bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews

challenging emotional 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

4.5

“All I want to do is leave a little more room for what good people are left to do their feral blooming.”

Sam Sax’s Yr Dead is a book that lingers, both in its haunting lyricism and in the devastating weight of its central character’s final moments. Told in fragmented, poetic prose, the novel unspools the memories of Ezra, a queer, Jewish wanderer who, between the moment they set themselves on fire and the moment they die, relives a lifetime of longing, loss, and political disillusionment. At its core, Yr Dead is an exploration of what it means to belong—to a place, to a person, to a history that is both inherited and self-defined. It is a blistering meditation on survival, grief, and the tenuous hope that something, somewhere, might feel like home.

Sax’s writing is incandescent, shifting between moments of raw vulnerability and sharp, sardonic humor. The prose is deeply lyrical, sometimes so fragmented it feels like grasping at wisps of thought before they disappear. Ezra’s memories flicker through time, painting a portrait of a life shaped as much by absence as by presence. Their relationships are transient, often destructive—there’s Edwin, a high school bully turned lover, Christian, a man whose home they share while betraying him, and Arnold, an older, controlling figure who locks Ezra away for days. Their family, too, is defined by loss: a mother who left, a father more devoted to his students than his own child. And through it all, Ezra walks with ghosts, asking, “How many people have visited my body and never left?”

The novel is profoundly political, interrogating protest as both an act of resistance and an act of despair. Ezra moves through the world with the weight of history pressing down on them, attending demonstrations but never quite feeling present, caught in the space between engagement and isolation. The book is deeply attuned to the ways queer and Jewish identities intersect with political struggle, how survival can feel like both an act of defiance and an unbearable burden. The question at the heart of Yr Dead is unrelenting: when language fails, when the world offers no clear answers, what do we do?

If there is a criticism to be made, it’s that the novel’s fragmented nature can, at times, feel disorienting. It demands patience, a willingness to sit with its ambiguity. But for those willing to engage, Yr Dead is profoundly moving, a book that refuses easy conclusions and lingers long after the final page. Ezra is a character who aches to belong, yet fears the intimacy such belonging requires. Their story is one of fire—sometimes a guiding light, sometimes pure destruction. And in Sax’s hands, their voice burns bright, refusing to be extinguished.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, fragmented storytelling and introspective narratives; those interested in queer and Jewish identity, political resistance, and the search for belonging; fans of Ocean Vuong, Carmen Maria Machado, and Akwaeke Emezi.

🔑 Key Themes: Longing and Alienation, Queerness and Jewish Identity, Protest and Political Grief, Memory and the Body, The Haunting Presence of Loss.

Content Warnings

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a harrowing and haunting reimagining of her uncle’s childhood, set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the brutal realities of reform school life. Blending historical horror with supernatural elements, Due crafts a deeply affecting novel that exposes the inescapable violence of white supremacy and the resilience of Black children caught in its grip.

After their mother’s death and their father’s forced flight from Florida, siblings Robbie and Gloria find themselves navigating the dangers of their racially segregated world. When Robbie is sent to Gracetown School for Boys—the Reformatory—after an altercation with a white boy, he is thrust into a nightmare of forced labor, abuse, and the eerie presence of haints: the ghosts of boys who never made it out of the school alive. Meanwhile, Gloria fights against systemic indifference, seeking allies where she can, even as white “benevolence” proves to have its limits. As Robbie struggles to survive within the Reformatory’s walls, Gloria’s determination to free him underscores the novel’s central theme: the power of love and community in the face of relentless oppression.

Due’s writing is both poetic and visceral, weaving stark realism with haunting imagery. The supernatural elements never overshadow the historical horrors; rather, they amplify them, reinforcing how the past refuses to rest, especially when injustice remains unacknowledged. Robbie’s ability to see haints serves as both a curse and a source of knowledge, connecting him to the boys who came before him and revealing the sinister history of the Reformatory, including the warden’s complicity in a deadly fire decades earlier.

The novel does not shy away from depicting the brutal realities of white supremacy—how Black children are criminalized, how white women’s complicity in racial violence is often overlooked, and how systemic racism is upheld through both active cruelty and passive indifference. Gloria’s encounters with the white women Miss Anne and Channing highlight this dynamic; they are willing to help—to a point—but ultimately prioritize their own safety over true justice. Conversely, Miz Lottie and the NAACP lawyer exemplify the power of Black resistance, even when the odds are stacked against them.

Despite its powerful themes and masterful storytelling, The Reformatory was a difficult read, not just because of its heavy subject matter but because its narrative voice occasionally felt geared toward a white audience. The framing of racism as something to be explained and understood, rather than simply confronted, made certain moments feel more didactic than immersive. Additionally, Robbie and Gloria’s young perspectives sometimes lent the novel a YA feel, which isn’t my personal preference. That said, Due has crafted an undeniably compelling and important story, one that demands remembrance and recognition of historical injustices. The Reformatory is a chilling, necessary read—one that I won’t soon forget.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of historical speculative fiction, gothic horror with social justice themes, and narratives that confront systemic racism; readers interested in the haunting legacies of racial violence and resistance; fans of Victor LaValle.

🔑 Key Themes: Racial Terror and Resistance, Historical Memory and Haunting, Family and Survival, The Injustice of the Carceral System.

Content Warnings

Pieces You'll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.25

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on March 4th, 2025 from Catapult.

Some books demand to be read slowly, their sentences savored like incantations. Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali is one such book—lyrical, haunting, and deeply introspective. In the wake of a harrowing medical crisis, Ali stitches together a self that was shattered, using memory, faith, and writing as both tools and battlegrounds. Her story is not just one of survival but of reclamation, of choosing how to piece herself back together after nearly being lost forever.

Ali’s memoir begins with the traumatic birth of her son, a moment that should have been sacred but instead becomes a site of violence and neglect at the hands of white doctors who refuse to see her, speak to her, or listen to her warnings. Their failure to recognize a rare form of preeclampsia, one that originated in her liver rather than presenting as typical hypertension, leads to HELLP syndrome—an often-fatal condition that leaves her brain swollen, scattered, and broken by strokes. When she awakens from a coma, she has only the most rudimentary functions, speaking in her first language, Urdu, but unable to grasp the reality of her own motherhood. The journey that follows is one of painful reconstruction, of filling in the gaps left by memory loss and medical trauma, of navigating an American medical system that failed her while also reckoning with the patriarchal traditions of her Muslim upbringing.

What makes Pieces You’ll Never Get Back so compelling is Ali’s refusal to accept easy narratives. She was dubbed the “Miracle Girl” by her doctors, yet she questions what kind of mercy strips a mother of her ability to recognize her own child. She reexamines Islamic theology, looking at conceptions of the afterlife, the sacred origins of the Qur’an, and the faith’s reverence for the written word—all through the lens of a woman whose mind has betrayed her but whose survival depended on language. As she struggles with aphasia and cognitive impairment, writing becomes the very thing that allows her to heal.

Ali’s prose is as fractured and luminous as the memories she tries to reconstruct. Her writing is steeped in sensory detail, moving with rhythmic intensity between the past and the present, between what is known and what is lost. The memoir’s strongest moments lie in its exploration of identity—not just the binaries of American and Indian, Muslim and secular, pre-stroke and post-stroke—but the fluid, shifting reality of selfhood when one’s own body becomes unfamiliar.

If there is any shortcoming in Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, it’s that the ending feels slightly rushed. After so much meticulous excavation of memory, the final chapters don’t linger long enough in the aftermath of Ali’s recovery. And yet, perhaps that is fitting—survival is not a neat conclusion, but an ongoing act.

This is a book that does not flinch from pain, nor does it romanticize resilience. Instead, it honors the messiness of recovery, the grief of what is lost, and the grace found in rebuilding. Ali’s memoir is a testament to the power of writing, of reclaiming one’s narrative when the world tries to silence it. An essential read for anyone who has ever had to fight to be heard, to be seen, to survive.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical and introspective memoirs, narratives of medical trauma and recovery, and explorations of cultural identity; those interested in the intersections of faith, memory, and storytelling.

🔑 Key Themes: Trauma and Healing, Memory and Identity, Cultural Heritage and Faith, The Power of Writing as Survival.

Content Warnings

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

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challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty is a hypnotic descent into the grotesque allure of the wellness industry, where the pursuit of perfection veers into horror. Suspenseful and slow-burning at first, the novel builds an unsettling tension as its narrator, a former piano prodigy, finds herself drawn into Holistik—a high-end wellness brand that promises transformation but demands something far more sinister in return. With sharp, lyrical prose and an incisive critique of beauty, capitalism, and assimilation, Natural Beauty is as intoxicating as it is unsettling.

When the narrator abandons her promising career in music after her parents are in a car accident, she takes a job at Holistik, recruited by the enigmatic Saje, who recognizes her from her conservatory days. Holistik is a temple to curated perfection, offering customized treatments and supplements that promise an almost divine level of beauty enhancement. As part of her onboarding, the narrator is required to undergo biometric testing and consume mandatory supplements—dispensed from a remote-monitored necklace—gradually molding her into an indistinguishable replica of her colleagues. The novel’s prose shimmers with eerie beauty, as the narrator initially revels in her newfound social capital: “There is no longer any way to deny it. I am becoming my best self.” But as she looks in the mirror and sees her ethnicity, her individuality, and even her autonomy slipping away, the cost of this transformation becomes horrifyingly clear.

Huang deftly critiques the commodification of beauty, exposing how capitalism preys on insecurity while enforcing homogeneity. Holistik’s ethos of “natural beauty” is anything but—it is curated, manufactured, and consumed, reinforcing the unsettling truth that in this world, even ethnicity is malleable if it serves the aesthetic ideal. The novel also delves into the pressures of assimilation, tracing the narrator’s struggle to navigate expectations, first as a prodigious musician and later as a willing participant in the elite beauty industry. Her gradual loss of identity is as much a reflection of societal pressures as it is of Holistik’s sinister machinations.

As the novel builds to its climax, its speculative horror elements fully emerge, culminating in revelations about the grotesque origins of Holistik’s products and the chilling experiments conducted under the watchful eye of its young, tech-visionary CEO, Victor Carroll. The novel’s pacing shifts dramatically in its final act, a rapid unraveling that some readers may find jarring. Yet, the underlying themes remain potent—who profits from beauty standards, and who is consumed by them?

One critique I had was the novel’s ambiguous handling of implied childhood sexual abuse, pedophilia, and incest. These themes, while unsettling, were never directly addressed or resolved, which felt unnecessary and potentially triggering, given their lack of impact on the overall plot. Despite this, Natural Beauty remains a compelling, thought-provoking read that lingers long after the final page. Huang’s ability to weave haunting, poetic imagery with biting social commentary makes this a standout debut. I was so enthralled by her writing that I immediately requested an eARC of her follow-up on NetGalley—if Natural Beauty is any indication, her next work will be just as mesmerizing.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of lyrical speculative fiction, social horror, and incisive critiques of beauty culture; readers interested in the intersections of capitalism, race, and bodily autonomy; Mona Awad, Sayaka Murata, and Ling Ma enthusiasts.

🔑 Key Themes: The Commodification of Beauty, Assimilation and Identity, Power and Exploitation, The Allure and Cost of Transformation.

Content Warnings

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva

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adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on February 4th, 2025 by Astra House.

Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy is an unflinching fever dream of a novel, a body horror-laced dystopia where climate collapse and capitalism have fused into something grotesque, irreversible, and deeply personal. In Nieva’s reimagined Patagonia—now a tropical coastline after the Antarctic ice caps have vanished—Dengue Boy, a mutant mosquito-human hybrid, comes of age in a world that was never meant to hold him. A product of reckless bioengineering, born from corporate greed masquerading as progress, he is rejected by his mother, tormented by his peers, and alienated from his own body. But Dengue Boy is not a story of assimilation—it is a story of monstrous reclamation.

As the novel unfolds, Dengue Boy’s identity fractures and reforms in the shape of vengeance. A brutal moment of self-discovery reveals that she is, in fact, Dengue Girl—only female mosquitoes bite. With that knowledge comes a new hunger, one that cannot be contained. She kills her tormentor, El Dulce, and embarks on a killing spree targeting the ultra-wealthy, those who have thrived while the rest of the world drowns in the consequences of their excess. The novel pivots between Dengue Girl’s transformation into the revolutionary Mother Dengue and the machinations of the elite, who have turned climate catastrophe into an economic engine, profiting off engineered pandemics. It is a world where financial speculation is indistinguishable from ecological devastation, where time itself has lost its borders, collapsing into a prelife of telepathic stones and viral mutations.

Nieva’s prose is as visceral as the world he conjures—dense, all-consuming, and steeped in satire. His sentences sprawl and coil, layering scientific jargon with surrealist horror, corporate doublespeak with fevered hallucination. The effect is hypnotic, a slow descent into a world where the grotesque has become commonplace, where revenge is both deeply personal and disturbingly systemic. Dengue Boy operates on multiple levels at once: a body horror Bildungsroman, a decolonial fable, a critique of techno-capitalism’s unchecked greed. It is a novel unafraid to ask what happens when the world turns so deeply against you that the only reasonable response is to burn it all down.

To read Dengue Boy is to confront the reality that the dystopia Nieva imagines is already seeping into our own. It is a novel that festers, lingers, demands to be reckoned with. And in the end, it leaves one question hanging in the thick, humid air: what happens when the monsters bite back?

📖 Recommended For: Readers who enjoy absurdist and dystopian speculative fiction, critiques of hyper-capitalism, and body horror with a philosophical edge; those interested in the intersections of technology, climate collapse, and resistance.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Climate Catastrophe and Capitalism, Revenge and Resistance, The Commodification of Life.

Content Warnings

The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on April 22, 2025 by Catapult.

“I am no longer bewildered by my collapse but by all we have survived.”

Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is an unpeeling, a revealing, a rebirth. It is an excavation of hunger—not just for food, but for identity, for history, for wholeness. Aziza writes with an unflinching gaze, dissecting the line between living and dying, exploring how each can masquerade as the other. At its core, this memoir is about anorexia, but it is just as much about intergenerational trauma, exile, and the weight of assimilation.

Aziza’s illness peaks during the first year of her marriage, a time when she obsessively curates her image online while her husband monitors her pulse as she sleeps. At 5’10” and 82 pounds, she is given an ultimatum: treatment or death. Yet, within the sterile walls of the eating disorder ward, Aziza finds herself suffocated by the behavioral modification techniques that reduce recovery to numbers—calories, pounds, intake forms. She exposes the rigid surveillance and loss of autonomy inherent in mainstream eating disorder treatment, questioning the assumption that such illnesses belong only to rich, white women.

But the roots of her disorder run deeper. In the hollow spaces where hunger festers, Aziza unearths the buried history of her father’s Palestinian identity—an identity he tried to suppress in an effort to sell her the American dream. The ghost of her Sittoo, her grandmother, lingers throughout the book, whispering of Gaza, of refugee camps, of a homeland lost but never forgotten. Through her father’s retold stories, Aziza comes to understand her disorder as a form of self-erasure—of her race, her queerness, her very being. The weight of exile and assimilation presses against her ribs, manifests in her refusal to take up space.

The memoir is a study of language, too—of the words spoken and unspoken, of Arabic phrases that carry histories, of the silences that shape identity. Aziza investigates her childhood with a forensic tenderness, tracing her first moments of bodily discomfort to the judgmental gaze of white childhood friends who ridiculed her Sittoo’s eating habits. That shame, that quiet rejection of inheritance, becomes a fracture that deepens over time. In searching for Sittoo’s past, Aziza begins to reclaim herself.

Her prose moves like water, shifting between stark, clear-eyed realism and lush, melancholic lyricism. Time bends, memory unfurls, and the narrative pulses with both urgency and restraint. There is an ache in every sentence, a longing woven into every reflection. The result is hypnotic, a memoir that feels less like a telling and more like a haunting.

Ultimately, The Hollow Half is about survival—not just of the body, but of the self. It is about reclaiming a stolen birthright, about refusing disappearance. In the end, Aziza does not find healing within the confines of carceral psychiatry. She finds it in her father’s stories, in the land of her ancestors, in the act of remembering. This memoir is a testament to the power of recognition—to see oneself, in all one’s fullness, and to finally say: I exist.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, introspective memoirs that explore identity, diaspora, and survival; those interested in eating disorder narratives beyond the white, Western lens; fans of Hala Alyan, Emmeline Clein, and Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Intergenerational Trauma and Diaspora, Body and Self-Erasure, Cultural Inheritance and Belonging, The Power of Language and Storytelling.

Content Warnings

Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Elene Lam, Chanelle Gallant

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emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was published in the US on November 12, 2024 by Haymarket Books.

Few books dismantle dominant narratives with as much precision and urgency as Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice by Elene Lam and Chanelle Gallant. This is not a book about victimhood. It is a book about power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how the state weaponizes law, borders, and morality to control racialized, migrant sex workers under the guise of protection. It exposes the violence of the so-called rescue industry, the dangerous conflation of sex work and trafficking, and the carceral feminist frameworks that ultimately harm the very people they claim to save.

Lam and Gallant refuse easy binaries, insisting that sex work is neither inherently empowering nor degrading—it is labor. And like all labor, its conditions are determined by structures of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. The authors demonstrate how sex work, for many migrants, is not a last resort but a strategic choice, one often safer and better-paying than other exploitative industries available to them. Yet, because of the racialized criminalization of both migration and sex work, migrant sex workers are treated as disposable—targeted by police, denied housing, and placed at constant risk of deportation. The state, not the work itself, creates the greatest danger.

The book excels in its analysis of the intersection between sex work and border politics, revealing how immigration laws are used to regulate and punish laboring bodies. The authors meticulously deconstruct anti-trafficking policies, exposing how they function less as protective measures and more as tools of surveillance, exclusion, and incarceration. Through case studies and firsthand accounts, they reveal the everyday realities of migrant sex workers—resisting, surviving, and organizing in the face of relentless criminalization.

One of the book’s most powerful interventions is its critique of white feminism’s role in the anti-sex work movement. Lam and Gallant illuminate the racialized moral panic surrounding sex work, tracing it back to colonial histories of controlling and policing women of color’s sexuality. White feminists, they argue, often uphold a framework of rescue that reinforces carceral power, echoing the same paternalistic logic as imperialist interventions that have come to dominate our world. The book rejects this model entirely, aligning itself instead with abolitionist and decolonial movements that prioritize self-determination over state intervention.

Not Your Rescue Project does not just challenge misconceptions about sex work—it demands a complete reorientation of how we think about justice. It calls for decriminalization, not tighter restrictions. It advocates for solidarity, not saviorism. It insists on listening to sex workers rather than speaking over them. At its core, this book is an indictment of the state’s role in manufacturing violence against migrant sex workers—and a call to action for those willing to fight for a world where justice is not defined by policing and punishment, but by autonomy and collective care.

📖 Recommended For: Readers invested in abolitionist and decolonial perspectives; those interested in the intersections of sex work, migration, and criminalization; activists, organizers, and anyone challenging carceral feminism; fans of Harsha Walia.

🔑 Key Themes: Sex Work as Labor, Criminalization of Migration, Anti-Trafficking Myths, Carceral Feminism vs. Abolition, State Violence and Surveillance, Worker-Led Resistance.

Content Warnings

Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade

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informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was released in the US on January 14th, 2025 by Algonquin Books.

Dean Spade’s Love in a Fucked Up World is not a self-help book in the traditional sense—there are no quick fixes or easy affirmations to soothe our romantic woes. Instead, Spade offers something more valuable: a radical reimagining of love and relationships, grounded in activism, accountability, and collective care. This is an anti-self-help book, one that interrogates the myths we’ve been sold about romance and urges us to step off the relationship escalator in favor of something more liberatory.

Spade meticulously deconstructs the cultural scripts that tell us one person should meet all our needs, that romantic love is the pinnacle of human connection, and that marriage and nuclear families are “natural” structures rather than social constructs designed to uphold systems of power. By tracing how these ideas have evolved over time, Spade reveals how they function to isolate us, keeping us tethered to capitalist fantasies of scarcity, consumption, and individualism. The book challenges readers to decenter romance, making space for deeper forms of care and intimacy beyond monogamous or hierarchical partnerships.

What sets this book apart is Spade’s ability to weave together structural analysis with deeply personal reflections and actionable exercises. Self-inquiry prompts throughout the text encourage readers to interrogate their own conditioning, expectations, and attachment patterns. Spade asks hard questions about why we desire what we desire, why the new relationship phase inevitably fades, and how we can move beyond cycles of conflict and punishment into more value-aligned ways of relating.

A particularly striking section examines how capitalism and technology teach us to numb ourselves, ensuring that we neither resist the horrors of the world nor stop chasing the impossible highs that consumer culture promises. In contrast, Spade calls for emotional presence and accountability—not just within romantic relationships but across all forms of intimacy. Through a transformative justice lens, the book offers strategies for conflict resolution, boundary-setting, and navigating consent, even (or especially) when the answer is “maybe.”

Spade’s prose is sharp and urgent, but never detached. The writing is direct, analytical, and deeply reflective, seamlessly blending political critique with relational introspection. Repetition, rhetorical questions, and declarative statements drive home key insights, making the book both intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant. This is a text that does not just critique existing structures but provides a roadmap for building something better.

Ultimately, Love in a Fucked Up World is a call to action: to unlearn, to resist, and to reimagine love outside the constraints of capitalism, patriarchy, and isolation. It is an invitation to cultivate relationships rooted in interdependence, solidarity, and care—ones that nourish rather than deplete, that liberate rather than confine. Spade doesn’t just ask us to love differently; he challenges us to love in a way that transforms the world itself.

📖 Recommended For: Readers invested in radical relationship models, transformative justice, and the intersections of activism and intimacy; those questioning the romance myth and seeking liberatory approaches to love and connection; fans of adrienne maree brown, bell hooks, and Mia Mingus.

🔑 Key Themes: Decentering Romance, Mutual Aid and Interdependence, The Impact of Capitalism on Intimacy, Transformative Justice in Relationships.

Content Warnings

The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole

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challenging emotional 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

4.75

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released on February 4, 2025 from Tin House Books in the US.

Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a lush and haunting intergenerational saga that explores the tension between fate and self-determination, weaving the lives of three Nigerian women across continents and decades. Esther, her daughter Amina, and her granddaughter Laila navigate the weight of tradition, migration, and survival, their stories punctuated by the voice of Iyanifa, an Ifa priestess who serves as a guide. With lyrical prose and a deeply introspective narrative, Bankole crafts a tale that is at once intimate and expansive, honoring the resilience of women who forge their own paths despite the burdens of history.

The novel opens with Esther’s teenage years in Ibadan, where a traumatic event binds her to a life she did not choose. Forced into marriage with Sani after he assaults her, Esther loses her first child, endures years of abuse, and eventually escapes with her daughter Amina. Their journey is marked by struggle and perseverance, as Esther builds a life from the ground up, finding stability in her catering business while clinging to the hope of a different future for Amina. But even as Esther breaks free from one set of constraints, she cannot help but impose others—her pragmatism shaping the expectations she places on her daughter.

Amina, ever the dreamer, sees America as an escape, a place where she might carve out an identity beyond the rigid expectations of marriage and duty. Yet, even as she reaches for independence, disillusionment follows. Bankole captures the painful complexities of migration—the promise of reinvention shadowed by struggle. Amina’s reunion with Joseph, the man her mother once loved, and the birth of her daughter, Laila, offer glimpses of hope, but the devastation of Hurricane Katrina alters the course of their lives. The novel does not flinch in its portrayal of loss

, particularly as Amina’s life is claimed by the chaos of the storm, leaving Laila to be raised in the fragments left behind

What sets The Edge of Water apart is its fluid, almost ethereal storytelling, where the past and present blur, and fate lingers as an omnipresent force. Bankole’s prose is rich with sensory detail, evoking the smell of Nigerian markets, the weight of humid New Orleans air, the ache of longing that stretches across oceans. The interludes from Iyanifa offer a spiritual and philosophical dimension, grounding the novel in Yoruba cosmology and the unbreakable ties between the living and the ancestors.

At its heart, this is a novel about the choices women make in the face of societal constraints, about the dreams that persist despite hardship, and the legacy of love and sacrifice that travels through generations. Bankole does not offer easy resolutions—Esther’s faith in destiny is both vindicated and complicated, Amina’s independence is both triumphant and tragic. But in the novel’s closing moments, as Laila returns to Nigeria to meet her grandmother, there is a sense of continuity, of a story still unfolding.

I was slightly disoriented at the start, but once I reached Part 2, I could not put it down. The Edge of Water is a stunning meditation on migration, motherhood, and fate; I was surprised by how much I loved this one and can’t recommend it enough to fans of diverse literary fiction!

📖 Recommended For: Fans of intergenerational family sagas, lyrical and introspective prose, and narratives exploring migration and identity; readers interested in Yoruba spirituality, mother-daughter relationships, and the complexities of diaspora; lovers of Akwaeke Emezi or Yaa Gyasi.

🔑 Key Themes: Fate vs. Self-Determination, Cultural Heritage and Diaspora, Motherhood and Inheritance, Faith and Spirituality, Survival and Resilience.

Content Warnings

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe

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adventurous funny 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? Yes

4.5

Amanda Lee Koe’s Sister Snake is a sharp-fanged, lyrical retelling of “The Legend of the White Snake” that slithers between myth and modernity, immortality and the mundane. With thrumming prose, Koe unspools the tale of Emerald and Su, two snake sisters who have shed their scales for human skin—but not their hunger.

Emerald, the green snake, is a restless sugar baby navigating the neon-lit corridors of New York’s Upper East Side. Jaded, immortal, and unapologetically feral, she siphons qi from her wealthy clients, feeding off their life force in a way that makes capitalism feel almost honest. Her sister Su, the white snake, has spent the last decade in Singapore, subsuming herself into human life with Botox and marriage to Paul, a powerful politician. Su has renounced her immortal self, believing civilization to be a salve, while Emerald scoffs at the idea that humanity is anything but a fragile masquerade. “Assimilate all you want,” Emerald tells her, “but don’t pass your self-loathing off to me.”

The tension between the sisters is as hypnotic as it is heartbreaking. Su’s desire for stability is haunted by past trauma—a violent assault by male snakes that first brought the sisters together—while Emerald’s rejection of human norms is less reckless than it seems. The novel hums with a desperate yearning: for safety, for connection, for something real in a world of artifice. When Su discovers a video of Emerald, in snake form, being shot by police in Central Park, she boards a plane to New York without hesitation. What follows is a reunion laced with betrayal, murder, and the reawakening of long-buried instincts.

Koe’s storytelling is mesmeric, weaving visceral imagery with biting humor. She writes with the sharpness of a fang sinking into flesh, making every line pulse with urgency or dark humor. The novel wrestles with identity and transformation, asking: How much of ourselves can we abandon before we become unrecognizable? Is survival worth the cost of erasure? Su’s carefully constructed human life begins to unravel, especially when she discovers she is pregnant and fears the child will be born a snake. Her decision to terminate the pregnancy is complicated by a primal, unexpected protectiveness, and as the sisters return to Singapore, the boundaries between past and present, self and other, human and beast blur beyond recognition.

Like Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, Sister Snake is a feral, feminist meditation on the wildness that civilization tries to tame. Koe unflinchingly critiques conformity, particularly within the rigid expectations placed on women. Su and Emerald are bound not just by blood but by the shared burden of navigating a world that demands their submission. But where Su seeks invisibility, Emerald demands to be seen, sharp teeth and all. Their love is bruising and relentless, shifting between tenderness and violence, much like the ever-changing nature of identity itself.

For readers who revel in lush prose, mythic reinvention, and stories of women who refuse to be caged, Sister Snake is a must-read. It coils around you, tight and unrelenting, until you feel its stinging bite.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of mythic retellings and feminist speculative fiction; readers drawn to themes of transformation, sisterhood, and rebellion; lovers of Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder or Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Identity and Assimilation, Primal Instincts vs. Civilization, Sisterhood and Betrayal, Power and Survival.

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bisexualbookshelf's reviews 793 reviews

bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews