bisexualbookshelf's Reviews (793)

Penitence: A Novel

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:
This would've gone down as a "fine, just not for me" book if it weren't for the two H*rry P*tter references and single use of the term Asp*rg*rs. There were some interesting transformative justice and abolition themes in this, but they got lost along the way. I was curious, then bored. Plus, it's 2025. It should be easy to avoid the aforementioned missteps.

Confessions

Catherine Airey

3.0

I read this book a month ago and haven't reviewed it yet because I don't have anything to say about it. It was easy to read, but I'm not sure that's a compliment in this case. There's nothing wrong with this book. It just bored me!

Moon Dust in My Hairnet

J.R. Creaden

DID NOT FINISH: 30%

Audiobook wasn’t holding my attention but gonna give this a try in print eventually!

In Universes

Emet North

3.5

emotional mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

In In Universes, Emet North invites readers to journey through a labyrinth of alternate realities, exploring not only the fabric of space and time but the complexities of identity, love, and self-doubt. The novella follows Raffi, a physicist obsessed with unraveling the mysteries of dark matter, whose life is rooted in control and the pursuit of genius. When Raffi becomes entranced by Britt, a queer sculptor who seems to make them feel weightless, they abandon their work and dive into the multiverse, seeking new possibilities for who they might be.

North’s writing is a delicate balance of intellectual ambition and emotional vulnerability, blending scientific wonder with deep, existential questions. Their prose is often poetic, carrying an undercurrent of sharp self-reflection as Raffi contemplates the limits of control. The book highlights Raffi’s search for meaning and the tension between their desire for mastery and the impossibility of fully understanding the universe—or themselves. North's reflective, urgent tone evokes a sense of urgency, as if Raffi is chasing an unattainable truth that might free them from their overwhelming sense of inadequacy.

At the heart of In Universes is a deep exploration of queerness, identity, and belonging. As Raffi shifts through countless versions of their life, they grapple with the constraints of gender, the pain of fractured relationships, and the longing to find a place where they can be truly authentic. The novel’s fluidity of gender, especially Raffi’s transformation from a physicist to a watercolor painter and beyond, speaks to the desire to reinvent oneself in the face of a world that demands definitions. The multiverse serves as both a metaphor and a literal space where the past, present, and future intertwine, and where Raffi’s relationships hold the potential to unravel everything they thought they knew about themselves.

Though In Universes offers a compelling journey across worlds, it struggles with cohesion. The universe-hopping format leads to a lack of continuity, and Raffi’s evolving identity sometimes feels disjointed rather than transformative. While the narrative explores fascinating ideas about control and circumstance, the novella falters in knitting them all together, leaving a sense of unresolved longing that mirrors Raffi's own quest for meaning. Ultimately, this story is a meditation on the messiness of being human, where no amount of genius can replace the power found in embracing the chaos of existence.

📖 Read this if you love: introspective journeys through alternate realities, explorations of identity and self-discovery, and poetic prose that blends science with emotional vulnerability; stories about the fluidity of gender, queerness, and the complexities of relationships.

🔑 Key Themes: Identity and Transformation, The Intersection of Science and Emotion, The Multiverse and Self-Discovery, Gender Fluidity and Authenticity, Love and Vulnerability.

Content Warnings

Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health

Micha Frazer-Carroll

5.0

informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

“After all, what is the utility of 'sanity' or 'rationality, in a world in which ‘sanity' means the death of oppressed people and the planet, and 'rationality' means the logic of the market? In this climate, it is Madness that will help us burst beyond the 'rational' confines of the asylum, of the prison, of capitalism and individualism. As the world drives us increasingly Mad, it is crucial that we take Mad knowledge seriously, and acknowledge its imaginative potential.”

Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carroll is a searing indictment of the ways capitalism, the state, and carceral psychiatry conspire to control and pathologize Madness. Frazer-Carroll demands that we reject the dominant narratives of mental health as an individual pathology and instead recognize it as a site of collective struggle. Opening with a deeply personal reflection on her own experiences with anxiety and depersonalization, she frames the text with an urgent call to externalize and politicize our understandings of Madness. She argues that capitalism is not only a significant producer of suffering but that it requires and sustains itself on our dissociation and distress. Frazer-Carroll traces the history of psychiatric institutions, revealing how their rise was inextricably linked to industrialization, poor laws, and the need to sort bodies according to their perceived productivity.

The book is unrelenting in its critique of for-profit mental healthcare and the ways it obscures the root causes of distress. Frazer-Carroll exposes the failures of psychiatric science, probing the historical and political contingencies that have shaped mental health diagnoses. She dissects the DSM and the biological turn in psychiatry, demonstrating how they parallel the rise of neoliberalism, creating categories that serve capitalist interests rather than actual human needs. Throughout, she reminds us that mental illness is not merely a biomedical issue but one deeply entangled with racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, and colonialism.

Frazer-Carroll does not merely critique—she envisions alternative possibilities. She highlights the radical history of Mad liberation and disability justice, arguing for an expansive neurodiversity paradigm that resists the impulse to "fix" Madness. She documents the violence inflicted on Mad people through policing and incarceration, starkly illustrating how psychiatric wards function as carceral institutions and how state violence disproportionately targets Mad people of color. In a hopeful turn, she examines international models of care that reject coercion, including Italy’s abolition of psychiatric hospitals and the work of the Fireweed Collective.

Mad World is incisive, urgent, and radical. Frazer-Carroll’s writing is bold and uncompromising, balancing sharp political analysis with historical critique. She exposes the material realities behind psychiatric knowledge, dismantling the idea that mental health is an objective, measurable concept. Instead, she reframes Madness as a site of both oppression and resistance. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking to challenge the mainstream mental health discourse and imagine a future beyond the psychiatric-industrial complex. Mad pride forever 🖤

📖 Read this if you love: radical critiques of psychiatry, abolitionist approaches to mental health, and the works of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Johanna Hedva, or Beatrice Adler-Bolton.

🔑 Key Themes: Capitalism and Mental Health, Carceral Psychiatry and State Violence, Neurodiversity and Disability Justice, Community Care and Mad Liberation.

Content Warnings

Notes on Surviving the Fire

Christine Murphy

3.0

challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on March 27th, 2025 by Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor.

Christine Murphy’s Notes on Surviving the Fire is a novel that burns with righteous fury. It’s an indictment of institutions that fail survivors, meditating on anger, survival, and a tangled web of grief, betrayal, and systemic injustice. Through Sarah’s raw narration, Murphy immerses the reader in the unrelenting exhaustion of trauma and the impossibility of moving forward when the world refuses to hold abusers accountable.

Sarah’s story is not an easy one—assaulted by a fellow student and disbelieved by almost everyone except her best friend Nathan, she navigates a world where justice is a myth and bureaucracy is a barricade. She and Nathan, both former monastics, seek solace in each other and in substances, numbing themselves as Sarah fights to access therapy through a university more invested in protecting its reputation than its students. Nathan’s death, ruled an overdose, fractures what little stability she has left. But when Sarah starts piecing together the circumstances surrounding his death, she finds herself chasing a truth as grim as her own past—one that forces her to reexamine everything she thought she knew about him.

Murphy’s prose is unflinching, blending snarky, defiant interior monologue with searing social commentary. The novel is heavy with grief, rage, and exhaustion, painting a picture of a world where justice is a privilege, not a right. The institutional failures Sarah rails against—Title IX neglect, police indifference, economic inequity—are uncomfortably real, making her anger feel both personal and universal. But for all its thematic weight, the book stumbles under its own ambitions. There’s simply too much crammed in: California wildfires, Sarah’s childhood hunting lessons, her professor stealing her research, Nathan’s sister’s addiction—it’s a chaotic sprawl that never fully weaves together.

And then there’s the ending. The reveal of Nathan’s past lands with a thud, followed quickly by a second plot twist that feels more like shock for the sake of it than a meaningful conclusion. The novel asks whether redemption is possible, but its answer is muddled, buried beneath an ending that feels unnecessarily gruesome.

For all its ambition, Notes on Surviving the Fire didn’t work for me. Murphy’s writing is undeniably powerful, but the novel’s structure is too scattered, its twists too abrupt, its trauma too relentless without enough moments of respite. Some readers might find it cathartic—I just found it a bit tiring.

Content Warnings

The Unworthy

Agustina Bazterrica

4.5

dark 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: No

"The truth is a sphere. We never see it whole, in its entirety. It slips down our throats, through our thoughts. The truth is changeable, it contracts, implodes, it’s powerful like a bullet. And it can be lethal."

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book is out now in the US.

Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy is a fever dream of religious horror, a novella that burns with lyrical brutality. Told through the secret writings of an unnamed narrator, it unspools a world where faith is both refuge and terror, where women are categorized and mutilated in pursuit of divine purity, and where memory itself is a battleground. The House of the Sacred Sisterhood, ostensibly a sanctuary in the wake of an apocalyptic event, functions as a site of rigid religious hierarchy and grotesque violence. The narrator, desperate to be deemed worthy, documents her existence in stolen moments of defiance, her words pulsing with urgency, loss, and a fragile hope.

Bazterrica’s prose is hypnotic, swinging between fragmented recollection and poetic horror. The novel cultivates a suffocating, cult-like atmosphere, where belief is survival and doubt is a death sentence. The mantra—“Without faith, there is no refuge”—reverberates throughout, a chilling encapsulation of the Sisterhood’s philosophy. The narrator, classified as Unworthy, longs to ascend to the status of the Enlightened, fearing the disfigurement imposed on the Chosen. But as she uncovers the Sisterhood’s horrors

—including the sanctioned rape of the Enlightened—

her faith fractures, and love becomes the catalyst for her ultimate act of rebellion.

The novella’s thematic weight is staggering, grappling with religious trauma, authoritarianism, and the erasure of self under oppression. Women’s bodies are controlled and punished, their autonomy sacrificed to an unnamed man’s divine decree and the Superior Sister’s ruthless enforcement. Language and memory are wielded as tools of both control and resistance; in writing, the narrator reclaims what has been stolen from her. The text pulses with questions of truth—what is real, what is myth, and how does faith warp perception?

Despite its bleakness, The Unworthy is not without tenderness. The narrator’s growing attachment to Lucía, a woman who enters the Sisterhood and quickly becomes a source of fascination and longing, injects the story with a quiet, aching intimacy. Their relationship is fleeting yet profound, an ember of humanity in an otherwise barren landscape. In the end, the narrator’s sacrifice is not just for Lucía’s survival but for the preservation of truth, her words a final act of defiance against oblivion.

This novella is eerie, reflective, and beautifully sapphic. Not everything makes sense, nor does it need to—its power lies in its atmosphere, its language, its ability to unsettle. Read it in one sitting, if you can, and let it haunt you.

📖 Read this if you love: religious horror, cult narratives, and feminist dystopias; I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.

🔑 Key Themes: Religious Trauma and Control, Memory and Identity, Faith as Manipulation, Queerness and Forbidden Desire.

Content Warnings

The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar

4.75

emotional 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: No

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

Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is a spellbinding novella steeped in the alchemy of language and transformation. At its heart is the River Liss, running north to south, its waters brimming with “grams”—linguistic fragments that can be conjured into magic. Within this world of mutable meaning and shifting forms, sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn care for the willow trees on their family’s land, singing to them in gratitude for their grammar. Esther, sharp-minded and drawn to riddles, is endlessly fascinated by Arcadia—a mystical city beyond a veil—while Ysabel, tender-hearted and poetic, fears the unknown it represents. Their bond is one of deep devotion, even as their perspectives on change threaten to pull them in opposite directions.

El-Mohtar’s prose is exquisite, layered with intricate metaphors that weave seamlessly into the novel’s thematic core. Magic here is not just spoken but conjugated and transformed, illuminating a world where the structure of language dictates the shape of reality itself. The novel’s central tension—between the fixed and the fluid, the named and the nameless—is mirrored in the sisters’ relationship, as well as in Esther’s love for Rin, a nonbinary shape-shifter from Arcadia.

The narrative unfolds with an immersive sense of wonder, carrying readers like the River Liss itself—ever-shifting, never stagnant. The story’s resolution, while poignant, arrives perhaps too swiftly; I found myself wishing for just a little more time in its luminous world. Still, The River Has Roots is a stunning meditation on language, love, and the transformative power of both. El-Mohtar crafts a tale that reshapes itself in the reader’s mind long after the book is closed, much like the grammar that bends the reality of Arcadia.

📖 Read this if you love: Lush, language-driven fantasy, stories of sisterhood and devotion, and folklore-infused worldbuilding.

🔑 Key Themes: Language as Magic, Transformation and Change, Family and Inheritance, The Tension Between Stability and Freedom.

Content Warnings

Calling In

Loretta J. Ross

5.0

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

"We can skip the viral shaming and reputational warfare. We can skip the ideological litmus tests that don’t help to build a diverse coalition. Whether persuading another individual or launching an entire cultural movement, real change requires bringing people in."

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was released in the US on February 4th, 2025 by Simon and Schuster.

There’s a moment in Calling In that I can’t forget—when Loretta J. Ross, a rape crisis counselor and survivor herself, receives a letter from a group of incarcerated men asking how not to be rapists. Instead of turning away, she leans in, choosing solidarity over punishment. This choice—to build rather than burn—is at the heart of Ross’s argument: real change requires engagement, not exile.

Drawing from over 50 years of activism, Ross interrogates the limits of call-out culture and the punitive impulses that often fracture movements from within. She examines why we feel the need to be right and how that impulse can stifle growth, warning against the weaponization of power in call-outs—especially when rooted in assumptions of guilt. Yet, this isn’t a book about passivity. Ross doesn’t suggest avoiding confrontation, but rather, being strategic with it. Calling in, she argues, is not about coddling—it’s about choosing to wield power with compassion, to guide rather than discard, to de-escalate instead of humiliate.

Ross grounds her theory in lived experience. Her work deprogramming Floyd Cochran, a former Aryan Nations leader, demonstrates how seeing someone’s perspective—without endorsing it—can be the first step in bringing them over to ours. She also explores how to “kill the cop in your head,” pushing readers to unlearn internalized policing and embrace mistakes as part of the learning process. Throughout, she offers tangible strategies for creating a call-in culture, whether in friendships, workplaces, activist spaces, or moments of personal reckoning.

Her writing is incisive yet deeply compassionate, blending social analysis with hard-earned wisdom. She challenges the notion that ideological purity strengthens movements, arguing instead that shame-driven activism weakens solidarity. Calling In is ultimately a call to resist not just external oppression, but the punitive mindsets that keep us from truly building together. If justice is the goal, Ross reminds us, then grace must be part of the path. For those seeking a less punitive, more transformative way to address harm, this book is absolutely essential.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist approaches to justice, movement-building rooted in care, and the works of Mariame Kaba and adrienne maree brown.

🔑 Key Themes: Accountability vs. Punishment, The Ethics of Conflict, Power and Solidarity, Transformative Justice in Activism.

Content Warnings

Fragments of Wasted Devotion

Mia Arias Tsang

5.0

dark emotional reflective fast-paced

“I curl into myself and I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask ‘is there anything left to give’ and it howls ‘yes yes yes forever.’”

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book was released in the US on February 6th, 2025 by Quilted Press.

Mia Arias Tsang’s Fragments of Wasted Devotion is a blistering and tender exploration of love, loss, and the self that emerges from the wreckage. In this beautifully splintered collection, Tsang takes us through a series of almost-loves and broken promises, charting a journey that mirrors the haunting rhythms of queer heartbreak. With each vignette, she unearths the quiet devastation that appears even before the final break, capturing that liminal space where desire and pain collide.

Tsang’s writing is raw and confessional, laced with a vulnerability that cuts deep. Her prose often feels like a series of erupting reflections—each phrase, each sentence, like a glimmer of something real, something too raw to ignore. She has a way of making even the most fleeting moments of heartbreak feel monumental, wrapping us in the melancholy of unfinished connections. A key theme is the cyclical nature of love: the way it can start so brightly only to fade into something unrecognizable, or worse, something that never truly existed in the first place. There’s a fierce clarity in her exploration of queerness, self-worth, and the painful realization that not all love is reciprocal. As you read about Tsang’s heart breaking over and over again, so will yours.

The collection’s brilliance lies in how Tsang intertwines her personal journey with the wider resonances of queer experience. Her story is one of self-discovery, not in the sense of finding new parts of herself, but in unlearning the idea that she was ever broken. The music of boygenius, MUNA, and Mitski echoes throughout, adding an emotional soundtrack to her pain and self-realization. These essays remind us of the quiet violence of unreciprocated love and the resilience needed to break free from it.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is for anyone who has been consumed by a love they knew would hurt them, anyone who has given too much of themselves to something that was never meant to last. It is a visceral, poetic reckoning with the fragility of love, and the promise of healing that comes when we finally stop looking outside ourselves to feel whole. Thank you, Mia - you are the bravest.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, confessional writing about queer heartbreak, self-discovery, and the complexities of love; introspective essays with a poetic, fragmented style; the works of Ocean Vuong or Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer Identity and Self-Worth, Unrequited and Dysfunctional Love, Emotional Vulnerability and Healing, The Cyclical Nature of Heartbreak, Resilience and Self-Acceptance.

Content Warnings

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