloom.

📖 Read this if you love: poetry about intergenerational longing, queer daughterhood, or the weight of whiteness, empire, and erasure. For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Migration and Inheritance, Queerness and Repression, Nationalism and Displacement, Mother-Daughter Entanglement, Belonging Beyond Borders.

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

Bob the Drag Queen

4.25

adventurous inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

What if Harriet Tubman came back—not just in spirit, but in flesh, fire, and full creative control? In Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert, Bob the Drag Queen brings her back as a hip-hop frontwoman, a prophet of rhythm and resistance, demanding not just remembrance but agency over what is remembered. Through a blistering blend of memoir, lyrics, and dialogue, Bob collapses time itself to ask: what does freedom look like for the living? For the Black, queer, and deeply human?

At the heart of this novel is Darnell, a once-celebrated producer who’s been stuck in a quiet exile ever since he was outed on national television. Called upon by Harriet to produce an album that speaks to “Black folk today,” Darnell enters the studio expecting a monument and finds a mirror instead. Harriet, in Bob’s hands, is not mythologized but magnified—wise, weary, deeply faithful, and completely uninterested in Darnell’s ego. She, and the other members of her band (the Freemans), carry stories of survival that are not sanitized. They’re raw, messy, holy. And they demand to be heard in full.

Bob’s writing is a masterclass in genre-bending: part gospel, part rap lyrics, part ancestral séance. The characters trade verses and liberation strategies with the same urgency, whether they’re decoding the Underground Railroad or unpacking the emotional weight of queer Black shame. This book mourns what’s been stolen, yes—but it also celebrates what we’ve made from the wreckage. At its core, Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert insists that history is best told by those who lived it, and that the most radical act we can offer the past is to listen—fully, deeply, without interruption.

What makes Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert so extraordinary is Bob the Drag Queen’s ability to deliver powerful, anti-racist history lessons through a vividly contemporary lens. This isn’t a dry textbook or a sanitized timeline—it’s a living, breathing conversation between the past and the present. Through magical realism, sharp dialogue, and emotional honesty, Bob challenges the myths we’ve been fed about American history and invites us to learn from those who lived it. It’s an inventive, electrifying reminder that liberation stories don’t belong behind glass—they deserve a mic, a spotlight, and an audience willing to listen.

📖 Read this if you love: bold reimaginings of historical figures, hip-hop as a vehicle for liberation, or contemporary stories grounded in Black queer resilience and creativity.

🔑 Key Themes: Black Liberation and Queer Identity, The Power of Self-Narration, Faith and Freedom, Intergenerational Resistance, Anti-Racist Historical Reclamation.

Content Warnings

The Only Good Indians

Stephen Graham Jones

4.0

dark reflective tense medium-paced

Audiobook review disclaimer:

I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading!

Review:
I enjoyed what I caught of this one, but didn't find it super accessible via audio. I struggled to keep up with the different characters and perspectives. I'm definitely interested in giving it a re-read in a different format so that I can fully absorb it.

Feed

Mira Grant

3.75

adventurous tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Audiobook review disclaimer:

I process sound less clearly than text (trauma brain things), so my audiobook reviews tend to be shorter and more surface-level than my usual ones. I don’t take notes while listening, and I often come away with impressions rather than detailed analysis. Still, I’m committed to reviewing every single book I read, even when the format changes how I engage. This is my way of honoring the listening experience—with softness, presence, and care. Thanks for reading!

Review:
This was fun! Unfortunately, I don't remember much more about it. I enjoyed it but not enough to pursue the sequels. I wasn't particularly invested in the journalistic focus nor the presidential race aspect which is......the majority of the plot. Murderbot fans might like this one, if they also like zombies.

Nothing Without Us

Cait Gordon, Talia C. Johnson

3.5

adventurous inspiring reflective medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

I don't usually wait so long after reading a book to write a review, but I've just found I don't have much to say about this one. Some of the stories were good, some less so, as with any anthology. I loved the representation and themes but didn't overly connect to or love any of the stories. Maybe this is one of those that feels like it was written more for a non-disabled audience? A good one to recommend to them!

Content Warnings

Unsex Me Here

Aurora Mattia

3.75

inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

This book will certainly not be for everyone. Most of the time, I had no idea what was going on. But I still loved every moment for both its queerness and for Aurora's dazzling writing. These are some of the most beautiful and heart-aching sentences I've ever read. The stories coalesced a bit more towards the end, but I was in it almost solely for the prose during the first half of the book. I fear Aurora may be too smart for me, but I'll still follow her through all the worlds she imagines.

Awakened

A.E. Osworth

DID NOT FINISH: 9%

I only read 10% of this book so can't really say if there's anything wrong with it. I struggled to get invested in the characters, especially with the heavy Harry Potter influence. Most of the reviews I've seen from other readers with preferences like mine are pretty meh, and I just don't have any time to waste when it comes to reading! Giving this one a pass - thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC, anyways <3

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

5.0

informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US on May 27, 2025 by Spiegel and Grau.

Forest Euphoria is a revelatory journey through the wild, slippery, and spectacular queerness of the natural world—an urgent, lyrical exploration that shatters the binaries we’ve inherited about gender, species, and even what it means to be “human.” Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian blends memoir and science with a tender precision, inviting us to see nature as not separate from ourselves but deeply entangled with all of its “undesirable” and uncategorizable beings: fungi with thousands of sexes, intersex slugs, glass eels whose genders remain mysteries until their final year. Here, queerness isn’t just identity—it’s ecology, time, and relationality writ large.

Kaishian’s reflections on kinship with snakes, swamps, and fungi pulse alongside sharp critiques of colonialism’s ongoing assault on both biodiversity and marginalized bodies. She draws on Indigenous frameworks like kincentric ecology and refuses the human exceptionalism that science often upholds, reminding us that we evolved alongside microbes, fungi, and animals, bound in a community where time itself is a shared rhythm. The draining of wetlands, the enforcement of rigid taxonomy, and the violent erasures wrought by capitalism all thread through her argument, showing how control over nature mirrors control over bodies and identities.

What resonates most is how Forest Euphoria makes room for the ambiguous, the in-between, and the unclassifiable—not just in nature, but in ourselves. It’s a fierce, tender call to embrace complexity, to reject productivity as the sole measure of worth, and to reimagine our relationships with all beings as collaborative and compassionate. This book is a balm for anyone who’s ever felt out of place or boxed in, offering instead a vision of life that is webby, fluid, and unapologetically queer.

For lovers of intersectional ecology, queer theory, and radical care, Forest Euphoria will shift the way you see the living world—and your place within it. It’s a wild, necessary read for our times.

📖 Read this if you love: queer ecology, radical nature writing, and intersectional explorations of identity and belonging; the works of Robin Wall Kimmerer or Sunaura Taylor. Specifically recommended for my friends Dak and Julia.

🔑 Key Themes: Queerness and Fluidity in Nature, Kincentric Ecology and Interdependence, Colonialism and Ecological Violence, Ecological Justice and Collective Care.

Content Warnings

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Kylie Lee Baker

4.5

dark emotional reflective tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Cora is used to terror, a worry that wrings your organs out and carves holes in you like termites in wooden furniture, but if enough of you is devoured, soon there’s nothing left of you but what was, and Cora is starting to feel full of holes, like Yifei can look straight through her.

In Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, Kylie Lee Baker drops us into a world thick with ghosts — literal and figurative — a haunted, pandemic-stricken New York where racism, trauma, and erasure permeate nearly every corner. Cora Zeng is a woman stranded between two worlds — her White and Chinese heritage, her doubts and her desires — battling not only her own paranoia and survivor’s guilt, but the oppressive structures that view her, and people like her, as expendable.

Baker’s writing is raw, intimate, and cinematic, a rich blend of gothic ghost story, thriller, and psychological character study. The style drops you directly into Cora’s mind — into her doubts, her loneliness, her struggles to connect — while tying her internal chaos to a communal experience of racism and xenophobia. There’s something profoundly intimate about seeing this through Cora’s eyes; we feel her fear of contamination, her shame about not fitting in, her disbelief in traditions — until those traditions become the key to honoring the people she’s lost.

The novel wrestles powerfully with the lingering effects of racial trauma and the literal ghosts it leaves in its wake. Cora finds herself battling not just a racist killer, but a system that dehumanises her and her community. Death, disease, and hungry ghosts become rich symbolism for communal pain — a legacy that must be addressed in order for healing to happen. Cora’s story underscores the necessity of honoring those we lose, and of making peace with the ghosts we carry forward.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng is a piercing exploration of alienation, survivor’s guilt, and the power of communal care — a gothic thriller that feels as intimate as a confession. It’s a book for those who have felt erased, misunderstood, or stranded between worlds, and a vivid affirmation that honoring our ancestors is a form of resistance.

📖 Read this if you love: gothic ghost stories, intimate and eerie character studies, and speculative fiction that wrestles with racism, survivor’s guilt, and community trauma.

🔑 Key Themes: Alienation and Grief, Diaspora and Cultural Heritage, Racism and Violence, Hungry Ghosts and Ancestral Connection, Healing through Confrontation.

Content Warnings

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