Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


October 2026 Featured Books:
1. A Bad Deal in Mormon Land by T.I.M. Wirkus
2. Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell
3. HUM by Sanam Sheriff
4. Motherlode by Kimberly Dark
5. Dish by Nancy Jo Cullen
6. My Journey to Her by Yuna Hirasawa
7. [sp]RED by Jessica Doe
8. Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast by Elissa Minor
9. Exequial: Exhumed by Hannah Graves
10. Something That Helps by Mona Høvring, translated by Kari Dickson


Book descriptions:

A Bad Deal in Mormon Land by T.I.M. Wirkus: Sometimes things are not as they appear, especially when religion, magic, and shady dealings mix.

It’s 1908, and itinerant spirit medium Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann is at the end of her professional rope, facing down two unappealing options: join an ill-conceived commune founded by some fellow trans ex-vaudevillians, or take on a high-paying but mysterious job offered by a religious extremist in Salt Lake City. Madame Ilsa opts for Utah and the employ of one Roger Marsh who, it turns out, wants her to summon the ghost of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, to give his blessing to Marsh’s fledgling offshoot of the mainstream church.

Unsure how she’ll pull off this near-impossible task, Ilsa finds an ally in Francie Bream, an East Coast journalist in town to profile Mormon women at the dawn of the twentieth century. Bream’s motives remain obscure to Ilsa, though she begins to suspect the journalist has an agenda far more sinister than she could have imagined. Complicating the situation further are an inept and volatile henchman, a relentlessly orthodox Mormon apostle, a copper magnate with a fetish for polygamists, Marsh’s rogue third wife, and a vengeful private investigator from Ilsa’s past. As dead bodies accumulate around her, Madame Ilsa worries less and less about saving her career, and more about making it out of Salt Lake City alive.

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell: Portrait of a Lady on Fire meets The Safekeep in this gripping debut that reckons with art forgery, desire, suspicion, and resistance

In raucous 1928 Berlin, Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman’s life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to join the city’s underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Working as a tailor while studying art in every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint.

Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when a wealthy female art collector, commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name. When lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding herself caught up in a devastating game of survival.

Laced with queer desire and life-threatening secrets, Venus, Vanishing pulses with hedonism and danger as history comes to Hannah’s door, offering a textured and sweeping counter-narrative of Jewish survival, creativity, and resistance.

HUM by Sanam Sheriff: Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry

The word “hum” in Urdu can mean both “we” and “I.” In English, it’s a gesture of sound—a vibration. Sanam Sheriff’s HUM is a trans call to the beauty of attempt rather than the clarity of arrival. This book seeks as the pilgrim seeks, wandering from a plural sense of self with a lyric attunement to the wound’s power.

Following a queer, trans, Muslim speaker who grew up in southern India and migrated to the United States, Sheriff’s debut collection invites us to listen: to how yearning for a country blurs with yearning for a beloved; to how exile, for queer and trans people, is where the body itself becomes a place of dignity and prayer.

Enriched by Urdu lyric traditions of love, and love mourned, HUM raises the queer erotic to the heavens, even as the grief of separation lingers as paradise lost. Here, Sheriff weaves together the two most potent threads of human life: pain and love, strummed until they sing.

Motherlode by Kimberly Dark: Every person is impacted by a dementia diagnosis in the family. While the pain of watching a loved one disappear little by little, is often discussed, what happens when the relationship wasn’t easy? Sometimes, the disease is not stealing something precious, but dismantling the careful negotiations a mother and daughter built over decades. The silences, the deflections, the rules about what can and cannot be said must all dissolve, and yet, Motherlode, by Kimberly Dark, shows how love and care can be left in their place.

This poetry collection, at turns poignant, funny, hopeful, and always accessible—navigates the journey of chaos and care that every family member of a dementia patient will recognize. In Dark’s particular case though, the disease forced an intimacy with her mother that neither would have chosen willingly. They disappointed each other often, and yet, chose an ongoing relationship.

Dish by Nancy Jo Cullen: In this smart, sexy romp of a novel Nancy Jo Cullen explores the joys of second chances—at life and at love.

Frida Davis-Lefebvre is back in her hometown of Lakeland, BC, sober and recovering from the sale of her popular, but debt-ridden, Toronto restaurant La Grange before she heads off to greener pastures when things get complicated. It’s hard enough settling in at home with her mothers, but then Perry, the sperm donor she’s never met, moves onto her mothers’ property to recover from his own difficulties and Frida discovers that her still-hot ex-fiancé, Charlie, is working at the hotel restaurant that just hired her. For his part, Perry is just trying to patch his life together enough to get back to the big city where he knows he belongs, until he is caught up in the whirl of the Davis-Lefebvre family and this young woman he finds an unexpected connection with. As Frida explores a frenemies-with-benefits situation with Charlie and Perry finds himself drawn into dog sitting for the local film producer and picking up his paintbrush for the first time in years, they both start to question the paths they had planned for themselves and whether or not what they really want is right in front of them.

My Journey to Her by Yuna Hirasawa: Trans manga author Yuna Hirasawa shares her experience living with gender dysphoria, as well as her trip from Japan to Thailand for her gender-affirming surgery in this acclaimed graphic memoir. She covers topics like coming out to family and the loneliness of traveling to a new place—all while illustrating the legal and medical processes of her own transition.

Winner of the 2025 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic!

After graduating university, Yuna Hirasawa spent several years going through the motions and working an office job. Until one day, while in pursuit of an essential missing piece of her life, she receives a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which opens up new doors for her. As she takes on medical treatments and tries out new makeup and outfits, she sees just how lonely and difficult the process of transitioning can be. But in 2015, when Yuna travels to Thailand for her gender-affirming surgery, the support of her siblings, new strangers, and documenting her experience through manga helps her begin to heal in more ways than one. Told in an honest and, at times, humorous tone, this memoir is a blend of manga and detailed prose that does not shy away from sensitive topics, such as suicidal ideation, transphobia, and the simultaneously harrowing, yet joyous, experience of gender-affirming surgery.

[sp]RED by Jessica Doe: Jessica Doe’s [sp]RED slices open the 78-card Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, challenging its canon. These poems trace the deck’s Eurocentric inheritance through echoes of Shakespeare, various organized religions, contemporary media, and more, restoring Indigenous presence with themes of motherhood, inherited trauma, hunger, and desire woven throughout. Shakespeare’s dying lovers are cut into stars in the Moon’s light. A daughter clips mansions from real estate catalogs, ashamed of her father’s Goodwill jeans worn in public. A mother watches strangers mock her fair-skinned son, claiming he doesn’t look “Indian” enough. In an unflinching feminist reclamation, Doe rewrites each card’s colonial symbolism with Cherokee history, cosmology, and worldview. [sp]RED is blistering, visceral, and written for anyone who would turn a family wound into an incantation.

Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast by Elissa Minor: When she walks away from the Mormon church and a twenty-five-year marriage, Elissa Minor abandons the only life she’s ever known to embrace her identity as a queer woman. In this intimate memoir, she explores shame, desire, beauty, and acceptance. Minor realizes that her desire isn’t the problem but the solution. Finding solace outside of the church in the wilderness that surrounds her, she eventually begins to understand what it really means to be pure and worthy.

On the rugged terrain of the northern Oregon coast, Minor discovers passion and harmony in the grip of nature and in the arms of a lover who will become her wife. In the salty sea air, she learns that her own queerness—though less-charted territory—is like her love of backwoods hiking and that to accept her sexuality, she must take full pleasure in the wild that encompasses her. Poignant and powerful, Another Eve re-examines past truths and celebrates honoring oneself and living authentically. For Minor, the end of her transformation is only the beginning.

Exequial: Exhumed by Hannah Graves: Every story is a eulogy.

The clown has been with Morgan since she was eleven years old. She’s learned not to talk about him. (“A Girl and Her Clown”)

A woman attends a family dinner for the first time in a decade. It will be “liberating,” her therapist insists, and so she’s going to record the whole thing. (“Reconcile with Your Family Today”)

It is a perfectly ordinary day for the mistress of the house. Today. Tomorrow. Every day. Until 2:28 a.m.. (“Life in Repetition”)

There are lights in the forest. Everyone sees them. Everyone wants to know what they are. Everyone who tries to find out never comes back. (“The Lights of Northwood”)

Encounters with ghosts, cursed books, incriminating VHS tapes, entities from the skies, and questions that are best left unasked.

Something That Helps by Mona Høvring, translated by Kari Dickson: From acclaimed Norwegian writer Mona Høvring comes an intimate and stirring coming-of-age and sexual awakening story of a young woman following her own path to destruction and reconciliation.

Laura is in her late teens, living in a small coastal town in Western Norway, the summer before her final year of school. Haunted by the death of her mother by suicide, she has a strained relationship with her fisherman father and feels the absence of her brother and closest friend, both of whom have moved away. Equal parts lonely and bewildered, a lack of guidance has made her independent, determined, and vulnerable.

When Laura meets the older, more experienced Vivian Koller, the encounter sets in motion a series of events that will come to define her and her future. Crucial influences converge, pushing the simultaneously childish and adult protagonist into dark places―and eventually toward the start of a new life.