Thanks to Riverhead Books for the free advance copy of this book. 

✨MINI REVIEW✨ 

What I liked:
📚 The prose is clear and delicate
📚 A close look at the complicated relationships we have with our parents as adults
📚 I've never been to Houston, but I could feel the city in this book
📚 Not all queer relationships are happy and safe, and as painful as Mike and Benson's relationship sometimes was, I'm glad the queer canon is broadening
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What I didn't like:
📚 Speaking of painful relationship, I do wish the characters had acknowledged the mutual abuse a little more directly. It would have been a very different book, then, though
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Content warnings: domestic abuse, cancer, death, racism, homophobia. 📚

 Bea is a popular plus size fashion blogger who, after years of pining after her best guy friend, has sworn off dating altogether. One night, after her weekly viewing of Main Squeeze, Bea drunkenly posts a rant about her favorite show, calling it out for its lack of diversity, especially when it comes to body type. Her piece goes mega-viral, and suddenly the producer of Main Squeeze is on the phone - would Bea like to be the next star of the show?
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ONE TO WATCH is both a love letter to and hate mail for The Bachelor, which is exactly where I find my own feelings about the show. I love it, I hate it, I wish it would do better in terms of race, sexuality, gender, size, and on and on. This book tackles a lot of that (I do wish it had done more around race, I kept entirely forgetting that one of the suitors was supposed to be Black) and with Main Squeeze making this pivot in the book, I very nearly got the version of The Bachelor that I wish existed.
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It also covered the publicity machine around the show - everything from online articles to transcripts of podcasts discussing episodes - in a way that I think is probably pretty close to how things would actually play out if The Bachelor cast a woman of size as the lead. Additionally, I was totally surprised by a few of the plot twists - not easy to pull off when your readers are probably Bachelor devotees who know all the tricks! The one thing about this book that I would say was not true to life was that Bea has thoughtful conversations of substance with her suitors!
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Content warnings: fatphobia, body dysmorphia, misogyny, sexual assault, doxxing, cheating, parental abandonment. 

Thanks to Books Forward PR for the free advance copy of this book. 

Rachel is a human from a different dimension. She travels to ours for her job as a daemon collector - picking up malfunctioning daemons (invisible creatures that tempt humans to steal, kiss, riot, etc.) for repair. Today, though, she's been assigned the job of tracking down a dangerous person who is trying to break the barriers between dimensions, and everything goes haywire. 

Wow, what a fun book! I loved the world built here, it's so clever and unique, and shown to us so clearly in just barely 200 pages. Rachel is a fantastic character - sharp and prickly, but with a good heart. GATEKEEPER also touches on a number of social issues, ranging from women not being taken seriously at work to the difficulty Black Americans have tracing their ancestry due to slavery.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this universe expands in the next book, since there’s obviously more coming with the way it ended. Also, I hope there's more of the daemon who likes to wear a coat, it was so cute! 

Content warnings: sexism, racism (including slurs), kidnapping, attempted murder.

Gloss was the biggest pop group of the millennium - bigger than Britney, bigger than the Spice Girls. But despite their global fame, inside the group, things weren't all glitter and rainbows. And now, 15 years later, Gloss girl Cassidy Holmes is dead. Her former bandmates look back over their years together and apart, trying to see what they missed, and why Cassidy ended her life.

THE UNRAVELING OF CASSIDY HOLMES is, yes, part pop nostalgia, part Behind the Music episode. But it's also so much more than that. It's an examination of the cost of fame, of the mental strain of endless microaggressions, and the many ways talented young women are taken advantage of.

We get Cassidy's point of view from the past, as Gloss is born and rises to stardom. We get the view of her groupmates from the present, revisiting their former life and the choices they made there. I felt deeply for each of them, for different reasons. I wanted so badly for things to work out and for the women to find kinship and support in each other, but it's right there in the title - it's an unraveling, for all of them.

Content warnings: suicide, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, misogyny, racism, Asian fetishism, stalkers, homophobia, substance abuse, sexual harassment and assault, rape.

Thanks to William Morrow Books for the free advance copy of this book.

In 1902 at the Brookhants School for Girls, a group of young women become obsessed with the published journals of Mary MacLane, a scandalous book in which she confesses to sapphic tendencies, and where the girls see themselves reflected. After creating the Plain Bad Heroine Society, though, two of them die a horrific death on school grounds - the first in a series of terrible deaths. A century later, a famed horror film director is making a movie about the story, starring the hottest it girl celesbian. But the curse of Brookhants seems to be following them now...or is it? 

Whew, PLAIN BAD HEROINES is hard to sum up - it's a series of nested stories that all feed on each other, with recurring imagery and old bloodlines and perpetual questions about what is real and what is staged. And I loved it. 

It's one of those rare books where I'm equally invested in each set of characters, and there are several sets of women we follow in this book. Some scenes had my skin crawling, others had me laughing and reading passages out loud to my partner. And on top of all that, it's queer, so queer! Generations of women loving women and they all felt real to me. Don't let the fact that this book is 600+ pages deter you - sinking into the world of Brookhants was a fully engulfing experience and I didn't want it to be over. 

Content warnings: homophobia, death, murder, wasps, sexual assault, institutionalization. 

Thanks to Penguin Random House for the free copy of this book.

CARRY is a memoir in essays by Toni Jensen, a Métis woman from the Midwest who later traveled all over the country as a journalist and professor. The book tracks scenes from her life alongside this country's epidemic of gun violence, and how the personal and the national stories collide. 

CARRY is one of the timeliest books I've ever read, and one of the starkest. The prose in this book is blunt, to the point. No time to waste when we've already lost so much. Jensen draws lines between colonization, masculinity, abusers, gun access and more, showing readers the complicated reasons for the unending violence we see every day. 

Jensen makes clear that this is a specifically Métis story but also the story of anyone who lives in the United States. Her background plays into her own experiences, but these experiences are not limited to her community, only magnified there due to the parallel violence of colonization and its many long-lasting effects. 

At times the writing feels disjointed as Jensen jumps back and forth in time and between various locations. However, I think it ultimately ended up adding to the sense that domestic abuse and gun violence are pervasive problems, outgrowths of so many factors and impossible to separate from the fabric of American life. 

Content warnings: physical and emotional abuse, gun violence, police brutality, human trafficking, sexual harassment and assault, rape, child abuse, animal abuse, murder, suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse, racism, bigotry, and more.