Daughters of Chaos
Jen Fawkes
The Overlook Press, 2024, 288 pages
$27.00

Reviewed by Martha Miller

Jen Fawkes is an award-winning author with a literary style that is at times lavish and stunning. I particularly enjoyed her periodic aphorisms reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.

For the most part, Daughters of Chaos is an epistolary novel told from multiple first-person perspectives of a set of twins, Silas and Sylvie. The narratives include their childhood and letters from their teen years onward. A major part of the story is about the Civil War, during 1862, and looking back on the events from 1877. The book is multilayered, while the story is advanced in sequence from the beginning to the end of Sylvie’s life. Historical figures are interspersed with fiction. The tale is more than simply a story of letters—it also includes encyclopedia entries, a translated play, news articles, and more. It synthesizes history, myth, and sheer invention, incorporating stories along with periodic jumps into ancient Greek drama. For me, these additional layers made the novel harder to follow. Nonetheless, the writing is engaging and well-crafted.

The story starts with the twins’ pregnant, unwed mother, Brigitte, and their tinkering, unavailable father. As children, they are abandoned by their mother and older sister and left alone with their father. While we see them from childhood, the lion’s share of the book takes place in Silas’ and Sylvie’s young adulthood. After the father’s death, Silvie’s brother leaves her, and we hear from him in letters which contain stories of his Confederate adventures in submarine construction and maintenance. Close to adulthood, Sylvie runs away to Nashville in search of her sister, Marina. There, she joins a Ladies Aid Society, a Union spy’s secret society of magical women disguised as prostitutes, secretly supporting the Union cause. These public women are all part of an ancient cult dedicated to trouble-making and the worship of Chaos. They work together toward a golden era of female sovereignty. Sylvie is tasked with translating the final, lost comedy of Aristophanes, and with the help of a dozen Priestesses of Chaos, works on it daily from the time she arrives in Nashville.

In an especially interesting section, we are told that real prostitutes nearly defeated the Union army due to syphilis. The authorities in Nashville recognize this prostitution problem and decide to round up all of these women and ship them elsewhere to rid Nashville of the disease. The prostitutes are put on a ship, and in a long, grueling trip, go from one port to the next, rejected each time until, unbathed, dehydrated, hungry, and some dead from suicide, they return to Nashville, where new laws are made to make prostitution legal. Working women are licensed and must have physicals that render them clean of disease. Early on, Sylvie tells us, “The fact that you’ve never seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” This sets up the reader for the speculative nature of the novel. Incredibly, we encounter a creature like Ray Bradbury’s Fog Horn, with silver scales, who is Silvie’s long-lost sister.

My problem with this novel is the scattershot structure. I wish I could tell you the whole thing comes together like a puzzle, but if so, I didn’t see it. The novel weaves together Greek mythology, Civil War history, sisterhood, fire, sex, and love. There are layers of text, journal entries, letters, narratives, play performances, as well as side stories told by other women. One in particular that will stick in my mind is about a woman who wants to murder her daughter because, despite appearances, she believes the girl isn’t hers. The father stops his wife several times and finally kills her. Then, because he loves her and couldn’t live without her, he kills himself. However, these bits and pieces take the reader in and out of the narrative.

While some lesbian attraction develops, only at the end does it come to fruition. The bewitching Hannah and Sylvie eventually ride off together toward California, into the sunset, one might say, where Sylvie gives birth to twins. Silvie puts the scraps of her life together in a book, and she also, like her sister, becomes a leviathan. In the end, we find Sylvie ready to teach her daughters how to belong to themselves.

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. For more detailed information, her website is https://www.marthamiller.net/. Her Wikipedia page is here. She lives in ‘The Land of Lincoln’ with her wife, two unruly dogs, and two spoiled and sleepy cats.

Letters to Forget: Poems
Kelly Caldwell
Knopf, 2024, 112 pages
$24.00

Reviewed by Lya Hennel

I previously reviewed Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish, a beautiful poetry collection and elegy to the author’s partner, Kelly Caldwell. Also a poet, Kelly was a trans writer and visual artist living with bipolar. This review is of her debut poetry collection, published after her death. A lot of these poems are addressed to Cass as letters. Letters to Forget is a companion book to Your Dazzling Death. The two works can be read separately and are both incredible on their own. But they complete and answer one another painfully, yet beautifully.

The collection is divided into three parts: Firstly, “Promise Light or Tomorrow” opens with apocalypse—an ending as a beginning. Half of the collection is composed of poems titled “[house of]” where “house” might be the body along with the grief. The other half is addressed to Kelly’s partner, Cass, and the poems are all titled “[dear c.” In these titles, the bracket never closes, as if every letter meant for Cass is endless and beyond rules: “[dear c. Please, don’t mind me, I’m standing facing the wall, trying to pay off a debt’’ (24). Kelly conveys her struggles with mental illness: the depressive episodes, the high-intensity emotions, and the empty, heavy hopelessness. “[dear c. Will you kindly care for my garden / until I return? It is spring now. […] I will return” (38) reads like an omen, a request, and a promise at once.

The second part of the collection, “Self-Portrait as Job,” mainly consists of a long-form poem. Across fourteen pages, exquisitely written, the poem features the biblical figure Job, who might be read as similar to Kelly trying to fit in a place she couldn’t find, in a life that felt like a stage play—suffocating and already scripted: “There was a man / Whose name was Job / Who couldn’t uncouple His good fortune / From his guilt” (42). “What you think is a hot plate coil heating red in your mouth / Is the taste of shame / Spit or swallow it / Either way it may take quiet root” (44). Throughout this chapter are feelings of shame, guilt, alienation, and boredom, intertwined with religious themes and seemingly religious trauma. Then, the words repeat like a metronome, in an intoxicating cadence: “It is summer, so there is no rain. The house […] It is half, so there is no whole. The house […] Is never still, is still, is no longer. The house” (45). As one body stumbles out of another / Impersonates a house / In passing” (52). “All of this is about god talk” (57) ends the masterful poem, followed by a poem titled “GOD TALKS.”

Finally, in the third part of the chapter, “Unlearning the Letter,” we return to short-form poems and the lulled repetitions of “[dear c.” and “[house of].” One of my favourite “[dear c.” poems reads: “To cross out is to add. I worry I might become unreal” (79). In this line, crossing out or leaving is a way of adding another chapter to the story, and a way in which the narrator makes a choice rather than following a written script. The poem also includes: “resurrection is a sense of direction […] I never wanted to be a wanderer, […] I plan to suffer greatly at my auctioned introduction into hope. This talent for getting lost requires effort’’ (89).

In many poems, Kelly reminds us of the various shapes death can take. Faced with the unknown, impermanence, and endless possibilities we die, transform, transcend, and experience rebirth, in an infinite cycle. For now, I am here, and if only for a brief moment, it might be enough. Just as when I read Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death, I found myself reading each poem again and finding new layers and meaning each time. I will keep coming back to Letters to Forget, as Kelly’s painfully accurate and relatable words convey and provoke intense feelings. This work is a strikingly beautiful collection that I know I will remember.

Lya Hennel (they iel) is a former Sinister Wisdom intern from France based in London, UK. They are passionate about queer multidisciplinary art and literature, poetry, and translating.

Mouth: Stories
Puloma Ghosh
Astra House, 2024, 224 pages
$26.00

Reviewed by Margaret Zanmiller

Puloma Ghosh’s stories in Mouth are made to read in one sitting, preferably starting at dusk with a storm rolling in, so that you can fall deep into the haunted world Ghosh weaves. The short stories establish themes of carnal desire and passionate death. Readers are reminded of the shadow selves that follow all of us. Using powerful language, Ghosh feeds a world of destruction that leaves space for intimacy and closeness.

Mouth’s narrators honor the banal things that happen every day with incredibly detailed observations that effectively place the reader in the fictional world: the party on the porch that’s separate from the party inside, the way cold feels against our skin, a lover leaving quietly, without a fight. In many of Ghosh’s stories, we are let into inner worlds that are expressed outwardly without shame, and always with pain, curiosity, and desire. Pages are lined with fresh monsters the narrators want to join, be held by, and become. Readers are provided a healthy dose of intensely descriptive body horror.

Ghosh writes for bisexuals preoccupied with death, former or current emo kids, fans of the TV show Yellowjackets, the movie Bones and All, or the band My Chemical Romance. Ghosh writes for those whose loneliness has chewed on them, eaten them, and spit them back out. Stick with the collection; Ghosh’s stories grow stronger with each page turn. Soon enough, they are smoking on the edge of your bed, eating raw meat from your fridge, looking at you through the mirror, and asking you to walk into a black hole with them.

Margaret Zanmiller is a Saint Paul dyke with a BA in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Minnesota.

A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories
Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Hogarth, 2024, 272 pages
$28.00

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

Mariana Enríquez, renowned for her 2021 International Booker Prize shortlisted work The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, haunts readers once more in her collection A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories. The twelve short stories, primarily set in Argentina, follow the horrors and lives of predominantly women narrators. Echoing themes of her previous work, Enríquez revisits sexism, illness, class inequality, gentrification, and mental and physical ruin throughout the text in a post-pandemic setting. A Sunny Place for Shady People is built on the language of mythology, as myth is explained and entangled in her stories.

In the collection, Enríquez tears womanhood apart; she inspects the ugly insides and confronts us with the pieces of what’s left. Her elements of horror are drawn from the dark and undesirable intricacies of humanity and femininity—the parts of ourselves we hide and shy away from. Her depictions of abandonment, absence, and women in isolation swiftly manifest into horror. She portrays scenes of disbelief, in which a woman’s intuition is diminished, and scenes of transformation, as when women are metamorphosed against their will in “Night Birds” or mutilate themselves for freedom in “Metamorphosis.” Enríquez explores women’s consciousness and experiences, as we witness them grapple with understanding themselves and the horrors to which they succumb.

Enríquez’s narrators are not perfect victims nor martyrs. Her characters live in worlds on the brink of collapse, built on colonialism, sexism, and paranoia. The beauty of Enríquez’s text lies in the unravelling of these forces and the authentic imperfections of her characters.

A Sunny Place for Shady People provokes visceral reactions through the stories’ building tension and direct, striking imagery. Her story “Refrigerator Cemetery” (one of her less grotesque works) exhibits horror in the images of countless abandoned refrigerators and naïve protagonists.

Enríquez’s final, most insidious story closes the collection cyclically, as “Black Eyes” showcases a rejection of the supernatural, as opposed to its invitation in the first story, “My Sad Dead.” Enríquez prompts readers to question how horror might dominate our lives if we let it in.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She recently completed her undergraduate study double majoring in English and Classics, and was a fall 2024 intern with Sinister Wisdom. Ruby is a lover, writer, artist, and poet, but mainly just a girl in the world.

Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down?
Allison Blevins
Persea Books, 2024, 70 pages
$17.00

Reviewed by Pelaya Arapakis

Allison Blevins’s award-winning book Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? is a lyrical meditation on the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition as experienced through the prism of a marriage. Following the daily lives of its central characters—Grim and Sergeant—Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? contemplates what it means to exist in a body among other bodies. Blevins’s hybrid narrative-in-vignettes defies conformity to a single genre, pushing and pulling between fragmented prose-poetry, fairytale, and auto-fiction, guiding us through difficult and deeply layered emotional terrains that are profound and heart-wrenching.

Masks figure prominently in Blevins’s work as a device to explore the multiplicity of identity. This thematic concern is first implied in the very epigraph of the text: “Under this mask another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces” (Claude Cahun). Soon after, we are introduced to Grim and Sergeant—personae of Blevins and her partner, respectively—as they navigate the world in bodies and identities that are in various states of flux. However, change is often accompanied by grief, and we bear witness to Grim, who mourns for the person she once was, the person she was before her illness, before “every moment [was] an accounting of pain” (61). Throughout this process, it becomes clear that identity is neither static nor singular, that “Grim is a character played by the woman she once was” (38). Here, identity is itself a mask—but not necessarily one that, when removed, unveils a definitive truth, but is instead a perpetual unfurling.

Throughout the narrative, Grim’s body is often rendered as a site of pain. Daily tasks become gruelling, “Grim tells the doctor, I want to stand long enough to make grilled cheese, want to walk the dark living room at night to check the children are breathing” (18). Still, Blevins speaks to the grounding force of the body. While “Grim often finds herself lost. . . Her body remains,” with its needs, desires, its state of simply being, binding her—binding us— to others: “we are not held together but bound to each other” (10). Grim is reminded of this visceral nature of embodiment in a medical waiting room, of “how we all do this strange moving together as marionettes. Like smelling armpits or ear wax or maybe dead skin squeezed from a tight black pore. Like remembering the weight of a past lover on your body. Like breaking apart or sewing together” (7). Yet, sometimes our needs conflict with those of people around us, and it is this very tension that Blevins captures with incredible nuance and poignancy. In a quarrel with the Sergeant, Grim asks what he needs, to which he responds, “I need you to need less from me” (41). Just as pain might course through Grim’s body, the quiet fracture of this confession reverberates throughout these pages.

Swirling between genres, Blevins weaves a gripping portrait of a marriage that is as devastating as it is tender. As the title suggests, Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down? reminds us that embodiment is shared, messy, and ineluctable, and that our bodies—with all the joys, aches, and complexities they bring—are our ultimate homes, even as they collapse around us.

Pelaya Arapakis (she/her) is a musician, arts worker, and freelance writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.

The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Angela Shanté
Page Street YA, 2024, 160 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” In these powerful poems, she confronts “Black Girls vs. The World.” She writes: “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free” (9). In the poet’s introduction, she confesses that “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing the title of by Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shanté claims that she wrote the book that she always wanted to read—a book to be read out loud—full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.

The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people. The salve poured into the wounds suffered by Black women is found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during her childhood years as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother and with her older sister, who assumed the maternal role when their mother was missing, became vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.

The poet writes of the “boxes,” or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb “to floss,” which means “to flaunt” in her own language. Through this word, she describes the economic boundaries that existed between herself, her sister, and the other children in the neighborhood whom she was told to call “the poor”:

“Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss” (18).

The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us” with the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their family members who instill in them certain codes of behavior and language. Other “boxes” become part of the wider, even more insidious influence of false socialization caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.

As I reviewed this poetry collection, I was drawn to the philosophy of James Baldwin in Begin Again—Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and works of the novelist and social critic. I began to consider the process of “unboxing” the self that Shanté describes in her poems. There are obvious similarities between this process of “unboxing” and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Professor Glaude writes:

“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly, he (Baldwin) intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. ‘You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it’” (35).

The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. She writes in the poem, “The South Bronx”: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty” (79). This exemplifies the recurring theme of her poems, that there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, nor ignored. She convinces readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Chiron Review, Seneca Review, Tuskegee Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.

Loving Corrections
adrienne maree brown
AK Press, 2024, 200 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

Loving Corrections is adrienne maree brown’s most relational book yet, exploring how communities can get “specific, and deeper, when we have accumulated the wisdom to challenge harmful norms of privilege and power” (4). brown wants us all to retain a curious posture in the face of diverse people and problems. Readers are invited to confront uncomfortable truths about their own biases—and how to confront others’—in the name of a love for our collective future.

brown did not write Loving Corrections to police activists, reprimanding them for not believing the right things or living out their solidarity in a specific way—in fact, brown’s essays rarely contain explicit political positions that may divide her audience. Instead, there is an entire chapter titled, “Righting Solidarity: Flocking Together.” She wisely shares that “confusion is a colonial tactic,” meaning that a lack of community between oppressed groups creates dissociation from intersectional issues that could be reconciled with a robust solidarity (85). Relationships come first in activism, brown believes, and it is the work of the activist to flock “with the people,” not to be in a position of power that confuses or fractures groups (92, italics brown’s).

In the chapter “Love Looks Like Accountability,” brown dives deep into how our personal relationships can have a ripple effect on how our society functions. In a digital world where “therapy speak” is often used incorrectly or in harmful ways, this chapter is a wonderful refresher on how we can love ourselves and others through the right ways of engaging in relationships. brown quotes Prentis Hemphill: “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (153). brown writes about how we must be responsible for our internal state and how it might impact others, how we must apologize and receive apologies, and how to know when it is best to let a relationship go. These feel like simple emotional teachings we learn in elementary school, but later in life, our capitalist system does not reward this loving behavior. Starting small with improving love in everyday relationships will create a more accountable and loving society.

In the conclusion to Loving Corrections, brown reveals that this is the last time she will write specifically for those “active in movements for social and environmental change” (189). This does not mean her work, nor ours, is close to finished. Loving Corrections is the sixth book that brown has written in the Emergent Strategy Series—which contains thirteen books in total—and oh boy, what a comprehensive and necessary series it is. These books are gentle yet mighty tools for activists and their communities. Loving Corrections affirms that, always, “there is love at the center” (7).

Courtney Heidorn (she/they) is an Assistant Editor for Chestnut Review and holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Azusa Pacific University. You can see more of their work in their chapbook, Palimpsest, from Bottlecap Press and in CURIOUS Magazine and Pearl Press. Find them on Instagram and Substack @palimpsestpoems.

To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers
Edited by Rae Garringer
The University Press of Kentucky, 2025, 112 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Home is a complicated thing. For many queer folks from Appalachia, home is too often a place longed for, but which we know will never quite fully have us. This collection captures that tension well, and importantly amplifies the voices of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalised peoples in the collection of essays and poetry. Living in spaces that don’t always love you back means that too many queer people move through the world braced for violence.

The collection gets right into the gut punch of what survival looks like with “What You Should Know Before You Kill Me” by Brandon Sun Eagle Jent (2-3). Jent writes, “This body is but a wave in the ocean of me,” (2) an assertion that queer existence is something larger than the physical body, and not easily erased. Rayna Momen’s “They Say All Kinds Are Welcome Here” lays bare the reality for so many, particularly people of colour in these spaces: “yet these [country] roads to prosperity / are full of [shit] potholes and bigotry” (4). The collection definitely doesn’t ease you in—you understand the nuances of the author’s lived experience before you finish the first essay.

Lucien Darjeun Meadows continues the conversation, “And I can never ‘go home,’ not really, not completely, ever again” (12). So, the work presents a question to the reader: Where exactly do you go and what do you do when home is both a longing and a loss? What I left with is that it’s up to us to carve out a space and fight for a place to be. I understand that this should inspire in some ways, but reading this during the current political climate in the United States left me feeling a little disheartened at the reality that we’ll seemingly always have to fight just to be.

Every piece in the collection speaks to those questions of longing and belonging. hermelinda cortés writes about being Mexican-American in a space that doesn’t “claim” her and her choice to stay, rooted by something deeper than belonging in a traditional sense. Likewise, Momen’s “Growing up Black in Appalachia / made me want to fight and to flee / left me internalized and empowered / to live a double life / like Affrilachians learn to do” (26) echoes the complexity of existence as a marginalized person in Appalachia. Garringer also acknowledges the difficulty in addressing these questions of identity and belonging: “This, too, is a part of the place I call home. And not talking about these horrific truths is a way of protecting them, condoning them, even” (46).

It’s hard not to feel sad reading the collection, but there are also lovely moments of love and hope—not naive hope—but the kind that we struggle for and progress towards, even if it still feels disheartening to fight for it constantly. Rosenthal’s segment, “A Queer Place Called Home” (63-70) was the most comforting read in the work. It offered a glimpse of a future for queer life and love in Appalachia. I suppose the collection answers the questions the authors raise by showing that home might not necessarily be someplace to return to, but instead something to create. D. Stump writes, “We find meaning in all the places meaning calls to us. We find home in all the places that invite us to sit at the table and eat” (82).

In the final pages, Jent returns, telling readers that “this world loves me too” (83-84). I finished To Belong Here feeling exhausted and a little sad, but mostly grateful for the book and the voices it holds—an undeniable proof that we’re here, creating and continuing.

Allison Quinlan now feels more conflicted about missing home. They are a nonprofit manager and teacher currently living in Scotland (originally from rural Georgia, United States).

Reflections in a Rearview Mirror
Teya Schaffer
2025, 54 pages
$10.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Teya Schaffer’s short volume of prose and poetry begins with a piece called “Appreciations.” It’s a conversation between an unnamed narrator and a street woman she calls Valerie—aka the “dog lady”—that takes place as the two sit on a curb in San Francisco circa 1970 or 1980. As the two talk companionably about the Free Clinic, women’s land, and animal rights, they are interrupted not once but twice by a man who aggressively approaches and insults them, excoriating the narrator for her masculine appearance. Her friend Valerie ignores the man. Our narrator takes Valerie’s lead, and the man eventually goes away.

I read “Appreciations” decades ago in a journal called Common Lives/Lesbian Lives in issue number seven, Spring 1983 (65-68). It struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a vivid picture of that San Francisco street life. But it also strikes me as a vivid reminder that attacks—verbal and physical—on our queer bodies are not anything new.

Other stories in this slim collection explore difficult and important relationships. “A Letter to San Francisco” is a painful correspondence between a woman who finds her lesbian footing in San Francisco and her closeted, married lover, originally published in Sinister Wisdom: 31 Winter 1987 (67-71). “With Love, Lena” is an aging Holocaust survivor’s reminiscence of her secret lover in New York City on the occasion of her death. It is a powerful story about survival in all of its forms, and though it was first published in Sinister Wisdom: 29/30 The Tribe of Dina, A Jewish Women’s Anthology (157-158) last century, it still is as powerful today.

The poems and stories in Reflections in a Rearview Mirror talk about illness, motherhood, and widowhood—all within the framework of what it means to be an out lesbian—in the late 1900s and now, in the early 2000s. They are frank, powerful, and moving reminders—a kind of historical document but also a road map of what it still means to be a lesbian, a mother, an ex-lover, a widow, and a wife, even now, in this perilous and treacherous time.

Judith Katz is the author of two novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She is currently working on sequels to both novels and is still meditating on her novel in a drawer, The Atomic Age.

Season of Eclipse
Terry Wolverton
Bella Books, 2024, 292 pages
$18.95

Reviewed by Lucy Soth

I couldn’t put down Season of Eclipse by Terry Wolverton. In the novel, a famous author witnesses a terrorist act and must go into hiding. She finds herself fighting for her life against a vast and powerful conspiracy. While drawn in by the novel’s suspense and page-turning intrigue, I came away appreciating its quieter and more complex questions of identity and personal fulfillment.

Marielle Wing is a fifty-one-year-old author who pours herself into her work. While she has reached heights in her career, she lacks fulfillment in her personal life. We meet her disappointed, returning from a conference after losing a book award and engaging in a meaningless, self-destructive tryst with a much younger woman. At the airport, she witnesses an explosion and photographs the alleged perpetrators. Taking photos may seem an odd, detached choice in the wake of a near-death experience, and Marielle’s choices occasionally seem improbable. However, we soon realize that Marielle’s experience of life is fundamentally disconnected. She is overly preoccupied with her looks and her writing talents and very concerned with her public image. She lives in self-imposed isolation, with only her ex-girlfriend’s cat as a close companion. The narration is critical of Marielle, foregrounding her faults with biting clarity.

Soon after the attack, an FBI agent visits Marielle and informs her that she must enter witness protection to ensure her safety. Her death is announced to the public, and she is forced to assume a new identity as a humble Midwestern school teacher named Lorraine Kaminsky. Marielle must contend with the death of her public persona and the loss of everything that made her exceptional. This is an interesting premise in itself, in which a famous egoist must adopt an anonymous and ordinary life, and the strength of the novel lies in Marielle’s internal narrative during this rupture. Her vanity, impulsivity, and ego fight against the life-or-death demand of anonymity. Her flaws are deeply human. Most sympathetic is her unfulfilled need for connection—an open wound that she seems unable to acknowledge fully. Marielle is as multifaceted and realistic as she is occasionally frustrating. Unable to accept her circumstances, she fantasizes about her splashy return to public life. But her humdrum existence doesn’t stay ordinary for long, as she’s soon faced with new threats against her life—and still others against her legacy, as her publishers announce the pending release of a posthumous novel, one that Marielle didn’t write.

Marielle is not an immediately likeable character, and that’s what makes her growth so compelling. Over the course of the novel, she can only ensure her survival by letting go of every aspect of her identity. As readers, we bear witness to her metamorphosis, in which her exposure to grave danger forces her to become a new person, one who must accept vulnerability, who must trust and depend upon others, and who can finally be open to true connection.

Lucy Soth is a writer, researcher, and dog walker based in Washington, D.C. In her free time, she makes lampshades and undertakes ambitious beading projects.