The Night Alphabet
Joelle Taylor
riverrun, 2024, 432 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Within the last couple of years, it feels like all of my favorite poets are releasing their debut novels—Kaveh Akbar with Martyr!, Ocean Vuong with The Emperor of Gladness, and Joelle Taylor with The Night Alphabet. Like Akbar and Vuong, Taylor’s debut is nothing if not poetic and experimental.

The Night Alphabet follows a young girl, Jones, who learns that she can embody other people’s lives across time—a coal miner, an incel, a eugenist—and then finds out that her mother and grandmother can do the same. This embodied time travel (or “rememberings,” as she calls it) comes to a head when Jones walks into a tattoo parlor in Hackney, London, in the year 2233. Covered head-to-toe in tattoos that commemorate her journeys, she asks the tattoo artists, Small and Cass, to connect her journeys with ink. The artists hesitantly tattoo her weathered body as Jones tells them about her rememberings, tattoo by tattoo.

The Night Alphabet feels disorienting in the most exciting way, especially due to its form: the novel almost reads like a short story collection of Jones’ rememberings, with every other chapter returning to the present timeline at the tattoo parlor with Small and Cass. As complicated as the concept for this novel is, the core of Joelle Taylor’s strange tale is remembrance, storytelling as empathy, and visibility.

Each time Jones recounts a remembering, there is a gorgeous black and white illustration at the start of the chapter. These illustrations are her tattoos, but also the wounds of her experiences. She explains that “every tattoo is a door into a new country,” and that her rememberings are like falling into another life (46). The core question throughout the novel is: What is experience, and empathy gained from experience, if not a constant growing pain? Her tattoos represent that pain “is a birthing place as much as a site of grieving” (338). What, then, is the true cost of empathy?

Taylor leans into storytelling in The Night Alphabet. Each remembering is a different genre, tone, and style, which reflects Jones’ core learning: “Empathy is the root of intelligence” (232). Taylor invites the reader into this experiment—the constant tone shifts are jarring, but also an exercise in true understanding. These rememberings are hard to read at times. An incel who murders women on camera and a eugenist participating in sex trafficking were particularly tough sections to read from the perpetrator’s perspective. However, through Jones’ journeys, she learns that “you must be everyone in the story to understand the story” (413). It is a challenging, yet necessary lesson.

The Night Alphabet wouldn’t be a Joelle Taylor work if it weren’t full of rowdy women. It is no mistake that the only people in the novel who can fall into these “rememberings” are women. Invisibility versus visibility threads throughout the entire novel, but is especially present in the lesbian bar chapter. Jones reflects, “I have sat in dyke bars across continents, each of them stuffed with sweating, gorgeous, ferocious, invisible women” (321). Intriguing implications of embodiment and visibility are core concerns for Taylor in this novel. Considering this work is primarily concerned with women, Taylor provides a vessel for female agency through Jones’ rememberings.

The Night Alphabet is no ordinary tale. If you want an exercise in empathy, a kaleidoscope of short stories, and a rolodex of unruly women, Joelle Taylor’s debut novel is for you.

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an associate editor-at-large for Chestnut Review and holds a BA in English from Azusa Pacific University. They are a regular book reviewer for Wild Shrew Literary Review with Sinister Wisdom. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

Sympathy for Wild Girls
Demree McGhee
Feminist Press, 2025, 216 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

In Sympathy for Wild Girls, experiences and knowledges associated with Black, queer womanhood are expertly infused into subtly surreal stories. Described as “Confident and poetic” by the Chicago Review of Books, Demree McGhee’s exacting and vibrant debut is a stunning, cohesive meditation on otherness, connection, and identity. Each story encapsulates a world of social systems, tenuous relationships, and underlying dreams and desires. This encapsulation allows the collection to meticulously analyze, synthesize, and dissect social mechanisms and influences. Engaging with the sharply rendered world of Sympathy for Wild Girls is like looking at our own through a magnifying glass—parts that are often ignored or brushed over are made visible and put on display. Throughout the collection, characters fall in and out of belonging, search for safety from hostility, become and transform, and come to terms with their otherworldliness while navigating societal rejection and girlhood’s treacherous terrain.

With stories articulated in multiple registers and encompassing varying degrees of reality, Sympathy for Wild Girls could be defined by its versatility. Stories like “Scratching” interrogate the boundaries surrounding death and life in its focus on grief and love, while stories like “Valerie” investigate the arduous task of unfurling repressed desire. Wry humor and sharp pop culture references intertwine with chilling, devastating meditations on what it means to experience discrimination, evoking the way harm and violence are inherent aspects of every part of marginalized lives.

Sympathy for Wild Girls could also be defined by its deft analysis of the emotions and feelings that influence actions and reactions to being chronically othered. As a result, the collection simmers with the sense of fear that comes with being mistreated and abused in the context of Black womanhood and girlhood. Each narrative is imbued accordingly with a fear of being wrong, replaced, or the recipient of violence. In addition, McGhee’s compelling storytelling and vivid imagery coalesce to create deeply resonant depictions of this fear—characters often change, shrink, hide, disguise, or distance themselves for fear of societal and personal fallout. For instance, narratives like “Thinning” revolve around a fear of seeming out of place or mismatched. In this way, fear as a survival response to trauma and discrimination pulses throughout this book, acting as a foundation for the stories.

For those who must fight to be seen, heard, and understood, who have felt alienated by expectations associated with womanhood and girlhood, who are familiar with the self-loathing and longing that accompany a life lived in the margins, Sympathy for Wild Girls is a collection of stories that will resonate, affirm, and inspire.

Grace Gaynor is a writer from Louisville, Kentucky. She is an assistant poetry editor for Noemi Press, an editorial intern at Electric Literature, a Feminist Press apprentice, and a poetry reader for Bicoastal Review. She studied English and GWS at Hollins University and earned an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Scribner, 2025, 480 pages
$31.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a book divided into two parts. The first is the life of Gertrude Stein when she came to Paris with her brother Leo, who was interested in art, and the beginnings of her art collection. What follows is twenty-some years of their lives through some of the greatest history of literature and two wars in Paris, as Stein meets and befriends Alice B. Toklas, falls out with Leo, and during World War II hides out with Toklas in a small French town—writing, living, and loving. The second part begins with Stein’s death and Toklas’ efforts to publish Stein’s prolific unpublished writings. Toklas worked with scholars and powers that be at Yale, where Stein’s papers had been donated, for twenty years as she aged and finally died. In an effort to save Stein’s papers, Toklas accidentally sent a scholar not only books, but notebooks containing hers and Stein’s personal lives. Thus Stein and Toklas’ personal life became public. An unpublished book titled Q.E.D. that contained the events of Stein’s first lesbian affair, before she met Toklas, a secret for which Toklas never quite forgave her, was published under another title. It’s hard to reduce Wade’s book, which is so rich in information, into the length of a review. While a great deal of An Afterlife is written in academic passages, in fact, it’s not a difficult read. There’s something about it that compels the reader forward.

When Stein died in 1946, the bulk of her writing was unpublished. Her work, Wade claims, was all her life “spurred by her scientific background” (3). Trained in medicine as a young woman in the US, this influence is clear later on in her writing. Stein asked questions about how perception worked, how words made meaning and embody the essence of people, places, things, and existence. She saw words as living things with physical properties, like materials a painter or sculptor might use to shape something new. Stein did with words what an artist does with paint.

Stein may be called less a writer in the conventional sense than a philosopher of language. As a woman with a wife, I liked the phrase, “My wife my life is my life is my wife,” (105). I admit that before reading Wade’s book, the most I knew about Stein was ‘a rose is a rose is a rose,’ which I discovered was so well known that Toklas had it embroidered on several objects in their home. I knew that Stein was an overweight lesbian who wrote in repetition and was often difficult to read. Her process was sleeping late and writing, and then Toklas typed up the writing the next day. She loved reading mysteries and often read one a day. In later years, during a trip to America, she wanted to meet Dashiell Hammett. One thing I think most know about her is she entertained visitors in her room with walls covered with paintings. The studio gatherings consisted of painters, modernist writers, and their wives. Stein entertained the artists and Toklas the wives. I actually started to wonder if Stein had not been an overweight, openly lesbian female, her writing might have been considered on a level of Joyce, Faulkner, and other experimental writers of the modernist or post-modernist era. The truth was, “Stein always made people uncomfortable” (375).

Stein’s second book, The Making of Americans was completed in 1912 when Stein was 38. It was a reparative classic immigrant narrative. New people make new existences out of old lives. Stein did not make a profit from her writing even though the women self-published five titles under the trade name of The Plain Editions between 1930 and 1933. She and Toklas financed the books by selling a Picasso. Whenever money was tight, they looked toward the many paintings in their studio. Nevertheless, Stein soon started to make a little money from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas published in 1932, and an opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for which she wrote the words and Vergil Thompson wrote the music. One very interesting part of Stein and Toklas’ life was World War II when, as two aging Jewish women, they left Paris and stayed in the country. Paris was invaded and eventually so was the small town where they hid. But they survived to return to Paris.

Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946 of uterine cancer, leaving Alice B. Toklas a widow for the next twenty years, with four hundred dollars a month and a mission. All property, including stocks, bonds, $82,000 cash, royalties, and the high-priced paintings from the studio, belonged to Stein’s nephew, whom neither woman was close to. Four hundred dollars a month in 1946 may have been adequate for living expenses, but as the next twenty years passed, the compensation paid for less and less. As time passed, Toklas frequently borrowed money from friends just to get by. After Stein’s death, only two books made money. The first was Q.E.D., the second was We Eat: A Cook Book, by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, which Stein wrote most of. These royalties went to Stein’s nephew.

Scholars who worked with Stein’s writing discovered that it changed over the years; in the beginning she used syntax to explore the inner process of emotions, and later she used language from literary conventions to explore her own feelings. With Q.E.D., Toklas pondered the final success of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt which after several rejections she finally published in pulp. Q.E.D. was published and a success. Toklas never abandoned her mission to get the rest of Stein’s writing published. Thanks to her, more of Stein’s writing was published after her death than before.

While the beginning of the book was an exciting love story, this later part was sad, as Toklas’ health went downhill. She died March 7, 1967 and was buried in the same grave as Gertrude Stein. Here the story is well written and interesting, and is also heartbreaking, for as Toklas became old and ill, much of her life was told from the point of view of scholars and publishers who worked with Toklas and watched her struggle.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is full of pictures and illustrations that support the story. I found this a well-written and easy-to-read book about a well-known modernist literary figure and a better-known early-twentieth-century lesbian couple. Their devotion to art and literature as well as to each other is remarkable.

Martha Miller is a retired English professor and a Midwestern writer whose books include fiction, creative nonfiction, anthologies, and mysteries. Her nine books were published by traditional, but small, women’s presses. She’s published several reviews, articles, and short stories and won several academic and literary awards. Her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Miller_(author).

How to Sleep at Night
Elizabeth Harris
William Morrow, 2025, 304 pages
$23.19

Reviewed by Evelyn C. White

In How To Sleep At Night, Elizabeth Harris, an openly lesbian New York Times reporter, delivers a dynamic cast of characters working to reconcile their ambitions with the vagaries of life. A successful lawyer and public high school teacher, respectively, Ethan and Gabe are gay, married parents to Chloe, their five-year-old daughter.

Their suburban New Jersey world is upended when Ethan, a once-moderate Republican, decides to run for Congress. Gabe, a lifelong Democrat, sees “red.”

“Ethan had always been to Gabe’s right politically, and twenty years ago when they started dating, that was fine,” Harris writes, in her debut novel. “Gabe was so liberal there wasn’t much on his left anyway. . . But over time, Ethan’s views had shifted. . . As he became more conservative, the overlapping ground between them narrowed. Today, there was almost nothing left.”

In a move that evokes then Senator Barack Obama’s “I won’t run for President without your blessing” pledge to his skeptical wife, Ethan solicits his husband’s support before taking the plunge. “Gabe sat at their dining room table, still, and silent, panicking,” Harris continues.

The outcome? Roll tape for Ethan’s cadre of campaign managers, image consultants, and swank fundraisers for ultra-right-wing Republican donors. Then add Fang, an albino milk snake that Chloe receives as “compensation” because her aspiring Congressman dad (glad-handing 24/7) is no longer free to take her to school. Cue Gabe doing double-duty.

Overwhelmed by the upheaval in their home, Gabe declines when Ethan invites him to join a strategy session about his campaign. “It would be rude to add that he’d rather crawl across the West Side Highway blindfolded,” Harris writes with the arch humor that infuses the novel.

Running on parallel tracks in the quick-paced narrative, readers find Kate. She’s a high-profile reporter at a major newspaper who happens to be a lesbian and. . . Ethan’s sister. In addition to the stress of office politics, Kate is on the rebound from a failed relationship. Ready for a refresh, she reconnects with Nicole, a former lover who has since married a man (with a penchant for golf), and become a stay-at-home mom in a town of McMansions.

Can you say lesbian drama? About their erotically charged meet-ups, on the down-low, Harris writes: “As their third round arrived, Kate excused herself to go to the bathroom. Alone in a crowd of strangers, Nicole had a moment to sit with the fact that her drinking buddy was someone with whom she used to have lots of illicit sex. She took out her phone to text [her husband], who had made the kids chicken tenders, toast, and apple slices for dinner and encouraged Nicole to stay in the city as late as she wanted.”

By the time the tale winds down, opposition research has unearthed an unsavory episode in Ethan’s past and Gabe’s LGBTQIA+ students have gotten a hate on him because of his mate. Kate is called to account at her newspaper for an alleged ethical breach. A “rogue” photo on Nicole’s cellphone triggers, as the Temptations crooned, a “ball of confusion.” As snakes are wont to do, Fang slithers hither and yon.

Elizabeth Harris keeps readers turning the pages in her skillfully crafted queer saga, How To Sleep At Night.

Originally published in The Bay Area Reporter

Evelyn C. White A former reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, Evelyn C. White is the author of the acclaimed biography Alice Walker: A Life and Chain Chain Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships. She is also the editor of The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking For Ourselves.

Fragments of Wasted Devotion
Mia Arias Tsang, illustrated by Levi Wells
Quilted Press, 2025, 144 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Fragments of Wasted Devotion is an incredibly self-descriptive title. Before reading, I assumed it was the poetic, hooking title that so many collections use (and then vaguely connect to one piece in the work), but no, this is simply a collection of Tsang’s fragments of wasted devotions. She sets the reader up to know the story won’t end well: “My heart was too young to be settled,” and she proceeds to become devoted anyway: “but I laid it down on your chest anyway” (1). From the first line, she presents the reader with the question: What does one do with unrequited devotion?

The ‘fragments’ aspect of the title rings true as well. Each work tosses you into a story with little to no context, and you certainly won’t find out the conclusion here, either. Readers see a fragmented narrative where the only throughline you can grasp is the devotion, again and again, no matter the person, place, or time. I struggled with this a bit, but I think that’s because I personally wrestle with more poetic vignettes like this work, not due to any flaw in the book. However, given that the fragments of Tsang’s wasted devotions are the heart of this collection, I found this fragmented presentation of vignettes clever and intriguing.

I deeply appreciated the honesty in her writing. Who hasn’t wondered how to hold someone in their heart if they can’t “eat my groceries before they rot?” (8). You don’t have to have your whole life together to love someone deeply. Tsang also dips into the complicated truth of loving someone who has hurt you (I’m also a firm believer in holding love and anger in your heart at the same time). “Melatonin Dreams” is a three-part piece where Tsang describes the pain of recurring dreams about her partner; a house in New Haven that’s long, brown, and green “like a shotgun. . . I’m ready for you to blow my head off again” (34) and then writes, “I am still trying to protect you from the rage of everyone who wants me to be happy” (35). Don’t we all know it—you have long conversations with family and friends, tearing apart someone for how they treated you, but you have that inexplicable urge to defend them (not their actions necessarily, just them). It can feel hard to hate someone you’ve seen humanity in, no matter how they left you. She finishes, “It’s hell to be trapped behind my own eyes, letting you happen to me when I’m supposed to have control here” (38).

How much these experiences are actually in Tsang’s control, I’m not sure. She writes, “I am on edge and I am breaking my life to get to you because that is what I do for what I love” (42), and she buys the bus ticket, crossing cities to reach someone one hundred and forty-three point three miles away. And again, she writes that the people she loves ask, in horror, “Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” (44). But Tsang answers her own questions, and mine, and those of the people who love her, when she writes, “I touch the feral creature of my heart and ask is there anything left to give and it howls yes yes yes forever” (42). “Longing Distance” was my favourite section of the collection because it replicates a feeling I think many of us have experienced, to some degree, of putting the world on hold to get to someone we love who doesn’t necessarily return the effort. “I shouldn’t have had to beg,” she writes, “I wish I could want anything else” (67–68).

So what does one do with unrequited devotion? The reader is welcome to find their own answer. Tsang, for her part, “fade[s] to black with a heart bursting with all the love you wouldn’t take and I know I’ll forgive you anything” (111).

Lastly, on page 15, there is an illustration of a little creature with a face like this: (•⤙•), and I love it. I didn’t write about all the illustrations, but every one was absolutely gorgeous, full of whimsy, and engaging.

Allison Quinlan is a PhD student in Scotland and might be the world’s slowest writer.

All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert
Riverhead Books, 2025, 400 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Cassandra Langer

Elizabeth Gilbert, global sweetheart of women’s magazines, TED Talks royalty, and patron saint of anyone who ever wanted to eat their way around the world, has returned with a new memoir. This one is not about finding love in Bali or mastering yoga in an Indian ashram. No, All the Way to the River is Gilbert’s full-throttle plunge into grief, queerness, addiction, mystical visitations, and the kind of emotional mayhem most of us would only confess under anesthesia.

This is not a beach read. It’s a fasten-your-seatbelts-for-a-bumpy-ride-and-maybe-book-an-appointment-with-your-therapist-after-you-finish book.

Gilbert begins with a visitation from her late partner, Rayya Elias, whose spirit seems far too opinionated to stay politely deceased. People may roll their eyes at such things, but I’m not one of them.

After my beloved dog died, I returned home to an apartment so empty it echoed. I clutched her leash like a Victorian widow and wept into her water bowl. The next morning, a disgusting, toilet-water-soaked tennis ball—yes, that one, the one I threw out—appeared on my pillow. I didn’t scream. I thought, “Oh. So that’s how it’s going to be.”

So when Gilbert talks about Rayya dropping in from the great beyond, I’m right there with her. Some of us get messages from the dead. Some get comfort. Some get ghostly tennis balls.

Gilbert’s memoir is a wild mosaic, equal parts emotional demolition derby, spiritual travelogue, queer romance, and New Age interpretive dance. At moments, it feels like The Killing of Sister George wandered off, took mushrooms, and started reading Jean Genet.

She tells us right away: “I couldn’t believe I had sunk this low.” And to her credit, she means it every time. Gilbert dives from one high to the next: emotional, spiritual, narcotic, romantic. It’s like watching a very literary pinball machine: bing, new obsession. Bong, new crisis. Ding, new mystical revelation.

And somehow it’s both maddening and completely relatable. Who hasn’t, in a moment of loneliness, reached for something questionable? Maybe not a controlled substance or a penthouse rental, but we’ve all been there in spirit.

At the heart of the book is Gilbert’s care for Rayya as she dies from pancreatic and liver cancer, a journey as tender as it is terrifying. Gilbert is loving, terrified, overwhelmed, generous, impulsive, broke, extravagant, sober, not sober, heartbroken, hopeful, and hysterically human. Sometimes all in the same paragraph.

Eventually, she lands in a twelve-step program, declaring that after contemplating murder, suicide, or possibly both on alternate Thursdays, it was time to “ask for help.” A sensible conclusion, really.

She writes with naked honesty, sometimes too naked, the way someone overshares in a group therapy session, and you suddenly find yourself rooting for them against your will.

This memoir is not for everyone, especially not for highly critical readers, but co-dependent lesbians will lap it up. It is for:

● people who fall in love like they’re leaping off cliffs
● people who grieve like the world is ending (because it is, for them)
● people who can’t resist one more emotional thrill ride
● people who have ever seen a sign from the dead and want a near-death experience

Others may find the book unbearable, too intense, too mystical, or too steeped in the spiritual equivalent of rainbow smoothies.

But Gilbert herself? She is a tangled, addictive, self-aware mess. And she knows it.

All the Way to the River is not tidy or transcendent in the way Gilbert’s earlier memoirs were. But it is deeply human, fiercely loving, unintentionally funny at times, and full of the chaos that happens when you’re trying to hold on to the living while being haunted—spiritually, emotionally, sometimes literally—by the dead.

By the last page, you may still not understand Elizabeth Gilbert, but you will absolutely appreciate her.

After all, most of us are just one heartbreak, one impulse purchase, or one ghostly tennis ball away from the river ourselves.

Cassandra Langer lives in Jackson Heights, New York, where she writes and reviews books, and makes art under the watchful eye of a very demanding calico. She is a contributor to The Gay & Lesbian Review, Ms. Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and is the author of Romaine Brooks: A Life. She is currently completing her second volume of a two-book anti-conversion memoir, consisting of Erase Her: A Survivor’s Story (available at Amazon in Kindle and soft cover) and working on The Other Side Of The Rainbow: Growing Through Trauma. https://theothersideoftherainbow.org/

Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA
Amy Erdman Farrell
The University of North Carolina Press, 2025, 320 pages
$35.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

In Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA, Amy Erdman Farrell takes on the momentous task of documenting, with painstaking attention to detail, the multifaceted and complex history of the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA). Farrell impressively spans the life of this American institution from the mythologies built up around its founder, Juliette Gordon Low, all the way to how the organisation now manages competing accusations of wokeness and conservatism. Farrell has provided a definitive account of the GSUSA which builds remarkably on previous histories in breadth, perceptiveness, and a willingness to acknowledge the organisation’s complicity in regimes of oppression.

Intrepid Girls unearths a number of significant events in the GSUSA’s over a hundred-year history and it is immediately evident that this is an extensively researched project involving many years hard at work in GSUSA archives. Beginning with the organisation’s origins as an improvement upon the United Kingdom’s imperialist Girl Guides, Farrell takes the reader through Girl Scouting’s early years, its government-sanctioned involvement in both American Indian residential schools and Japanese-American incarceration camps, and its persistent failure to desegregate and support African-American Girl Scouts throughout the twentieth century. From its initial history as a conformist organisation working hand-in-hand with the US government to assimilate girls of colour, indigenous girls, and immigrant girls, the organisation is accused of sowing subversion increasingly in the later years of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Caught up in McCarthyism, disputes over sex education, and endorsement of the United Nations, the GSUSA undergoes socio-cultural changes which shift it from a stalwart of patriotism to a threat to family values.

Central to Farrell’s narrativising of the history of the GSUSA is identifying the ‘strategies of innocence’ used in response to attacks from all sides of the political spectrum. Presenting Girl Scouts as inherently innocent, unable and unwilling to discuss controversial topics or politicised issues, Farrell shows how the GSUSA persistently engages in a ‘dangerous innocence’ which denies its complicity in oppressive regimes under the guise of girlishness. Farrell is expertly able to follow this thread throughout the GSUSA’s story, acknowledging how silence and a desire to please all stakeholders all the time, even at the expense of Girl Scouts themselves, has led to an organisation fraught with doing too little, too late. Essential to this history is Farrell’s repeated interrogations of an organisation that seeks to promote girls’ leadership, whilst consistently refusing to name which girls are leading, and to where they are expected to lead. Intrepid Girls asks hard questions about how the GSUSA represents itself to the public, and how these representations are grounded in a history of deploying whiteness as innocence and neutrality as apoliticalness.

Alongside Farrell’s thorough research, the story of the Girl Scouts is enhanced by reflections on her own involvement in the organisation. Chapter Ten offers an account of Farrell’s 1975 pilgrimage to Juliette Gordon Low’s birthplace in Savannah, Georgia, with her Girl Scout troop. In providing this snippet of personal history, Farrell presents a case study for her claims about the GSUSA’s silence and feigned ignorance on social issues relating to oppression. She highlights how Low’s social position in the late nineteenth century as a wealthy heiress in the South, bolstered by both slavery and taking land from American Indians, provided the seeds for the GSUSA. Yet twelve-year-old Farrell was taught nothing about slavery, stolen land, or how these enabled the existence of the troop in which she found so much community. As such, Farrell offers a poignant account of what happens when innocence is adopted as a ploy to evade unpleasant histories and perpetuate hero-worship of real, complicated people. The inclusion of Farrell’s personal insights is a boon to this work of history, emphasising the real and lived impacts of the Girl Scouts, both positive and negative.

Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA is a work of impressive depth and a significant contribution to our knowledge of the GSUSA as an organisation that now represents a major aspect of American culture, known throughout the world. Farrell’s analysis exceeds that of a facts-driven history, offering an analytical lens on the strategies and actions of the GSUSA which forces us to look past the sweet-as-pie façade of the Girl Scouts and examine its deeper, messier, complex history.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa and Substack girlishh.substack.com.

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen
Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars
Anthem Press, 2025, 226 pages
$110.00

Reviewed by Atlanta Tsiaoukkas

Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen begins with a discussion of the 2021 SNL skit “Lesbian Period Drama.” This introduction documents the notorious rise across popular culture of visual media tropes depicting frail Victorian women engaged in tense romantic affairs. Accepting the display of satire as confirmation, Sarah E. Maier and Rachel M. Friars study neo-Victorian cinema and television in the past twenty-five years that center lesbianism, asking why filmmakers are drawn to the long nineteenth century when narrating queer female-centered stories.

Beginning with the early 2000s adaptations of Sarah Waters’ novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith—which triggered an enthusiasm for indulgent narratives of queer Victorian romance, Maier and Friars guide the reader through a broad range of material. Focusing on British and North American productions, with the notable exception of Céline Sciamma’s film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it is undoubtable that this monograph represents the most complete assessment thus far of the lesbian period drama as a subgenre of historical cinema. Their forays into the American West with Godless (Frank) and The World to Come (Fastvold) were particularly insightful in their expansion of the geographic landscape of what is considered neo-Victorian cinema, examining how the conventionally masculine genre of the Western is queered by the inclusion of lesbian stories.

At times, Maier and Friars’ survey would have benefitted from a tighter focus, particularly in those chapters on biofictions like Lizzie (Macneil) and Ammonite (Lee), where the details of the cinematic narrative and historical accuracy meander far from the text’s central focus on lesbians on screen. Overall, Maier and Friars tell a contemporary nuanced story about declining spectacle in the depiction of neo-Victorian lesbian performances while emphasizing the emotional dimensions of these romantic relationships.

Despite frequently turning to the perspectives of directors in their analysis of neo-Victorian cinema, I was surprised to find that Maier and Friars spent little time considering the lack of lesbian professionals involved in the production of these films and television series. Across their selected corpus, only two leading actors publicly identify as queer: Kristen Stewart of Lizzie and Adéle Haenel of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Similarly, only one director of the included films identifies as a lesbian, Sciamma, also of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. For a monograph that generously turns to the authority of the director on many occasions, this absence will be apparent to any lesbian reader wondering why period dramas rarely include lesbians in the creation of lesbian stories.

A similar limitation may be noted in the decision to use the term ‘lesbian’ over more inclusive terminology. Lesbian is not a term that is used frequently in neo-Victorian period dramas, since it is an identifier that only came to popular usage in the twentieth century. Its modern use in describing both real historical people and fictional portrayals of neo-Victorians on screen risks rendering some women characters’ sexualities less visible. Not all the women depicted in Maier’s and Friars’ corpus are shown as exclusively interested in relationships with other women—in The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Harkin), for example, Marguerite also has relationships with men. Whilst the last quarter century of neo-Victorian representation has affirmed that lesbians did exist in the past, the existing scholarship has not made sufficient room for the possibility of bi- and pansexualities, which continue to be historical and cinematic impossibilities.

Maier and Friars’ Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen offers a valuable retrospective of the rich neo-Victorian lesbian narratives in the first decades of the twenty-first century that I hope will ignite enthusiasm for further investigations. Their multifaceted analysis, encompassing feminist, queer, and decolonial insights, is a significant contribution to the field.

Atlanta Tsiaoukkas is a UK-based writer and researcher currently working towards a PhD on queer Victorian schoolgirls and their homoerotic friendships. Find her on Instagram @aatlanta_aa and Substack girlishh.substack.com.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics
Rupert Kinnard
Stacked Deck Press, 2025, 278 pages
$34.95

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

Allow me to introduce to you Professor I. B. Gittendowne, otherwise known as Rupert Kinnard, the creator of the first Black gay and lesbian comic strip. The strip ran for over twenty years in a variety of alternative and queer periodicals, and now, Kinnard has collected these pointedly hilarious gems into a beautifully designed and produced 11 ¾” by 9 ¼” hardcover volume: Ooops…I Just Catharted! Fifty Years of Cathartic Comics. Beginning with his first cartoon character, the Brown Bomber, Professor I. B. Gittendowne deploys the most effective and universally available persuasive tool—humor—to topple racist, sexist, and homophobic absurdities. The four-panel strip grew to feature two inimitable main characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Perpetually nineteen years old, the Brown Bomber (named after boxing champ Joe Louis) is an endearingly innocent, buff, single-gloved, non-violent gay superhero; his side-kick, Diva, is a Ph.D.-holding lesbian educator—honoring, Kinnard tells us, the many strong, intelligent women in his life. Together, the two create a depth of social analysis and action that could not have been achieved by a single character.

In 278 lavishly-illustrated pages, Kinnard tells the story of how he developed the strip over the years. A native of Chicago, Kinnard began his artistic career as a student at Cornell College, a small liberal arts school in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. At first, the strip’s only regular character was the Brown Bomber (B.B.), who appeared in the weekly student newspaper, addressing various institutional problems. B.B. was joined at times by the Vanilla Cremepuff, a barely disguised college president, viewed askance for clueless inaction on racial issues. After three and a half years—and wildly-successful campus Brown Bomber T-shirt sales—the Brown Bomber came out as gay.

After graduating in 1979 and moving to Portland, Oregon, Kinnard began publishing Brown Bomber strips in a short-lived local gay and lesbian newspaper, the NW Fountain. A few years later, the Brown Bomber began gracing the pages of a new queer publication, Just Out, where he was soon joined by Diva Touché Flambé, who offered transformative visions and actions to assuage the Brown Bomber’s dismay at the irrationality he often encountered. In addition to occasionally displaying certain mystical powers when nothing else would suffice—e.g., turning an unrepentant LA police officer into a pig—Diva introduces a therapeutic device called slapthology, promoting clear thinking in the recalcitrant with a slap upside the head. “Wow!” says a character, post-slap, “My mind feels as fresh as a breath mint! I guess most written history has centered around the accomplishments of white people!” Kinnard reflects, “I saw myself as being part Diva and part Bomber.”

A job loss in Portland led Kinnard to move to the Bay Area, where Cathartic Comics flourished in the SF Weekly, an alternative paper, for seven years. During this time, Kinnard reinvented his author persona as Prof. I. B. Gittendowne. When the SF Weekly changed hands, ending that paper’s run of Cathartic Comics, Kinnard returned to Portland. Kinnard’s involvement in a life-changing car accident brought the weekly strip to a close, but did not alter the enthusiasm of his fan base or change Kinnard’s dedication to the persuasive use of art and humor as an avenue to social justice. We can only be grateful that he has spent his recent years compiling and designing this celebration of B.B. and the Diva.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! features hundreds of Cathartic Comics strips which otherwise would have vanished along with the newsprint on which they appeared. The artistry is superb, every panel full of energy as characters interact with each other and react to their world’s latest outrages. The Brown Bomber almost always looks the same—wearing the same tennis shoes and over-sized athletic socks, the same shorts, same cape, same boxing glove on his right hand, same scarf tied on his head. The elegant Diva, however, rarely wears the same outfit twice.

In the text accompanying the strips and other illustrations, Kinnard describes both his choices of drawing tools and his artistic and graphic design education. He narrates the development of Cathartic Comics from his childhood to 2025, providing explanatory detail for strips that comment on events with which some readers may not be familiar, such as Ronald Reagan’s gaffe during the 1988 Republican National Convention when he tried to say, “facts are stubborn things,” but actually said, “facts are stupid things.”

Occasionally, I found myself losing the thread of the narrative text as I immersed myself in strip after strip from a given era. Later, I discovered two compact chronologies near the end of the book. I’d suggest that readers look at these first for an overview, then read from the beginning. I should also add that some typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors have crept into the text, but, while unfortunate, they do not lead to misreadings.

Ooops…I Just Catharted! offers hours of joyful reading, just when we need it.

Julia M. Allen is Professor Emerita, English, Sonoma State University. She is the author of Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, SUNY Press, 2013 and co-author with Jocelyn H. Cohen of Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press, Lever Press, 2023.

Encounters for the Living and the Dead
Jameela F. Dallis
River River Books, 2025, 106 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Encounters for the Living and the Dead is a first collection of poetry by Jameela F. Dallis. She opens this rich and fecund poetic exploration with an epigraph quoted from bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions: “No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside us in a new way” (hooks, 129). With this epigraph, the poet introduces us to the organic function of memory and the connection to our past as she both mourns and celebrates our ancestors, grandmothers, cousins, and friends. She continues: “Altarworks are poems for people who’ve passed on—some I’ve known and loved. I imagine the poems being a part of an altar thick with candles and melted wax like my own” (85).

The presence of death in life, appearing like a pearl inside an oyster, forms a recurrent theme in her work, as in her poem titled “Three of Swords”:

I remember smelling the sweat, the turpentine— / that scent that was always always reminding me that you would die. / That scent the shape of something rotten, maybe fecund, / but still something I wish I could walk into again— / its memory is something that resurrects / my worry for you and then dissolves (11).

An oyster appears in many of her poems as a symbol of the poet’s eternal love for the sea. For example, in her poem “See Me Now,” the poet describes the fortune she had to cross the ocean four times, to travel throughout Europe, and to dine on gourmet food in many countries. She relishes seafood as she feeds her imagery: “Himalayan black salt / and pink rare salmon swim into / the silver threads of memory” in “I, Origin” (19). Jameela writes of her insistent love for the food and memories of the sea: “Holding onto my oyster dreams / nowhere to be / released from weighty history I gather my dreams / sup at your banquet” in “Oyster Dreams” (38).

Ekphrastic verse pervades this lush collection. Jameela writes poems to celebrate the paintings of artists like Henri Matisse and Robert Motherwell. She devotes the entire section three to “Ekphrastic Encounters”—poems in tribute to the work of other artists from David Bowie to Helen Frankenthaler. In the Notes, she records:

Henri Matisse’s ‘Les Betes De La Mer (1950)’ inspires not only the eponymous poem but resonates throughout the entire second part. In what feels like kismet, in high school, I completed a master copy of Matisse’s work when I thought I’d become a professional visual artist one day. . . Thus, passionate love, heartbreak, cheekiness, and more research into marine life than I ever imagined imbue this. . . book (86).

This fine debut collection is presented with the blessing of poets—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jaki Shelton Green, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Emilia Phillips, and Jameela’s “mentors, teachers, professors, advisors, family members, and benevolent ancestors. . .” (90). Gabrielle Calvocoressi has written about Dallis: “So few of us are willing to experience life fully if it means being confronted with our deepest hungers and the deep harms we have been forced to live through. So few of us can sit with the living and the dead with the kind of generosity that Dallis does, the deep curiosity, the love” (Praise).

The poet Jameela F. Dallis is a resident of Durham, North Carolina. Her publications include poetry, interviews, art criticism, and literary scholarship. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals such as Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, and The Fight and the Fiddle under the auspices of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Jameela holds a B.A. in English from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals.