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.


July 2025 Featured Books:
1. The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King
2. Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
3. Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde
4. Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work by Chocolate Waters
5. The Original by Nell Stevens
6. Taste the Love by Karelia Stetz-Waters and Fay Stetz-Waters
7. Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker
8. Curtains of Rain: Cortinas de Lluvia by Anel I. Flores
9. Sideways Selves: Travesti and Jotería Struggles Across the Américas by PJ DiPietro
10. The Nursing Home Hoax by Shelley Thrasher and Ann Faulkner


Book descriptions:

The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King: In this dazzling debut novel, a hidden and nearly forgotten magic—of Reforging pencils, bringing the memories they contain back to life—holds the power to transform a young woman’s relationship with her grandmother, and to mend long-lost connections across time and space.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she’s always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive.

Combining the cross-generational family saga and epistolary form of A Tale for the Time Being with the uplifting, emotional magic of The Midnight Library, Allison King’s stunning debut novel asks: who owns and inherits our stories? The answers and secrets that surface on the page may have the unerasable power to reconnect a family and restore a legacy.

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu: Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.

While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.

Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde: From the acclaimed author of Vagabonds!: an audacious and eye-opening exploration of cross-generational queer life in Nigeria.

What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone?

In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria.

Across Lagos, one of Africa’s largest urban areas and one of the world’s most dynamic cities, Osunde’s characters seek out love for self and their chosen partners, even as they risk ruining relationships with parents, spouses, family, and friends. As the novel unfolds, a rolling cast emerges: vibrantly active, stubbornly alive, brazenly flawed. These characters grapple with desire, fear, time, death, and God, forming and breaking unexpected connections; in the process unveiling how they know each other, have loved each other, and had their hearts broken in that pursuit.

As they work to establish themselves in the city’s lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.

Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work by Chocolate Waters: The best of Chocolate Waters’ poetry finds its home in Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters. During the Women’s Liberation Movement, Waters traveled around the United States to share her erotic, angry, and feminine poems, gathering throngs of lesbian admirers. Waters was a modern-day lesbian-feminist bard performing her poems with theatrical flair. Waters’ poems grapple with gender norms, sexual harassment, and hetero-patriarchal publishing expressing the rage that comes with experiencing the second-class citizenry of womanhood. Even more radical, Waters’ writes of lesbian intimacy and sex, calling attention to nuances of family and belonging in the context of her identity as a lesbian. Melting in Your Mouth is a treasury of Waters’ early work. As witness to and participation in Gay Liberation and the Women’s Liberation Movement of the seventies and eighties, Waters’ poems also witness a genealogy of living and laughing authentically against all odds.

The Original by Nell Stevens: In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.

Brought to her uncle’s decaying Oxfordshire estate when she was a child, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household, an outsider in her own home. Now a self-possessed and secretive young woman, she has developed unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls.

As Grace cultivates her talent as a copyist, she realizes that her uncanny ability to recreate paintings might offer her a means of escape. Secretly, she puts this skill to use as an art forger, creating fake masterpieces in candlelit corners of the estate. Saving the money she makes from her sales, she plans a new life far from the family that has never seemed to want her.

Then, a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea, who wishes to reconnect with his family. When Charles returns, Grace’s aunt welcomes him with open arms; yet fractures appear in the household. Some believe he is who he says he is. Others are convinced he’s an impostor. As a court date looms to determine his legitimacy—and his claim to the family fortune—Grace must decide what she believes, and what she’s willing to risk.

Is Charles really her cousin? An interloper? A mirror of her own ambitions? And in a house built on illusions, what does authenticity truly mean—in art, in love, and in family?

Deftly plotted and shimmering with Nell Stevens’s distinctive intelligence, style, and wit, The Original takes readers on an unforgettable adventure through a world of forgeries, family ties, and the fluctuations in fortune that can change our fate.

Taste the Love by Karelia Stetz-Waters and Fay Stetz-Waters: A delicious, heartwarming romantic comedy about big dreams, life-changing friendships, and the people who bring out your best.

Six years ago, eco-chef Alice Sullivan and her culinary-school rival almost gave into the burning tension between them. But those kisses? Just the heat of competition boiling over. Sullivan never expected to see Kia after graduation . . . until Kia crashes back into her life with a plan to buy Sullivan’s beloved Portland greenspace.

Kia has worked hard building her social media empire as the big-hearted glitter-bomb queen of the food-truck scene. Now she’s one step away from opening a foodie utopia for underrepresented culinary talents. But Kia’s plans catch the attention of a bulldozer-happy food conglomerate, and now both Kia and Sullivan’s dreams are on the line. When a legal loophole turns out to be the only way to save what they each love most, they’re left with one option: pull off a very public fake marriage to obtain the deed to the land and keep their old rivalry under control.

As the line between fake and real love blurs, can Kia and Sullivan set aside their differences and find the perfect recipe for happily ever after?

Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker: An examination of hysterectomy and the struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy.

At least one hysterectomy is performed every minute of the year, making it the most common gynecological surgery worldwide. By the age of sixty-five, one out of five people born with a uterus will have it removed. So, why do we seldom talk about this surgery? Highly performed yet overlooked, examining the paradox of hysterectomy begins to unravel the various problems with how we medically treat uteruses and the people who have them.

Get It Out weaves centuries of medical history with rich qualitative data from 100 women, trans men, and nonbinary people who had, want, or are considering hysterectomy. In compelling detail, Andréa Becker reveals how America’s healthcare system routinely deprives people of the ability to control their own bodies along race and gender lines. When people ask for a hysterectomy, they are often met with pushback: Are you sick enough? Old enough? Have you had enough babies? Will you regret this? How will your future husband feel about this? Yet this pushback is not equally experienced. While some people are barred access, others are ushered toward a hysterectomy. These contradictory recommendations reveal the persistent biases entrenched within healthcare.

Get It Out interrogates how little choice people with uteruses ultimately have over their reproductive health, and explores what these “choices” signify amid interlocking systems of inequality.

Curtains of Rain: Cortinas de Lluvia by Anel I. Flores: Take this exhilarating journey through the vibrant landscapes of identity and resilience in Curtains of Rain. In this compelling narrative, the lives of intergenerational Latinx queer and gender queer individuals from a postcard bordertown intertwine, leading them to a reunion amidst the cultural tapestry of San Antonio, TX.

At its heart is Solitaria Gaviota-Alaniz, a fearless protagonist on a quest to thrive and love fully. Fifteen years after fleeing her hometown following an exorcism, Solitaria returns to confront the ghosts of homophobia that haunt her past. Supported by her queer familia of her gay tíos, non-binary best friend Toni, and a diverse community of panederas and drag queens in San Antonio, Solitaria makes a search and rescue mission for her lost self.

As Solitaria navigates the complexities of familial relationships and confronts environmental racism, Curtains of Rain celebrates the generous ingenuity of the queer survivor. With courage and determination, Solitaria transforms trauma into triumph, redefining tradition, and finding home once again in a world where love knows no bounds.

Sideways Selves: Travesti and Jotería Struggles Across the Américas by PJ DiPietro: How trans and non-binary networks engage in decoloniality across hemispheres.

A deeply informed, theoretically rich work of inquiry and critique, Sideways Selves learns from two communities of migrants as they contest their marginalization under the colonial regime of gender—colonial because, as PJ DiPietro affirms, Indigenous and Afro-diasporic conceptions of embodiment have been displaced by the European-Christian order of gender. Following gender-nonconforming Aymara, Kolla, and mixed-race exiles in Buenos Aires and K’iche’, Nahua, and Central American migrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, DiPietro takes stock of a collective, transnational effort to reimagine ideas of personhood and kinship that gender makes unthinkable.

The communities DiPietro studies create new kinds of identities, collective and genderless in nature. Their ways of thinking and doing, though radical, are motivated by old wisdom, storytelling, healing, and religion—brujería, curanderismo, Voudoun, and other practices that colonialism, capitalism, and the nation-state have unsuccessfully tried to erase. In equal measures philosophical and ethnographic, Sideways Selves witnesses and listens as these displaced people—displaced from their homes and from the moral geography of the West—show us what a just, decolonial world could actually be.

The Nursing Home Hoax by Shelley Thrasher and Ann Faulkner: In this fresh take for grown-ups on the classic Nancy Drew series, crime-solving duo Taylor and Marilee investigate suspicious activity at a small East Texas nursing home.

Taylor, a semi-retired lawyer, and Marilee, whom she met in college, reunite in their eighties with a bang. They bond over the return of their college friend Edith, a doctor working in Africa who returns to the US for medical treatment and ends up in rehab at a local nursing home not far from Taylor and Marilee.

But when Taylor and Marilee visit, all is not as it seems. Several long-term patients have been victimized by a cybercriminal, and local law enforcement seem as uninterested as they are inept.

With the help of two high school seniors, amateur sleuths Taylor and Marilee must solve the mystery of who is taking advantage of wealthy residents so they can spend more time dealing with their romantic feelings, which have evolved during their sixty years apart.