Author: Patricia Elzie

This is a queer young adult anthology and I rarely say this about anthologies but, every single story in this collection is a winner. It was thoughtfully put together and features a racially diverse range of characters that are multiple different flavors of queer. It also includes a wide range of genre representation, which I appreciate.

There’s a vampire story titled, “What Happens in the Closet” by Caleb Roehrig that had me literally laughing out loud because of how awful the vampires are (and it’s not because of the violence). The same story made me cringe because of the awkwardness of being a teen, the awkwardness of being gay, and the combined awkwardness of being a teen who is gay.

Another story that has a nice balance is titled “Lumber Me Mine” by CB Lee. It has the rawness of a fresh breakup out of a toxic relationship with a person who is incredibly manipulative but then it also has a super swoon-worthy girl our lead character meets in Woodshop class. She’s only in Woodshop because she is avoiding the Nutrition and Household Planning class since that’s where her ex will be. I don’t want to give too much away but I really enjoyed this story.

One of my absolute favorite stories in this whole book is “Victory Lap” by Julian Winters. It is so sweet and I absolutely cried multiple times which is silly because it’s a short story! I would cry on one page, be fine for the next, and then start crying all over again a paragraph later. Luke Stone, our protagonist, is looking for a prom date with the help of his friends. We learn that Luke recently quit the cross country team to help his dad out more at his dad’s well-known barber shop. We also learn that Luke’s mother had passed away and also that Luke hasn’t come out to his dad yet. This story could totally be a recipe for disaster but it is filled with so much goofy dad goodness and I have a soft spot in my heart for dad jokes as well as for really good dads.

One of the many things I appreciate about this collection is that the characters are also all along different points in their queer journeys. Some are already well-established in their identities and some are figuring things out still and some figure things out by the end of the story and some don’t and that’s okay. There’s so much more in this anthology as well. A story that features LSD, a story including a few Greek gods, a story featuring a kitchen witch which is also another one of my most favorites in this book. Aliens! Selkies! Dystopian futures! A super fun read that has something for everyone.

Rebekah Taussig tells very personal stories and through them, teaches readers so much about her experience as a person who uses a wheelchair and about ableism and how ableism punishes all of us. The author does not pull punches when she writes about how awful people can be. She breaks down a lot of really crap behavior in films and television, such as when a character with a disability has that dream sequence where they suddenly don’t have that disability anymore which is based on the audacious assumption that all people with disabilities would be happier without them. There is also the common thinking that they would do anything to get rid of them, even evil things. I’m looking at you, Detective Pikachu.

She also tears into “inspiration porn” such as the promposals of the captain of the football team asking the disabled girl in class to prom. “Inspiration porn” is a term for using disabled people as props for videos for likes and clicks because “everyone” wants to see the heartwarming videos of these heroic people being so heroically kind. The rest of that chapter is absolute fire as well. Kindness is complicated and this book makes readers take a step back and think about acts of kindness and when they are actually selfish acts versus when they are something someone actually needs. Taussig gives the example of seeing a person using a wheelchair trying to reach a napkin from a pile of napkins on a high counter. The world doesn’t need the sort of kindness of another person handing them a single napkin. We need someone who will move the whole pile of napkins to a place where they are accessible to everyone all the time.

The author talks about how she was around a group of women and they were talking about experiences that are assumed universal experiences for women, such as catcalling or being told to smile; however, the author hadn’t because what, she’s less of a woman? Because the assumption that a person in a wheelchair has no reason to smile? This is not the author saying all women deserve to be harassed but what she is saying is that we really need to think about all women when we start to assume things about all women.

In another chapter I really appreciated she writes about the capitalist equation that hours + production + wages = value but when a person is disabled, their production amount might be different, the hours you can work might be different, and the wages you’re getting paid are likely to be different which, in a capitalist society, means they are valued less.

This book was thoughtful, enraging, and an absolutely essential read.

In this time-travel historical fiction, Kiku imagines herself as a teen. She and her mother are visiting San Francisco from Seattle. They go to Japantown to try to find the home where Kiku’s Japanese American grandmother and her parents lived in the city before they were forced into an incarceration camp during World War II. We learn that Kiku and her mother don’t really talk about Kiku’s grandparents or her mother’s upbringing much. Her grandmother passed before she was born and she never got to know her. Kiku knows very little about her grandmother’s experiences.

At one point, Kiku’s mother goes into the mall and Kiku gets sucked back into time for the first time. She describes it as “displaced.” Once she gets her bearings, she realizes she is seeing someone who might have been her grandmother, having a violin recital. She is able to look around briefly before being shoved back into the present. Kiku gets displaced another couple of times, again, back in time to her grandmother’s experiences. Kiku ends up being in the same incarceration camp as her grandmother, age 17, and great-grandparents. Kiku quickly realizes that there is so much she didn’t know about this completely heinous act by the U.S. government and she is learning it all firsthand.

Personally, I learned nothing about this in school. The only reason I knew about the Japanese incarceration camps is because my grandmother’s half-sister was forced into one. If a person was 1/16th Japanese or more, they were forced into a camp. My family was also in San Francisco and I wonder if they were sent to the same camp as Kiku’s family. As Kiku explores, she learns there is so much shame around what happened, especially by the people who experienced it and it doesn’t get talked about in many families nor taught in schools.

I had no idea that people protested within some of the camps and that some folks refused to sign paperwork that said they would join the U.S. military. I didn’t know that there were a lot of differences of opinion between the older generations who immigrated from Japan and the younger generations who were born in the U.S. Reading this was enraging on so many levels, from the fact that this happened, to the fact that this kind of awfulness continues to happen in different ways to different groups by this same government, and the fact that most of us were taught so little about it. This graphic novel is so important and a great read.

For folks who are socially — and/or environmentally — minded, trying to “do the right thing” is a never ending battle and it is really easy to fall into despair from overwhelm and hopelessness. While major changes need to be made via policies and business practices, this book gives readers some insight as to how we can each be consumers more mindfully and in ways that do the least amount of harm.

Fair warning, this book may tell you a lot of things that you don’t want to hear, like how much of what you put into your recycling bins doesn’t actually get recycled and goes into landfills. This is also true for items that are donated to thrift shops. While the primary advice is to consume less, that is, to buy fewer disposable items and to reuse what you already own, the author recognizes that it is impossible for most if not all of us to live a zero-waste lifestyle. Such a lifestyle is not what the author is promoting anyway and that’s what I appreciate about this book. We are in a capitalist society and so, how do we make decisions that do the least amount of harm while also remaining realistic for us to do as individuals?

The answers to how we consume are going to be different for each of us and this book offers resources for us to make the most informed choices. Is being vegan actually better for the environment? What if I can’t avoid fast fashion? Is buying organic important in the grand scheme of things? Am I causing harm by buying things from large department stores or multi-billion dollar websites? Is the bank I use evil? This book helps readers tease out the often complicated answers to these questions and more while giving us additional questions to ask ourselves when we make decisions about how we spend (or give) our money.

While so many folks are very heavy-handed and “black and white” about these things, this book does an excellent job of exploring the grey areas to help us each make decisions that we can feel good about.

The first chapter starts with the time of day and a date: November 17, 1929. Seattle, Washington. Each subsequent chapter of the book starts with a date in relation to that first date of November 17th, for example, “October 6, 1929, six weeks before” or “November 14, 1929, three days before.” The chapters are not in chronological order which makes this puzzle a very exciting one to piece together.

So we have Seattle, prohibition, and magic. There are different types of magic such as plant magics and elemental magics. There are also shapeshifters, like werewolves but some people shift into animals other than wolves.

Ambrose Earnshaw is Seattle’s Commissioner of Magi. They are not the Seattle police department though unsurprisingly, they work closely together. The Magi Commission purportedly keeps magic-users in line. Ambrose is a very wealthy man and when we meet him, he is interviewing a handler for his adult daughter, Fiona. The woman he is interviewing is Dolly White, who doesn’t have any magical abilities but she knows her way around potions and she went to a nice finishing school. Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Fiona frequents a speakeasy owned by a Black woman. Fiona drinks way more than her father would like and she is also addicted to a drug she adds to her alcohol they call “shimmer-shim,” “shim” for short. Fiona is supposed to be married to a fine upstanding young man and she is off galavanting, jazz and gin and so on, so Mr. Earnshaw hires Dolly to keep Fiona in line, off drugs and booze, and definitely away from that speakeasy.

Ambrose Earnshaw has a son as well, Francis. Francis is incredibly creepy and he’s known for assaulting women. The family knows it and pays to keep the victims and the victims’ families quiet. Meanwhile, we have Violet Solomon, who owns Violet’s Hat Shop, the speakeasy that Fiona frequents. Violet’s brother is a shapeshifter and shapeshifters are looked down upon usually but now it seems like shapeshifters in the area are in a lot of danger.

I legitimately had a wonderful time reading this book and it’s a fairly fast read, too!

This book is an immersive fantasy with a lot of violence that I just couldn’t put down. It’s told in the first person by Deka, a 16 year old girl who lost her mother to a disease three months prior to the beginning of this book. She lives in a small village with her father. It’s important to note that Deka’s mother was not from the village and had deep brown skin. Deka too, has brown skin while her father has light skin, blond hair, and gray eyes and because of this, the town hasn’t been incredibly kind to Deka. The town is also very religious, pulling their rules and morality from a book called the Infinite Wisdoms and a god they refer to as the Infinite Father, Oyomo. Surprising no one, the vibe is ultra-patriarchal and misogynistic.

The book begins on the day of the Ritual of Purity. All 16 year old girls in the village need to go through the Ritual of Purity. Once a girl is proven pure, she is considered a full citizen of the village and is eligible to marry and have a family of her own. The Ritual of Purity itself involves a priest non-fatally slicing each girl’s skin with a blade. If her blood runs red, she is considered pure and passes the ritual; however, if her blood runs gold, that is an entirely different thing altogether.

Before it is her turn in the temple, Deka feels a few moments of foreboding before the village is attacked by large murderous beasts that could kill a person with a single scream. A huge bloody fight ensues and in a moment of terror and desperation, Deka yells for the monsters to stop and they do, before leaving entirely. The people of the town are freaked out by this, her own father calls her a demon, and someone tries to run her through with a sword. She does not bleed red and they lock her up.

After weeks of torture, a foreign woman shows up to offer Deka a choice: to either finally die, or to join the Emperor’s elite force of fighters he is creating. This woman has all kinds of information about what Deka is and she would be taking Deka to a combat school where she would meet other girls like herself. At the end of her military service, she would gain purity.

This was such an exciting read that kept me on my toes and definitely caught me by surprise more than once.

This book specifically takes place on the Virgin Islands when they were occupied by Denmark and the islanders were enslaved. It’s told through not only the present time of the book, but also through flashbacks and dreams and hallucinations.

It begins when our main character, Sigourney Rose, was a child. She is an islander and her family is the only, or one of the only, Black families that owns a plantation and has enslaved people. Her mother has promised that she will free people and many of the islanders held her in some kind of esteem. Since she was Black, of course, all the other kongelieg (which translates to “royalty” and basically means the slave-holders) hate her. In fact, the very beginning of this book is a flashback. As I mentioned, Sigourney is a child. Her mother, brother, and sister are ambushed at their own home during a party and murdered. Sigourney manages to escape, as all the enslaved and even other kongelieg at the party were also murdered.

After her escape, Sigourney was rescued by a servant who was basically on standby and waiting for something like this. Sigourney falls under the care of a relative who is also kongelieg. She changes her last name to her relative’s, and is no longer Sigourney Rose but Sigourney Lund. She spends the next many years planning her revenge on her fellow kongelieg and she finally gets an invitation to the King’s island to spend the storm season with the other kongelieg. The king is supposed to choose his successor at the end of this storm season and the kongelieg are not above killing each other. There is a lot of murder that happens in this book. At first I thought it was going to be a bit of a Hunger Games vibe but it is well beyond that.

The other very important thing you have to know about this world is that some people have supernatural powers, referred to as having craft or possessing craft. If an islander is found to have craft, they are executed. If the fjern, that is, any white people, have craft, they say it is a divine gift. Sigourney, an islander but also kongelieg, is not executed for her craft and she most definitely has craft. She can read minds and not only that, but she can control minds as well.

This book was such a wild ride and is the first in a complete duology. Content warnings for anti-Black racism and many types of violence.

Many people have really strong opinions about creative advice, regardless of the type of project. Some folks have advice that they swear by. Create daily, build a habit, etc. Other folks have the opinion that being creative is so unique to each individual that all advice, in essence, is incredibly unhelpful at best and flat out bad at worst. Personally, I apply a some/many/most framework. Some people think creative advice is useless. Many people find value in creative advice. Most people can usually find at least one thing of value in a pile of creative advice. This is why I tend to read books about creativity. I don’t expect that every single thing in the book will be inspirational to me but I expect to find at least a few things that I can identify with and apply to my own writing, music, cooking, etc.

Creative Quest by Amir Thompson (AKA Questlove) likely has a bit of something for everyone. Questlove is the co-founder of the music group The Roots (which is also the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon). Questlove is a drummer, a DJ, an author, a culinary entrepreneur, a designer, and more. This man does not stop.

A warning about this book which was written a few years ago, he does use a couple of comedians as creativity examples (one of the comedians is a transphobe, the other is a rapist). Otherwise, I enjoyed this book! He not only gives advice on being a creative, but he also explores what creativity means, how different people may define it, and has some great discussions on creativity inspired by other creative works.

One thing he talks about that I don’t read enough of in such advice books is the importance (for some people) of being an apprentice or having a mentor. A lot of people can benefit from that kind of relationship and there is always such an emphasis on doing things on your own when having a creative community is important because nothing happens in a vacuum. Related is another idea he talks about, which is cultivating a network. Something Questlove spends a lot of time talking about is curation. Curation as an important part of the creative process and curation as creativity itself. I’m inspired to read that section again because there was a lot of good stuff in it.

I do want to note that there is definitely music used throughout the audiobook which can be an absolute cacophony of sound if you turn the speed up on your audiobook players like I do.

This book is pretty high-intensity from start to finish and I could not put it down. Some content warnings up front for death of a spouse, suicidal ideation, violence against women, and death of a child. Some readers are hesitant to call this book a romance but I disagree. It’s gritty, real, and ugly sometimes but it also has some very important hallmarks of what makes a romance a romance.

Our heroine is Feyi Adekola. Five years prior to this story, there was an accident that killed her husband. She has been deep in grief and it shows in her art. Feyi and her best friend Joy live in New York and at the start of this story, Feyi decides that she is ready to have sex again, not for love, but she is ready to allow someone to give her physical pleasure. She has sex with a guy at a rooftop party and they date for a while but it doesn’t get very serious. They part amicably and Feyi meets someone else: one of this guy’s friends, Nasir. Nasir is perfect and he doesn’t rush her. He agrees to be friends, though he clearly wants more. He is patient and adoring and they grow a beautiful friendship.

Nasir is from Jamaica and he gets her a spot in a show at the National museum with a curator that Feyi has only dreamed about working with. He takes her to Jamaica and they stay with his father, Alim Blake, a celebrity chef with two Michelin stars. He had a gorgeous home built up on the mountain and Feyi is both star-struck and awestruck at the amount of luxury.

Feyi is putting everything in jeopardy because the minute she spotted Alim picking them up at the airport, she knew there would be trouble because he’s radiant in a way that makes everything and everyone want to orbit around him. She’s going to be in Jamaica for many weeks, in this beautiful, intriguing person’s home, trying desperately not to ruin everything she is trying to build with Nasir because she is absolutely smitten with his father.

Aside from consistent high-intensity lust, grief is always present in this book in some way and even in the chapters full of lust or love or beauty, grief is always right there. I think it’s brilliant to juxtapose these very high highs with the heart shattering lows and it makes the love even more beautiful, the sex sexier, and the sadness almost unbearable. By the end of this book I was rooting for so many of the characters to find love and healing and life in ways they had not been able to for a long time.

Anna Sale is the host of the Death, Sex, and Money podcast and this book is an extension of that show. Sale wants us to have those conversations that we are avoiding, sometimes even for years. As you can imagine, content warnings for a bunch of hard things, especially around death including infant death.

The author’s argument is that we all go through these particular hard things and by avoiding the conversations that could actually help us and our relationships, we end up isolating ourselves and maybe even making things harder to deal with than they already are. The book is divided into five big buckets of “hard things” by chapter: Death, Sex, Money, Family, and Identity.

The bulk of the book is actually stories upon stories not only about the author but folks she has interviewed for the Death, Sex, and Money podcast about the hard conversations they’ve had in their lives or that they wish they had in their lives and how that experience of having (or not having) the conversation has affected them. In the introduction and at the end of each chapter, which, again, is full of stories, Sale offers up what she has learned about how to have such conversations. She does such a phenomenal job of acknowledging not only that these conversations are hard but also how they are hard and then the importance of having them anyway.

Personally, I am remarkable at avoiding conversations, especially around and with family as well as conversations around death. One quote in the book was, “Family is where we tend to lose our maturity” and wow, that hit close to home. I can’t say that after reading this book I was excited to have all these conversations, but recently I have been unexpectedly forced to have some of them. I am deeply grateful to have read this book a couple years ago because I felt like I had a bit more support and bravery around these incredibly hard conversations and topics.