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793 reviews

Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda

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dark emotional reflective medium-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

5.0

But maybe when the time comes, I will think that I am tired of being anybody's girlie, and I will go somewhere nobody knows to call me ‘girlie,’ or to ask me where my mummy is, or whether I even have a mummy, and they will instead ask me what my name is, and I will be able to choose a name and my own story, a story that I am making up by myself.

Ghostroots is a rich, intimate collection of short stories that merges ordinary Nigerian settings with a shimmering thread of magic and grotesque transformation. ’Pemi Aguda finds a way to illuminate the hidden anxieties, desires, and histories that lie just beneath the surface of daily life — particularly when it comes to the roles of women in a family, a home, and a community. The stories are piercing, vivid, and at times heartbreaking, yet there’s a deep thread of resistance tying them together — a persistent inquiry into how we break away from oppressive structures and become more than the roles we were handed.

This collection explores intergenerational trauma and the struggles for freedom within oppressive traditions — especially for women battling a legacy of abuse, silence, and submission. From a young woman battling possession by her own grandmother in “Manifest,” to a new mother wrestling with her ability to connect and care in “Breastmilk,” these stories illuminate the intimate, messy relationships we have with those we love and the past we carry within us. There are moments when houses become prisons or financial structures consume their contributors, when a young girl finds herself kidnapped and reshaped by another’s desires — all reflecting a universal human fear: that we may become what we most want to destroy.

Ghostroots resonates profoundly for those who, like me, are passionate about honoring the stories of women, ancestors, and children — stories often erased or forgotten by a dominant culture. Aguda shows us that naming oneself and choosing one's future is a radical act, especially when the past feels inescapable. The collection highlights the power of imagination to illuminate hidden struggles, transforming silence into voice and submission into liberation. It’s a rich, intimate, and piercing collection — perfect for readers who appreciate stories about transformation, intergenerational trauma, and the power of women’s resistance.

📖 Read this if you love: intimate, piercing short stories; intergenerational family dramas with a touch of magic; rich character studies that illuminate hidden struggles.

🔑 Key Themes: Mothers and Daughters, Generational Trauma, Transformation and Self-Determination, Home and Belonging, Nigerian Culture and Folklore.
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Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline

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informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.25

Reading Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson felt a bit like sitting at the feet of a guardian, a friend, a legend. Tourmaline brings Marsha P. Johnson’s story alive in rich color and deep texture — not just as a symbol of resistance, but as a flawed, loving, complex person who insisted on her right to exist exactly as herself. There’s a vivid thread tying together Marsha’s grassroots activism, her wild, generous spirit, and her ability to illuminate a path forward for a movement that tried — again and again — to erase her.

The book traces Marsha’s journey from growing up Black and transgender in a racist, transphobic society, to making her way to NYC with only $15 in her pocket, to organizing alongside Sylvia Rivera, founding STAR, and putting her whole soul into the struggles for trans liberation, sex workers’ rights, and AIDS care. Tourmaline highlights not just Marsha’s role in the Stonewall Riots, but her ongoing organizing — from securing housing for unhoused trans people, to providing a communal safety net when institutions failed, to insisting on her own visibility against police violence and societal neglect.

What resonates most is how Marsha lived resistance through her very existence. She made herself a home in a world that tried to destroy her and, in doing so, opened doors for future generations to follow. The book underscores her roles as a mother, a friend, a caregiver, a lover — a person made powerful by her ability to care, to connect, and to resist. Marsha’s story is a testament to the necessity of solidarity, of honoring those who paved the way, and of choosing love and liberation, again and again, in the face of unimaginable odds.

For anyone who wants to remember — or learn — what it means to fight for a world where everyone can live their fullest, truest lives, Marsha is a rich, raw, and deeply necessary read.

📖 Read this if you love: Black trans resistance, stories of community care and solidarity, rich historical narratives from the margins, and the legacy of Stonewall.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans liberation and activism, sex workers’ rights and survival, racism and policing, chosen family and community organizing, honoring ancestors and honoring oneself.
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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 20%.
There’s nothing wrong with this book! Quite the opposite!!!!! This was an audio reread and as much as I love it, it’s not working for me on audio — complex worldbuilding usually doesn’t. Will be rereading a physical copy before the end of the year! <3
Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon

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adventurous inspiring 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

5.0

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

What if your body was both your battleground and your revolution? In Volatile Memory, Seth Haddon crafts a searing, speculative exploration of transness, surveillance, and techno-corporeal resistance through a love story between two women—one flesh, one memory. In this futuristic world, humans wear animal-inspired masks that biologically enhance their bodies—granting speed, strength, or heightened senses—to better survive in a hostile, corporatized galaxy. When scavenger Wylla discovers an experimental HAWK mask on a supposedly barren planet, she doesn’t just find salvage—she finds Sable, the disembodied consciousness of a dead woman trapped in the mask with no memory of how she died. What follows is a breathtaking journey through grief, rage, and reclamation, as the two reckon with the systems that tried to erase them.

This is a book that pulses and bleeds. Haddon’s prose is intimate and gorgeously lyrical without sacrificing momentum. With an eye for political nuance and emotional devastation, Volatile Memory delves deep into the violence of state-backed conformity, where bodily autonomy is criminalized through data and surveillance. Wylla, a trans woman haunted by her pre-transition self, is a striking protagonist—sharp-edged, vulnerable, and deeply principled. And Sable? Sable is unlike any narrator I’ve encountered: possibly a ghost, possibly an AI, definitely a woman, and achingly human in her desire to be a part of the world.

The worldbuilding is chilling and precise: a galaxy ruled by the Corporate Federation, where every citizen’s genetic identity is logged from birth. Tech is intimate, exploitative, and inescapable. Yet amidst this dystopia, somehow, love blooms—as both romance and care, rage, and mutual protection between two women who refuse to be erased.

Haddon doesn’t just tell a story—he builds a body out of language, memory, and resistance. Volatile Memory is for the girls who survived, the ghosts we carry, and everyone still trying to make a home in their own bodies. It’s what happens when Murderbot meets Time War, with more tenderness and an A.I. spin. I can’t stop thinking about it.

📖 Read this if you love: trans protagonists fighting the state, poetic sci-fi, queer speculative fiction, or stories that ask what it means to reclaim your body and your history.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy & Trans Embodiment, Surveillance Capitalism & Oppression through Data, Memory, Ghosts & Digital Consciousness, Queer Love Against Corporate Fascism.
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Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle

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adventurous mysterious 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

4.75

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US by Tor on August 12th, 2025. 

“Nothing matters” might be the thesis statement of Vera’s life—but Chuck Tingle dares to ask what it means to keep going anyway. 

Lucky Day is a surreal, sardonic, and unexpectedly tender meditation on trauma, statistical chaos, and the fragile threads of meaning we cling to when the world stops making sense. Narrated by Vera—a statistician-turned-reluctant investigator with a deeply bisexual yearning for logic and love—this speculative horror novel unfolds in the wake of a catastrophic event known as the Low Probability Event (LPE), in which 7.9 million people died from impossibly bizarre accidents on a single day. Four years later, Vera is grieving, dissociated, and clinging to routine like it’s the only thing keeping her from unraveling completely—until a himbo government agent comes knocking, dragging her back into a world she’s long since given up on.

Tingle’s writing is saturated with sardonic wit, lyrical nihilism, and deeply philosophical pondering. Vera’s narrative voice is razor-sharp, often bleak, but undercut with bursts of dark humor and moments of haunting vulnerability. Tingle balances a kind of absurd horror with sincere emotional stakes, especially as Vera confronts biphobia, loss, and the temptation to lean into chaos when everything feels pointless.

At its heart, Lucky Day is about the violence of randomness and the quiet bravery of choosing meaning anyway. It explores what it means to survive after the world breaks, to live with uncertainty, and to resist both fatalism and corporate exploitation. The novel critiques systems that commodify chaos—like the Everett Corporation’s manipulation of probabilities to turn profit while sacrificing lives—and insists that even amidst broken timelines and spacetime tears, we still have choices. Vera’s bisexual identity, repeatedly erased or dismissed, becomes one site where she refuses to give up her own complexity—even when the universe demands simplicity.

I wasn’t in love with the ending—it wrapped up too tidily given how committed the book is to existential messiness, and the alien/Area 51 twist felt like an unnecessary add-on. But even with its flaws, Lucky Day is weird, gutsy, and one of the most conceptually rich books I’ve read this year. If you’re into anti-capitalist weird fiction, emotionally wounded queer protagonists, or books that ask big questions about fate, grief, and the math of hope—you might just find this one worth the odds.

📖 Read this if you love: surreal speculative fiction, existential horror with heart, and emotionally devastated queer women doing cosmic math to survive.

🔑 Key Themes: Bisexual Erasure and Belonging, Probability and Fate as Power, Grief and Meaning-Making, Post-Trauma Existentialism, Queer Chaos.
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Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman

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challenging reflective slow-paced

2.0

In Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman argues that conflating interpersonal conflict with systemic abuse distorts our understanding of harm—and often reinforces the very power structures we claim to resist. Moving from queer communities to the carceral state, from personal estrangement to global oppression, Schulman’s central thesis is that unnecessarily escalating conflict to the level of “abuse” is a form of avoidance that too often justifies punishment, disposability, and state violence.

There are important critiques here—particularly around the social costs of shunning, the dangers of moral panic, and the ways carceral feminism can reproduce harm in the name of safety. Schulman challenges readers to consider community accountability as a transformative alternative to state-sanctioned punishment, and she’s right to name how “safety” can be weaponized by institutions to maintain supremacy.

But despite its ambition, this book left me deeply unsettled. Conflict Is Not Abuse may be provocative, but it is not trauma-informed. Schulman’s comparisons between traumatized behavior and supremacy ideology are especially disturbing, suggesting that survivors’ boundaries or desire for estrangement mirror authoritarian rigidity. This framing erases power differentials and misunderstands trauma as a refusal to tolerate difference, rather than a response to lived harm. The section on “traumatized behavior” was so dehumanizing, I had to skip it entirely.

At its core, the book assumes that all parties in a conflict are equally resourced, safe, and capable of mutual repair. But what happens when someone isn’t? Schulman offers no roadmap for survivors navigating unsafe dynamics, nor does she account for how trauma, neurodivergence, or disability might impact our capacity for confrontation or communal healing. Her prose is rhetorically forceful, but emotionally flat—there is little compassion here for those simply trying to survive.

There are questions in this book worth engaging. But for those of us navigating relational abuse, survivorship, disability, or neurodivergence, Schulman’s framework can feel not just insufficient—but actively harmful. It critiques the criminalization of harm while replicating a punitive attitude toward those who are harmed. For trauma survivors, estranged readers, or anyone navigating relational violence, I’d approach with caution—or not at all.

📖 Not Recommended For: Trauma survivors, estranged readers, or anyone seeking a compassionate, survivor-centered lens on harm.

🔑 Key Themes: Conflict vs. Abuse, Supremacy and State Violence, Mislabeling Harm, the Limits of Punishment and Repair.
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Muzzle by Rivka Clifton

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challenging reflective tense fast-paced

4.0

Thank you so much to the author for the gifted eARC! This book was released in the US by Jackleg Press in March 2025. 

In Muzzle, Rivka Clifton cracks open the quiet violences that so often go unnamed—what we inherit, what we internalize, and what we risk passing on. Set against a backdrop of the rural Midwest, this debut collection brims with restrained intensity, where even stillness can feel like a threat. Clifton’s poems are not declarations; they’re inquiries—fragmented, recursive, and deeply embodied. The speaker often seems caught mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-unraveling, which is precisely the point: Muzzle is less interested in resolution than in tracing the contours of harm, grief, and the desperate desire to transform them.

Recurring images—mouths, tongues, sinew, empty beds—evoke the tension between speech and silence, between touch and avoidance. “Yes, I believe I believed. / What else was there to do // when my mouth’s use mystified my mouth?” the speaker asks, encapsulating the book’s central question: how do we live inside a body, inside language, when both have been used as sites of violence? Even when the poems allude to hunting or parenthood, the real target often feels more intimate: the self, the memory, the unprocessed anger coiled beneath the surface.

Clifton’s language is sparse but searing, balancing poetic minimalism with emotional weight. These poems are curious about what it means to cause harm without meaning to, to parent with the memory of being parented poorly, to speak when silence feels safer. There are no tidy answers here, only careful examinations of what it costs to be tender in a world that teaches you to muzzle yourself—or to bite.

Recommended for readers drawn to lyric fragmentation, emotional ambiguity, and the complex ethics of care. Muzzle will resonate with those who’ve sat with the uncomfortable truth that survival sometimes comes at the cost of softness—and still crave a poetry that reaches toward softness anyway.

📖 Read this if you love: fragmented lyricism, rural hauntings, and poetry that interrogates the ethics of speech and silence.

🔑 Key Themes: Language as Violence, Inherited Harm and Familial Memory, Embodiment and Grief, Survival and Restraint, The Fragility of Tenderness.
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Cacoethes by Chloe De Lullington

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challenging emotional reflective 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? Yes

4.5

Thank you so much to the author for the gifted eARC! This book will be released on June 12th, 2025 by Northodox Press.

There’s a specific kind of chaos that lives in the marrow of early queer girlhood—a cocktail of bad decisions, unrequited crushes, boundary-testing hookups, and the dizzying ache of wanting to feel wanted. In Cacoethes, Chloe de Lullington captures that chaos with a voice so sharp it could cut, yet so tender it feels like a bruise you keep pressing. The story follows Erin, a British university fresher clinging to the “Cool Girl” archetype as she stumbles through a haze of club nights, online dating, and emotionally lopsided entanglements. Her world veers off-course when she matches with Aidan, an older American man who drags her into a BDSM dynamic that starts intoxicating and quickly turns unsafe. Erin’s friends raise the alarm—but Erin is caught in that murky space between desire and danger, where submission feels like control until it doesn’t.

One night, when Aidan says he wants to break up, Erin falls apart and is quietly picked up by Bo, a gentle classmate who becomes both a lifeline and a mirror. But instead of staying in that safety, Erin eventually rebounds into the world of sugar dating, where she meets Hal—a charismatic, former comedian who gives her what Aidan couldn’t: attention, aftercare, and a warped sense of stability. Meanwhile, Erin’s feelings for Bo—complicated, closeted, and deeply inconvenient—simmer beneath the surface, until Hal begins to unravel, pushing her to confront what she’s actually been running from. By the end, Erin is no longer performing confidence for the male gaze; she’s choosing softness, queerness, and real connection in the form of Hal’s daughter, Harriett, who offers her something startlingly rare: a future.

Erin’s journey is messy, loud, and often painful: she falls for men who neglect her and overlooks the women who see her most clearly. Her relationships are transactional in more ways than one, and yet they’re also sites of genuine longing, pleasure, and transformation. Erin’s narrative voice—chaotic, self-effacing, and heartbreakingly perceptive—reads like a diary scrawled in eyeliner on the back of a club flyer. Her stream-of-consciousness reflections are laced with biting commentary, especially on sex, power, and the limits of feminist rhetoric when it fails to make space for desire’s contradictions.

Cacoethes asks big questions: What does agency look like when you enjoy being dominated? What does empowerment mean when pleasure is tangled with performance and survival? What happens when your queerness doesn’t arrive softly but explodes through heartbreak and jealousy and slow, stumbling realizations?

If you’ve ever loved the wrong person, ghosted a good one, or found yourself wondering why affection sometimes feels like danger and sometimes like home—this book will see you. Cacoethes is a love letter to queer messiness, and a reminder that sometimes becoming yourself is less about choosing the right path and more about surviving the detours with a little bit of your softness still intact.

📖 Read this if you love: razor-sharp coming-of-age stories, bisexual awakenings, chaotic but introspective girl narrators, and voice-driven fiction that doesn’t shy away from power, performance, or mess. 

🔑 Key Themes: Bisexual Self-Discovery, Power and Submission, Queerness and Desire, Sex Work and Emotional Labor, Girlhood and Performance.
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Trans Studies by Crystal Odelle

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challenging hopeful reflective fast-paced

4.5

Thank you so much to the author for the gifted copy!

Reading Trans Studies by Crystal Odelle feels like cracking yourself open and finding glitter, grief, theory, and teeth. This is not a tidy memoir or a neatly theorized academic text—it’s something messier and far more alive. Odelle crafts an elliptical, poetic reckoning with trans femme embodiment, desire, and survival in a world that insists on misreading them. Her prose is jagged and intimate, a genre-shifting fusion of vignette, critical reflection, and spiritual longing that resists easy categorization, much like transness itself.

Across these pages, Odelle excavates what it means to be illegible—not just to cis institutions like academia, but even within queer and trans community. They name the ache of being seen as a gender-fraud, of chasing an essential womanhood that might not exist, of finding affinity in femininity despite its erasures. There’s humor here (dark, biting, unrepentant), but it’s always threaded with a tender awareness of the cost of visibility and the psychological toll of transmisogyny. One recurring question echoes beneath it all: if the world is bent on your disappearance, how do you stay?

Trans Studies is not interested in making transness palatable—it refuses tidy narratives of becoming. Instead, Odelle writes into the contradictions of nonbinary transfemininity with bold vulnerability and incisive clarity. They let messiness in. She writes of suicidal ideation without flinching, of desire as both power and wound, of longing for a life that feels inhabitable. Their writing holds space for the sacred, the sexual, and the scholarly all at once.

This book is not a roadmap, but it is a companion for anyone searching for language to hold the shifting, often brutal, always beautiful experience of trans femme life. A searing, gorgeous act of survival. I feel lucky to have read it.

📖 Read this if you love: genre-defying memoirs, trans theory rooted in lived experience, and writing that’s as intellectually sharp as it is emotionally raw.

🔑 Key Themes: Transfemininity and Illegibility, the Perception of Gender, Desire and Suicidality, Writing as Survival.
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Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

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adventurous inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

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 love these. Seanan McGuire is the only writer who could get me this invested in teenage narrators. The worlds she builds? Immaculate. The horse girl one wasn't quite for me, but I was still along for the ride. Thanks, as always, Seanan <3