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bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews

Notes from a Queer Cripple by Andrew Gurza

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for the eARC! This book was published in the US on April 21st, 2025.

Notes from a Queer Cripple is the raw, hilarious, and fiercely tender disability justice sex-ed you didn’t know you needed. Andrew Gurza cracks open the myth of “inspiration porn” and instead offers us the messy, joyful, deeply human reality of being queer and disabled—and looking hot while doing it.

Reading this felt like getting a voice note from a friend at 2 a.m.—equal parts confessional, gutting, and horny. Gurza’s voice is frank, flirty, and radically vulnerable. They open with their own definitions of disability and ableism, and from there, the narrative unfolds like a love letter to his disabled queer self—a self shaped by rejection, survival, and eventual erotic reclamation. I found myself underlining passages about the heartbreak of being excluded from queer community due to inaccessibility, and then smiling through misty eyes at the fierce joy they reclaim through sex, community, and crip wisdom.

Gurza doesn’t sanitize anything—thank god. He shares everything from learning to masturbate in his disabled body to how mobility aids can be part of sexual intimaxy. They don’t ask for pity; they ask us to do better. To talk about access needs in the bedroom. To make queer clubs accessible. To stop treating disabled sex as shocking or inspirational and start treating it as real. He reminds us that time spent convincing able-bodied people that disabled folks are desirable could be better spent...well, actually having sex.

At its core, Notes from a Queer Cripple is an urgent call to queer community: practice access intimacy, not just in theory but in the thick of our desire, our dancefloors, our dating apps. Gurza is asking us to stretch—not out of guilt, but out of love.

This book cracked something open in me. It’s one of those reads I’ll come back to, especially when I need a reminder that queer disabled joy isn’t some shiny exception. It’s a right. It’s a practice. And if we’re really about liberation, it has to be collective.

📖 Read this if you love: candid memoirs, radical disability justice, queer sexual liberation, and authors like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eli Clare, or Mia Mingus.

🔑 Key Themes: Internalized Ableism and Sexuality, Queer Community and Access Intimacy, Disabled Pleasure and Body Sovereignty, Reimagining Desire and Disability Representation.

Content Warnings

Liquid: A Love Story by Mariam Rahmani

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for the eARC! This book was released in the US on March 11, 2025.

This book is messy, cerebral, deeply Muslim, and brutally honest. And while I didn’t always know where it was going—or even what was happening—I admire the ambition of its chaos.

In Liquid: A Love Story, Mariam Ramani crafts a biting, meandering portrait of a queer Iranian American academic caught at the intersection of structural precarity, inherited trauma, and romantic longing. The narrator, fresh off her PhD in a field her adjunct salary cannot sustain, embarks on a quest to locate a statistically significant spouse—one hundred dates, fourteen weeks—while dodging Islamophobia, parental expectations, and the emptiness of gig academia. The absurdity is intentional, and often funny, but what lingers most is the ache beneath the narrator’s dry wit.

Ramani’s prose is dense and self-aware, toggling between dissertation-like analysis and poetic reflection. References to Said’s Orientalism, the ethics of arranged marriage, and the politics of the hijab sit alongside awkward first dates and hot girl app fatigue. There are sapphic flings, the messy gravity of a best-friend situationship, and a syllabus on chick flicks that might’ve been my favorite subplot. The narrator’s dry, sardonic narration kept me hooked even when the plot felt like it was slipping through my fingers.

Around the halfway mark, the novel pivots hard. After her father’s heart attack, the narrator flies to Iran, where the tone and stakes change completely. The narrative slows down, becomes more embodied, more tender. The chaotic energy of the first half gives way to grief, inheritance, and ancestral longing. It’s jarring—but maybe necessarily so. Love, after all, isn’t tidy. Neither is diaspora.

Liquid never quite coalesced for me structurally, and I wish the transitions had been cleaner. But Ramani is doing something ambitious here: interrogating how capitalism, academia, and empire distort even our most intimate desires. If you’re okay with a little narrative disarray in exchange for big ideas and biting prose, this one’s worth wading into.

📖 Read this if you love: dry wit layered over emotional vulnerability, anti-capitalist academic fiction, and messy diasporic intimacy.

🔑 Key Themes: Islamophobia and Diaspora, Love and Financial Precarity, Academia and Class Tension, Queer Longing and Belonging, Marriage and Modernity.

Content Warnings

Aggregated Discontent: Confessions of the Last Normal Woman by Harron Walker

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challenging funny reflective medium-paced

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on May 20th, 2025.

Harron Walker’s Aggregated Discontent is a razor-sharp, vulnerable, and searingly honest collection of essays that peers into the contradictions of trans womanhood in a cisnormative world. With sardonic wit and emotional clarity, Walker navigates the minefields of passing, labor, spectacle, and survival with a voice that is both unflinching and deeply human.

Across these essays, Walker maps the impossible terrain of what it means to be seen—too much, not enough, only when convenient. She details the emotional calculus of transitioning while broke, the frustrations of rainbow capitalism that promise inclusion but deliver little material change, and the endless loop of wondering if visibility is worth the cost. Her writing oscillates between confessional tenderness and cultural critique, and her prose crackles with punchy rhythm, incisive metaphor, and tongue-in-cheek irony that made me both wince and laugh out loud.

I was especially struck by her reflections on working a job she hated just for the insurance coverage, and the aching uncertainty of early transition—when every new version of yourself is still unfurling. The essay on watching Monica with a cis audience was a standout: layered, sharp, and painfully resonant. Her class-conscious readings of The Devil Wears Prada and The Intern, however, didn’t land for me—perhaps because I’m not a huge fan of either film, and the essay dragged a bit. Similarly, while the piece on Greer Lankton is rich with insight, its length left me a little adrift.

Still, the throughline of the collection—the experience of trans womanhood, from searching for trans elders, to interrogating trans motherhood, and reckoning with social infertility—feels radical in its intimacy. Walker invites us into a degendered, more capacious vision of family, femininity, and care, one where survival doesn’t preclude joy, and where transness is not just a battleground, but a place of creativity and connection.

Aggregated Discontent isn’t neat or easy—and that’s its power. It offers no clean conclusions, only the messy, brilliant edges of a woman daring to be fully seen.

📖 Read this if you love: trans cultural critique, anti-capitalist essays, and writing that blends memoir with media analysis.

🔑 Key Themes: Trans Womanhood and Visibility, Rainbow Capitalism and Exploitation, Passing and Misogyny, Trans Motherhood and Social Infertility, Art and the Politics of Representation.

Content Warnings

Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang

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dark reflective tense fast-paced

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

4.75

Thank you to NetGalley and Dutton for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on May 13th, 2025.

What a brutal, breathtaking read. Immaculate Conception is a scalpel of a novel—sharp, deliberate, and terrifyingly intimate. Ling Ling Huang doesn’t just imagine a dystopia ruled by art, algorithms, and empathy devices—she dares to dissect what it means to be seen, used, and recreated in a world that commodifies trauma, creativity, and care. This book didn’t just hook me—it sank into my skin and dragged me under.

At the center of this speculative spiral are Enka and Mathilde, art school best friends turned estranged rivals turned technological entanglements. Raised on opposite sides of a class-divided society, Mathilde and Enka’s bond is forged through longing, admiration, and unspoken competition. Enka, from the impoverished fringes, sacrifices her original medium to make art the system will fund. Mathilde, raised in an elite enclave, is tragic and mesmerizing—a child of 9/11 whose grief births museum-worthy work. Together, they are what art school rumors thrive on: one is brilliant, the other beautiful. But in Huang’s hands, both are brilliantly broken.

This novel is speculative fiction that feels alarmingly now. The invention of neuro-tech like SCAFFOLD, the rise of generative AI and its impact on artists, and the corporatization of empathy and creative expression are chilling in their familiarity. Huang explores how art—particularly that of marginalized people—is surveilled, sanitized, and sold. Mathilde’s “immaculate” pregnancy for a museum piece? Horrifying. Enka’s descent into mind-merging obsession? Equally so. Their friendship morphs into a parasitic loop of mutual need and betrayal that left me reeling.

I found Enka to be a masterfully unlikeable narrator. Her resentment, her hunger to matter, her desire to be Mathilde or inside Mathilde—it’s all uncomfortable, and deeply real. I couldn’t look away. Huang’s prose pulses with this discomfort: lyrical, ruthless, utterly unflinching. There are lines I read twice just to feel the sting again.

If I had one critique, it’s that the ending wobbles under the weight of so many big ideas—cloning, artistic conservatorship, divine birth, and tech-fueled codependency. I wanted a slightly cleaner landing. Still, it’s a near-perfect read for fans of dystopian intimacy, techno-capitalist critique, and messy, toxic friendships. I closed the book, gutted and in awe.

Ling Ling Huang, if you read this, you have my whole heart. This is easily one of my top reads of the year, and I’ll be chomping at the bit to see what you write next.

📖 Read this if you love: feminist dystopias, speculative fiction about art and obsession, and toxic queer friendships with body horror undertones.

🔑 Key Themes: Surveillance and Artistic Exploitation, Toxic Intimacy and Obsession, Techno-Capitalism and Neurology, Class Stratification and Empathy.

Content Warnings

Queer Sex: A Trans and Non-Binary Guide to Intimacy, Pleasure and Relationships by Juno Roche

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emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Tender, unflinching, and defiantly human, Queer Sex is a testament to the beautiful, messy, and radical possibilities that unfold when queer and trans people write their own scripts for intimacy. Blending diaristic vulnerability with candid interviews, Roche creates a tapestry of voices that illuminate what it means to seek love, pleasure, and connection outside the confines of cisheteronormativity. I found myself pausing often, heart swelling with recognition at the bravery it takes to walk toward intimacy with no map, only hope.

At its core, Queer Sex is an excavation—a digging away of the assumptions society buries deep into our bodies. Roche, with tenderness and a keen eye for nuance, documents how queerness and transness open up multitudes in sex, shifting focus away from genitals as sites of meaning and toward emotional resonance, bodily autonomy, and the slow, revolutionary act of self-love. The conversations throughout the book wrestle openly with the deconstruction of gender binaries, the liberatory power of T4T love, and the shadow of stigma—whether from HIV, age, sex work, or simply daring to be visibly trans in a world that demands invisibility.

What moved me most was how Roche refuses to tie the messy contradictions of desire into neat, digestible narratives. Instead, Queer Sex honors ambiguity, celebrates bodies in their complexity, and reminds us that intimacy doesn't need to look any particular way to be real, profound, or holy. It’s a book that doesn’t just speak to trans and queer readers—it cherishes them.

For anyone seeking a work that reimagines what sex, love, and embodiment can look like beyond the limits of normativity, Queer Sex is both a balm and a battle cry. A necessary, radiant addition to any bookshelf built on liberation, tenderness, and truth.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to candid memoirs, radical queer and trans narratives, and intimate explorations of love and embodimen.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer and Trans Intimacy, Body Autonomy and Self-Love, Deconstructing Gender and Desire, Resisting Cisheteronormativity, T4T Love and Community Care.

Content Warnings

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

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emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us is a searing, hopeful, and necessary intervention—a reminder that abolition is not about our feelings, but about collective transformation. With clear-eyed compassion and unwavering principle, Kaba offers readers not a destruction manual, but a blueprint for building the structures that sustain life. In these essays and interviews, she reorients us: failure is not fatal, but an opportunity for growth. Harm is not an aberration, but a certainty—and our work lies in meeting it with care, not cages.

Kaba’s prose is sharp, accessible, and deeply human. She dismantles the myths we’ve been fed about police, power, and punishment, revealing how the legal system criminalizes survival, particularly for Black women, BIPOC youth, and "imperfect" survivors like Marissa Alexander. She makes plain that fewer police would mean fewer opportunities for brutality, yet warns us against mistaking courtroom victories for systemic change. Again and again, Kaba insists: “Hope is a discipline.” It is not passive, but practiced—a daily act of solidarity, community-building, and imagining otherwise.

One of Kaba’s most powerful contributions is her challenge to the narrative of the "perfect victim"—a narrative that underpins rape culture, the abuse-to-prison pipeline, and the criminalization of survival strategies like sex work. She urges us to shift from individual action to collective responsibility, from punitive mindsets to healing justice. She reminds us that a system that cages people never cages the conditions that create harm in the first place.

Reading We Do This ’Til We Free Us feels like sitting at the feet of a beloved teacher who holds you accountable while never letting you lose sight of your own capacity for compassion and change. It’s not a comfort read, but it is a care-filled one—an invitation to practice a harder, more meaningful kind of hope. A vital text for anyone dreaming of a freer world.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist thought grounded in community care, radical hope as a political practice, and the works of Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and adrienne maree brown.

🔑 Key Themes: Abolition as Creation, Imperfect Survivors and Criminalization, Healing Justice and Mutual Aid, Hope as Discipline, Racialized State Violence.

Content Warnings

The Lamb by Lucy Rose

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challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced

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

4.0

In The Lamb, Lucy Rose weaves a darkly feral, lyrical meditation on the nature of love—the way it nurtures, starves, and devours. Nestled in a secluded forest with her mother, Margot lives a life shaped by hunger: for safety, for acceptance, for affection that doesn’t bite back. Under Mama’s volatile shadow, Margot becomes a reluctant participant in the family’s grisly survival—luring "strays" to feed the insatiable bond between them.

Rose’s prose is searing and intimate, almost bruising in its tenderness. Every line thrums with a raw, haunting cadence, capturing Margot’s claustrophobic yearning as she navigates the treacherous terrain of girlhood, isolation, and inherited violence. Mama's charm—weaponized and wild—and Eden's arrival as a second mother figure complicate Margot’s fragile sense of belonging. Love, here, is not gentle. It is a hunger with teeth.

The novel masterfully explores the devouring dynamics of feminine power, particularly between mothers and daughters. Through Mama’s manipulation and Eden’s eerie tenderness, Rose interrogates the myths of inherent goodness and maternal sanctity, suggesting that violence and care are often braided together in ways that defy easy separation.

The ending unsettled me deeply—and not in the way I craved. After being lulled by the book’s brutal beauty, the final act felt almost inevitable but still left me hollow, uncertain if the story’s emotional momentum was betrayed or fulfilled. Even so, The Lamb lingers under my skin: a testament to its harrowing, unforgettable power. Months after reading, I am still digesting what it offered—and what it asked me to swallow.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of dark folk horror, introspective psychological realism, and searing explorations of mother-daughter dynamics; readers who appreciate the feral lyricism of Carmen Maria Machado or Julia Armfield.

🔑 Key Themes: Love and Devouring, Inherited Trauma, Feminine Power and Violence, Isolation and Belonging, The Fragility of Tenderness.

Content Warnings

Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris

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dark emotional reflective 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

5.0

Grief, like lichen, clings to the body long after the first wound has scabbed over. In Green Fuse Burning, Tiffany Morris carves open the quiet violence of survival — the gnawing hunger for connection, the bone-deep estrangement from land and language, and the unbearable stillness of a world that refuses to mourn with you.

Rita, a Mi’kmaw artist adrift after her father’s death, seeks refuge at an isolated cabin where the woods seem to breathe with their own kind of grief. Haunted by her faltering grasp of her ancestral language and a girlfriend whose care often feels more like betrayal, Rita’s days blur under the twin weights of memory and loneliness. Her desire to consume the wild foliage around her reads not as madness but as a desperate ache to rejoin something that has always been slipping from her fingers.

Morris threads eco-horror through the novella with a deft, almost imperceptible hand: a pond that thrums with uncanny life, a lichen woman glimpsed in dreams and reflections. These elements are not mere metaphors but living, rotting testaments to the cost of our disconnection — from each other, from the Earth, from the inevitability of death. Nature, in Green Fuse Burning, is not a backdrop but a witness. It does not judge Rita; it absorbs her sorrow wordlessly, recognizes her as kin.

While the novella’s pacing sometimes wavers, the emotional depth never does. Morris writes Rita’s struggle with an aching honesty — neither glorifying nor pathologizing her — and the result is a story that feels profoundly human. Tender, unflinching, and defiantly rooted in Indigenous and ecological grief, Green Fuse Burning asks what it means to live in a dying world, and what small mercies might be found in refusing to look away.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who love eco-horror with emotional depth, Indigenous-centered storytelling, and haunting explorations of grief and belonging.

🔑 Key Themes: Grief and Cultural Disconnection, Ecological Horror and Climate Crisis, Colonial Trauma, Death and Rebirth through the Natural World.

Content Warnings

I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.0

Urgent, tender, and brimming with unruly hope, I Hope We Choose Love feels less like a book and more like a hand held out across the wreckage. In a world fraying at the edges, Kai Cheng Thom offers an aching, defiant belief: that love — complicated, imperfect, and fiercely honest — is the only way forward.

In this searing collection of essays, Thom wrestles with the contradictions and heartbreaks of queer community, laying bare the painful truth that even the spaces we build with care can replicate the harms we sought to escape. She moves with generosity and precision through the thorniest terrain — cancel culture, accountability, consent, identity politics — refusing easy answers in favor of messy, vulnerable questions. "I don’t want to be validated. I want to be loved," Thom insists, cutting through the neoliberal gloss that too often sanitizes justice work into spectacle rather than solidarity.

Thom’s writing is most luminous when she examines the failures of punitive culture, challenging us to imagine relationships capacious enough to hold harm, repair, and grace without collapsing into retribution. Her analysis of how essentialism fractures our movements — how binaries and "oppression olympics" foreclose real understanding — feels both incisive and deeply personal, rooted in her lived experience as a trans woman of Chinese heritage.

If at times the essays feel repetitive or if certain provocations could have benefited from deeper engagement, the emotional resonance never falters. Thom writes not as a distant critic but as someone embedded in the struggle, scarred and still believing. Her vision of queer chosen family, strained under the pressures of homonormativity, reminds us that community is not a utopia but a commitment — one that must be constantly, tenderly remade.

Ultimately, I Hope We Choose Love is a necessary intervention for anyone weary of the cycles of shame and disposability that plague our movements. Thom doesn’t offer a roadmap out of the apocalypse. She offers something harder and more beautiful: an invitation to stay soft, stay honest, and choose each other anyway.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist visions of community care, nuanced critiques of cancel culture, radical frameworks for transformative justice, and the works of adrienne maree brown or Mariame Kaba.

🔑 Key Themes: Love and Accountability, Queer Community and Chosen Family, Punitive Culture and Harm Reduction, Trans Liberation and Cultural Heritage, Justice Beyond Retaliation.

Content Warnings

Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács

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adventurous inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Tender, intricate, and alive with possibility, Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács is a luminous meditation on cognition, communication, and the radical multiplicities of being. Through shimmering, speculative worlds, Takács invites readers to imagine forms of connection that resist dominance, binary thinking, and easy legibility.

Across this collection, minds bloom differently: some communicate through emotional calibration, some through tendrils and cracked flowerpots, some through networks of consent and shared pain. Takács’s deep fascination with neurobiology and neurodivergence thrums underneath every story, refusing to flatten difference into deficit. In “Four Point Affective Calibration,” the assumption that the narrator’s desire to engage with aliens stems from autism is deftly interrogated—opening up questions about the presumptions embedded in so-called “universal” emotions.

Throughout, bodies and gender shift fluidly, refusing tidy classification. In "Folded Into Tendril And Leaf," survival and transformation are intimately entwined, as a once-transfigured student must rescue the very teacher who once made them a plant. The throughline of bodily autonomy, especially in the face of institutional abandonment or violence, pulses urgently. Even the smallest acts—growing roots into a cracked pot, offering blood to a housebeast—become acts of resistance and intimacy.

The titular novella is perhaps the collection’s most searing achievement: a story of obsession, power, and chosen suffering in the service of collective survival. Oyārun’s fixation on Aramin is uncomfortable, raw, and ultimately reshaped into something transformative—an act of yielding not to another’s will, but to communal need. In Takács’s deft hands, consent is not a formality but a living, breathing practice of freedom.

At every turn, Power to Yield and Other Stories reminds us that connection across difference is not simple, but it is sacred. This is eco-science fiction at its most tenderly defiant: a collection that cracks open the binaries of body and mind, self and other, and plants something gorgeously unruly in their place.

I finished these stories feeling a little stranger, a little softer, and a lot more hopeful. I cannot wait to read more from Takács.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of eco-speculative fiction, neurodivergent narratives, and expansive worldbuilding; readers drawn to the intersections of cognition, embodiment, and solidarity; admirers of Nnedi Okorafor or Becky Chambers.

🔑 Key Themes: Neurodiversity and Communication, Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Power and Consent, Queer and Nonbinary Futures, Collective Survival.

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bisexualbookshelf's reviews 793 reviews

bisexualbookshelf's reviews
793 reviews