A sweet and touching middle grade story about grief and queer self discovery, as well as dealing with topics of friendship, financial instability and ghost hunting.
The story follows 11 year old Bug, whose Uncle just died and whose hause is haunted, as Bug tries to figure out how to cope with the grief and to understand what the new ghost wants to communicate. And why can Bug only ever see ghosts when Bug looks in a mirror?
The writing is good and intruiging and I loved the plot of self-discovery and the examination of how such well-meant sentences such as "just be yourself" can be really hard to deal with when you don't know who you are yet. I also really enjoyed the descriptions of gender dysphoria and grief, but also the complicated friendship between Moira and Bug, who only stayed friends because their parents work together.
All in all a good book that I would recommend to middle schoolers who enjoy slow character focussed stories.

A cute but short comic about claiming your identity and about grief. This novel follows a reanimated corpse, who is told that she is Maura, a scientist's sister, but she doesn't have any memories of being Maura and is in fact pretty sure she's her own being. When Maura's ghost appears to her in a mirror, she is sure of it and has to decide how to proceed.
The novel deals with topics of grief, conformity to stay safe and being yourself and is a fresh and interesting Frankenstein-inspired story. The artstyle is cute and the character designs distinct. I really enjoyed reading it and I also liked the nonbinary representation in a side character.

This book is a queer feminist retelling featuring two of Lovecraft's female characters and giving them a much more interesting storyline. It should be right up my alley, but unfortunately it wasn't.
My first issue was that I somehow missed that this was based on Lovecraft's work. Since I am not super familiar with his lore and pretty much only know it from a variety of Call of Cuthulu games and the podcast Malevolent I spent quite some time confused what the exact world building was about (I guessed it once Arkham was brought up and I googled the women, which helped). Once I realized it was Lovecraft inspired I did feel a bit stupid since it does mentioned "the Outer Gods" on the cover (which should have been a sign tbh), but realizing that earlier might have made my experience a more enjoyable one. I also feel like the retelling aspects will be a struggle for people who have never engaged in anything lovecraftian as it is not really explained in the text itself. My second issue with the text is that the first half of it was a slog to get through. It is written in an epistolary manner, switches between perspectives and rarely names the characters except for in the beginning of the chapters, which made it incredibly hard to follow the story in the beginning. I found myself having to backtrack a lot for the first 30% just to make sure I'm connecting the right stories. Plus the writing style is a bit over the top flowery for me at points, which also made it hard to follow the story and it does not vary between perspectives. I think sticking to just one perspective might have improved my reading experience a lot.
However, once the transformation started and I managed to get into the flow of the story and the writing and knew the two characters well enough to see which plotline we were currently following, I devoured this part with great pleasure. It is scary, it is gothic, the horror is cosmic and it's about healing from trauma and learning to trust and allow yourself to love. Touching and fucked up in the best of ways. I definitely think that if you can handle flowery and ornate prose better than I can and if you know a bit more about lovecraft, you will enjoy this even more than I did.

TW (also provided in the book): past incestous sexual abuse between father and daughter (the act is described once, but not in a lot of detail), past rape (again, not a lot of detail, but it is described), past traumatic pregnancy, body horror, emetophobia, body dysmorphia, ableism towards people with albinism, mentions of suicide ideation.

This felt a bit like asoiaf but if it was set in a christian small town and tried to be more lyrical. I enjoyed the initial world building and particularly the writing style a lot. Unfortunately the constant "woman experiences massive trauma and abuse and then she dies" and "everybody is a bastard" and "pretty much every woman experiences sexual trauma but doesn't get to have a single feeling about it besides powerless disgust" made my reading experience uhhhh bad. In general it is just bleak and bad things happen because everybody is a bad person and that is not the type of story I enjoy.
TW: ableism, murder, graphic sexual assault, past + current attempted sexual assault of a child, attempted incest (adult son attempts to suckle from his mother), abuse (parental, domestic, child), gore, self harm, violence, cannibalism, animal cruelty, miscarriage, suicidal thoughts

I really enjoyed the book. Some parts seemed kinda streched out, but it was good. It is kinda disappointing that there are two books wedged into one and they don't meet, but i guess that will happen during the next two books. I enjoyed both stories a lot and I am interested to read how this will work out when their (very different) worlds collide.

Update on my reread now in 2024 (og review from 2016):
I still enjoy the world building but am no longer as enamored with the story as I used to be. It drags on a bit, especially with the two seperate stories and I found myself bored at times. I'm still excited to keep my reread going, but im lowering my rating.

This collection of YA queer horror by authors of color was something I was very much looking forward to and I definitely found myself enjoying it. If you enjoy your horror on the "milder" side, often tempered with a cute romance and featuring teen protagonists you will definitely enjoy this a bit more than I did though. I found it great to read a diverse anthology (of course especially the cultural and racial diversity was great!), however I want to point out that this is another queer anthology that features two glaring omissions: There are no trans women or asexual or aromantic characters featured in any of the short stories. In fact most stories feature lesbians/bisexual women, three gay/bisexual men, two feature a nonbinary character (Nine Stops & A Brief Intermission - both are explicitely stated as afab) and only one features a trans man (Leyla Mendoza and the Last Home on the Lane). And if I'm being completely honest I don't think that's a good look for an anthology that markets itself as diverse to have important parts of the community just missing. Trans girls of color and asexual and aromantic PoC need and deserve rep too.
My favorite short stories here were "The Visitor" by Kalynn Bayron, about a familial halloween celebration with a horrifying reason and a really spooky end, "Guested" by Rebecca Kim Wells, about a sister desperate to get her real sister back after she comes back wrong from a "Guested" party and "Nine Stops" by Trang Thanh Tran about a haunting viral video with a grisly end. I enjoyed most of the other stories as well and would rate nothing here under 3 stars, which is not something I see very often in anthologies. As I already said above I tend to enjoy my horror more on the darker side and that is also visible in the stories I enjoyed most, but I want to point out that there are also quite a few relatively sweet stories with varying levels of scares, some buzzfeed unsolved references, adorable romances, loving recognition of the self in the scary wizard in the end of the street, family drama and sometimes also dealing with the real-life horrors of being queer and a person of color. All in all, I would recommend this collection to a younger audience or those who want a cute queer introduction to horror.