bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews

Trauma Plot: A Life by Jamie Hood

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

4.5

“I've written one hundred thousand words on my trauma. Is that unintelligibility? Rape effaced me and yet I speak it. It stole my face and my name, and I'm still fucking here. It remains in me. We live in rape's presence, and its presence infests us. This pretense of wordlessness is a tool of the tormentor. It doesn't serve.”

What does it mean to tell the story of something that resists language? Trauma Plot is not just a memoir—it is a mutiny against the tidy, linear narratives we expect from survivor stories. Jamie Hood writes with raw lyricism and intellectual fire, unspooling her experiences of sexual violence in recursive, fragmented prose that mirrors the disorientation of trauma itself. From the first page, this book made my chest ache.

Hood begins with the unspeakable: a group assault a month before Trump’s election. Her voice, at first distant and dissociative, slowly fractures into intimacy, rage, sorrow, and clarity. As she shifts from third to first to second person, from diary entries to cultural criticism, we are pulled deeper into a story that refuses to behave. Her obsessions—Philomela, the limits of narrative, the “first-person industrial complex,” the myth of the perfect victim—are interwoven with brutal honesty and searing analysis.

There is no performance of redemption here. No ascension arc. Hood is explicit about her dissociation, shame, disordered eating, her return to sex and drinking despite vows to abstain. And still: the story pulses with life. She chronicles joy with girlfriends, as well as moments of care in therapy. What emerges is not a survival narrative, but something messier and more alive—an insistence on agency, even amid chaos.

Though confessional writing isn’t usually my preferred genre, Trauma Plot left me spellbound. It is unflinching in its pain, but also in its refusal to be sanitized. Jamie Hood refuses to perform palatability for the page, and in doing so, she gives voice to the stories rape culture has demanded remain silent. Her rage, her language, her refusal to tidy the mess—these are acts of resistance. And her insistence on telling the story, again and again and again, in whatever way she can? That is a kind of liberation.

📖 Read this if you love: confessional memoirs that resist narrative closure, feminist literary criticism, radical survivor narratives, and the works of Melissa Febos.

🔑 Key Themes: Sexual Violence and Narrative Fragmentation, The Myth of the Perfect Victim, Rage and Resistance, Confession as Literature, Rape Culture and Silence, Trauma and Memory.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel

Go to review page

dark mysterious reflective tense 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

4.5

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:
There was a lot going on in this book and I'm not sure I got all of it. But I really enjoyed the ride! The sibling dynamics were so real, gritty, and relatable. I would die for any of these characters. And the cast of narrators did a phenomenal job! I'd like to tell Marcus Kliewer (author of We Used to Live Here) that this is how you write a doppelganger story. 
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Go to review page

challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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:
Hm. Well. 

I really don't know what to make of this book. Of course, it was an enjoyable listen before I knew what was going on. After all the twists hit, I felt kinda icky. I felt the most icky reading Ward's author's note explaining why she chose to write this book
(she saw a video of someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder and got obsessed? Nope.)


It's hard because so much of the book is just a fun, brain-off horror read. The twists come so late in the game that I'm struggling to associate how much I hated the ending with how much I enjoyed the beginning.

I'll leave it at this: this is a harmful portrayal of a deeply misunderstood mental illness. But, long live Olivia.  
In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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:
This might be my favorite of the series - long live the Goblin Market. 
Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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. These are super quick so some of the details are a tad forgettable, but I love the characters AND the worldbuilding. Yes to the fat rep! Yes to the anti-fatphobia! Seanan does it again!
Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

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. These are super quick so some of the details are a tad forgettable, but I love the characters AND the worldbuilding. I was slightly less invested in this one than the first one but still really enjoyed it!
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire

Go to review page

adventurous mysterious reflective fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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. These are super quick so some of the details are a tad forgettable, but I love the characters AND the worldbuilding. Thanks, Seanan!!
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane

Go to review page

emotional reflective tense 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

5.0

“To us, basketball was a historical record of all the ways a body can move with and for another. What could be better than the strange and perverse pleasure of being known?”

Thank you to NetGalley and The Dial Press for the eARC! This book was released in the US on May 13, 2025.

I finished A Sharp Endless Need by Mac Crane with tears on my face and gravel in my chest. It’s a book that hurts and holds, like an ice bath for tender queer hearts: shocking, raw, strangely soothing. Crane gives us Mack—a fiercely competitive high school basketball player, a closeted queer teen, a grieving daughter navigating the electric tension of first love and the deep grief of all the things she can’t say aloud.

Set against the backdrop of early 2000s suburbia—complete with Sixers jerseys, Wet Seal, and Allen Iverson posters—Crane’s novel pulses with desire, despair, and the desperate hunger to be seen. Mack’s love for her best friend and teammate, Liv, is all sweat and eye contact, late-night phone calls, and bruised bodies sharing court space and grief. Their bond is both intoxicating and tenuous, as much about what’s withheld as what’s spoken. On the basketball court, they’re poetry in motion; off it, they’re a car crash in slow motion.

Crane’s prose is lush, physical, and deeply interior—Mack’s voice aches with need, shame, and sharp self-awareness. This is not a tidy coming-out story. It’s a gutting portrayal of how queerness can be both a revelation and a risk, especially in environments saturated with repression, silence, and toxic masculinity. There are moments where Mack thinks queerness can’t ruin her life if she just never names it. God, am I familiar with that thought.

This book is for the girls with calloused hands and guarded hearts. The ones who fell in love with their best friends in locker rooms and car rides, who measured their desire in eye contact and shared playlists. For the sapphics who didn’t get an easy first time, or who loved someone who couldn’t love them back out loud.

And it’s for the ones who lost parents too young and had to rebuild a future with grief in their backpack. Mack’s relationship with her dad, flawed and tender, layered with masculine pride and unspeakable queerness, is one of the most nuanced depictions of loss I’ve read in a while.

A Sharp Endless Need isn’t easy. It tackles trauma, queer shame, corrective violence, and the devastation of untethered longing. But it’s also a radiant testament to survival, to reinvention, to queer kids who find meaning even after the game ends.

This novel felt like getting dunked in heartbreak and hauled back up by hope. If you like your queer stories devastating, tender, and absolutely unafraid to go there, this one will live in your chest for a long, long time. Thank you, Mac Crane, for all the gay yearning - it broke my heart once again.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, aching queer coming-of-age stories; intimate depictions of first love and grief; or books by Ocean Vuong.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Longing and Shame, First Love and Friendship, Survival and Reinvention, Silence and Unspoken Desires.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Plum by Andy Anderegg

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Thank you to Hub City Press for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US on April 8th, 2025. 

Plum by Andy Anderegg is one of the most devastating and precise portrayals of familial abuse I’ve ever read. Written in second-person, it doesn't just tell you a story—it makes you live it. J., the narrator, is a child watching her older brother take the brunt of their father’s violence while she scrambles to stay small, stay good, stay unnoticed. From the very first chapter, I felt myself in her—hypervigilant to the moods of an unstable parent, flinching at every slammed door, learning to read adult faces like they were sacred texts, trained by chaos to anticipate disaster before it speaks.

J.’s voice is sharp, poetic, and eerily detached—like so many of us who learned too early that feeling deeply could be dangerous. Her loyalty to her brother is the backbone of her childhood, and yet even that becomes frayed under the pressure of their parents’ manipulation. She is taught to believe he’s the problem, the defiant one, while their father’s rage simmers just beneath every breakfast table interaction. And as her brother spirals—fighting at school, disappearing, eventually hospitalized—J. internalizes what so many abused daughters do: that survival is earned by being quiet, by being good, by disappearing into herself.

So much of Plum reflects the emotional architecture of my own past. The parentification. The shame. The small betrayals I told myself were love. The prose—lyrical, clipped, and viscerally present—captures the staccato rhythm of trauma: looping thoughts, dissociation, the endless calculations of how to keep the peace. J.’s eventual turn to cam work to survive, her use of sex and silence as currency, her longing for escape and refusal to trust it even when it arrives—all of it rings true. This isn’t trauma for drama’s sake. It’s a symphony of survival: dissonant, aching, and real.

What Plum offers is not a clean recovery arc, but something more honest: a portrait of a girl growing into a woman who is still learning how to want, how to trust, how to stay. J. becomes someone who chooses herself, even when it’s messy. Even when it’s lonely. Even when it means burning the last bridges to her past. I hope to be like J.

For those of us raised by rage, by silence, by people who made us responsible for their misery—Plum is a mirror we don’t often get. It reminded me that freedom isn’t always soft or immediate. Sometimes, freedom is a key to a house in your name. Sometimes, it’s walking away. And sometimes, freedom is becoming someone who gets to decide for herself what love looks like. Thank you, Andy, for J.’s fierce story. 

📖 Read this if you love: hauntingly lyrical narratives, deep explorations of trauma and survival, and books by Sarah Rose Etter or Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Generational Trauma, Parentification and Survival, Addiction and Violence, Reclamation of Self and Autonomy, The Legacy of Abuse.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings
Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez

Go to review page

challenging emotional funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

Alligator Tears is a memoir that doesn’t flinch—from poverty, from queerness, from rage, from joy. Edgar Gomez offers a searing yet tender series of essays tracing a coming-of-age shaped by broken systems and impossible expectations. The story begins with a stroke and an ambulance too expensive to call, and spirals through minimum wage jobs, racist school programs, queer Latin clubs in the shadow of Pulse, and the bitter inheritance of American “opportunity.”

Gomez writes with biting wit and raw clarity about the class realities so many of us are told to survive with silence. Whether recounting their mom’s bankruptcy filed in the same breath as gifting veneers, or watching white shoppers waltz through a mall staffed entirely by Black and brown workers, Gomez refuses the false comfort of bootstraps narratives. These essays are especially sharp in their depiction of familial love that is both fierce and fraught—his mother, a Nicaraguan immigrant turned Starbucks barista, is both his anchor and his wound.

As a queer Latin American kid growing up in Orlando, Gomez’s journey into identity is marked by MySpace boys, theater crushes, YouTube influencer aspirations, and the slow unfurling of selfhood in the aftermath of rejection. His queerness glitters through every page, even when dulled by loneliness, toxic masculinity, or cultural silence. This book holds queer joy, too—not just the kind found in nightclubs and love stories, but the quiet victory of embracing your femininity and being seen without being exoticized.

If you’ve ever been told you had to work harder, be nicer, or take up less space to deserve stability, this memoir will meet you like a mirror and a machete. Alligator Tears isn’t about overcoming—it’s about exposing the game, surviving on your own terms, and laughing with all your (fake) teeth.

📖 Read this if you love: class-conscious queer memoirs, sharp humor layered with emotional depth, and stories that hold both love and resentment for family and culture.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Coming-of-Age, Cycles of Poverty and Survival, Femme Visibility and Machismo, the Myths of Labor and Class. Familial Estrangement and Cultural Silence.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings