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.

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.

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.

Swagger: A Celebration of the Butch Experience
Curated by Rae Theodore and edited by Nat Burns
Flashpoint Publications, 2024, 174 pages
$16.95

“And think about / How much I love / Butches / And the people / Who love them”

(“Butch 4 Butch,” Beck Guerra Carter, 72).

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Swagger is a celebration and an exploration of the identity, history, and community of butch lesbians. Whether you identify as butch or simply want to understand butchness in its multifaceted glory, this work offers great insight and connection. The work begins with artwork such as “Gender” by Ash, and unfolds into retellings and stories from elder butches and poetry that captures the spirit of butch existence. One of the earlier sections written by Merril Mushroom—a name familiar to many Sinister Wisdom readers—announces the book’s intention to define, complicate, and joyfully celebrate butchness, beginning with a non-rigid definition of ‘butch.’ Her words set the tone for the rest of the compilation of voices adding to the conversation on being butch, and reminding readers that defining butchness can be both simple and complex.

The book continually grapples with key questions: What does it mean to be butch? How do we see, define, or know it within ourselves? The explorations in Swagger are as varied as the individuals writing them, but every work has some exploration of these questions, and many presented answers! Georgie Orion lets us know that butches can be anyone—“Lesbians from Girl Scouts. Lesbians from camp. Lesbians from church. Lesbians from school. Basically every grown-up lesbian I had ever met. And they all showed up” (21). Understandings of the intersection between community and the celebration of a shared, comfortable, normalized identity were present all through the work. In addition to descriptions of building a shared community, the topic of self-creation features in several pieces.

The question of masculinity and the boundaries of emulation versus reclamation, which I have always considered a distinctly butch expression, is a recurrent theme. Virginia Black writes,

“While I have emulated men and masculine presentation, I have never wanted to be one, nor felt the need to defend my space as a lesbian against a man…unless he was trying to manspread on public transportation, so I did it first to prove a point. How straight men perceive me doesn’t shape my self-definition” (26).

Cindy Rizzo’s “City Butch” grapples with the insecurities that accompany socially constructed butch stereotypes and reaffirms the confidence to define oneself. She writes, “How far could I stray from a stereotype so I could be true to myself?. . . I knew in spite of everything that I was a butch” (28). The answer to the questions of identity definition and constructed lines aren’t explicit, but several pieces set out that identity can be self-determined and fluid. Virginia Black closes their work by noting the possibility inherent to her self-determination of butchness. How should she define herself and her butchness? They write, “Exhale. / However I want” (27).

Swagger honors the vibrant past of butchness while embracing the ever-evolving diversity of butch identity (and ever-evolving understanding of butch identity). Several authors in the collection touch on trans identity and butchness, which is important in a collection like Swagger. As Audre Lorde writes, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives” (Sister Outsider, 138). Transphobic rhetoric persists, even in queer communities, erasing the contributions of the people at the forefront of the fight for liberation. Transness is celebrated in this work, too. Swagger sets up a conversation to challenge misconceptions that masculine presentation determines gender or that gender identity and gender performance are inherently the same. The collection also makes it clear that socially drawn lines can become tools of resistance and experimentation.

Finally, I loved reading the authors’ biographies at the end of the work, not only because it gave me insight into the identities of the people creating but also because it provided information on connecting. If you couldn’t tell from my earlier havering on community and connection, I consider it a vital aspect of the queer community, so it was lovely to find these incredible people compiled at the end of the work. Swagger embodies queer community and connection in a really beautiful way. Every butch joyfully existing is evidence of a queer future, so I’ll leave you with Victoria Anne Darling’s rallying words, “Don’t, don’t, don’t / Tone it down” (33).

Allison Quinlan (they/she) volunteers as a copyeditor for Sinister Wisdom and manages a non-profit in the UK that supports survivors of abuse. They’re exceptionally bad at keeping lavender plants alive. . . one could say they’ve become a lavender menace.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
Fannie Flagg
Random House, 1987, 416 pages
$9.99

Reviewed by Allison Quinlan

Growing up queer in a small Georgia town, I was always searching for glimpses of myself in the stories around me. Representation wasn’t just hard to come by—it often felt impossible, especially in a community steeped in religious traditions where queerness wasn’t something openly acknowledged, let alone celebrated. Enter the 1991 film adaptation of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I didn’t read the book until this year when it was kindly gifted to me, but the book and the film are quite similar.

The story deeply resonated with me as a teenager, offering a rare depiction of what I identified as sapphic love. The bond between Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison was unlike anything I’d seen on screen before. Before I watched it with my family for the first time, my mother described it as a “movie about two friends who start a café together and kill an abusive husband” (sorry for the spoiler there about the husband, but the book and movie have been out since the nineties, my friend). As soon as Idgie and Ruth interacted in the film, I already doubted they were just besties. Talk about a “historians will call them friends” moment—those women were not straight.

The novel makes their love clear. When Ruth first comes to visit the Threadgoodes, Idgie’s mother tells her siblings that Idgie has a “crush” on Ruth and that no one ought to laugh at her (81). The author describes Ruth and Idgie as “happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be” (87). Ruth’s description of Idgie as her “bee charmer” (87) is a sweet pet name to me—no different from calling my partner “darling.” When Ruth leaves to marry Frank, Idgie tells her she can’t go—that Ruth loves her, not him (90). It’s baffling to me that people often reduce this relationship to platonic friendship; maybe that says something about the reluctance to recognise queer love in media.

However, Fried Green Tomatoes only centres the relationship for a small portion of the work, and the work as a whole necessitates serious critique. Watching the movie as a white, queer teenager, I didn’t engage with the pretty blatant racism and focused solely on the queer relationship. There’s a lot wrong with the portrayals of Blackness. There’s a split in the book of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white people. The ‘good’ white people could be the wikipedia entry for ‘white savior.’ Even the ‘bad’ white characters are barely and rarely bad, except Frank, who is portrayed as ‘bad’ primarily because he’s a rapist first, racist second. Grady is a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), yet Idgie remains close friends with him.

The author writes Black characters as loyal servants happy with subservient positions. Ninny and Evelyn treat Black people as some sort of strange ‘other.’ Throughout the book, the descriptions of Black characters’ physical appearance, speech, and behaviors are terrible. Their appearances often directly correlate to their characters’ supposed morality (particularly how ‘light’ or ‘dark’ they were (pp. 73-75). Fried Green Tomatoes is a fictional work—any argument that the work is trying to ‘reflect reality’ is selective; remember that the book portrays an openly sapphic relationship in Alabama in the 1930s. The stances presented are of the author’s own volition. The work seemingly only considers racism to be racism when it crosses a constructed line—one that separates a KKK member from a white woman’s othering of Blackness; but both hold the same racist ideologies.

Fried Green Tomatoes gave me representation that felt personal and tangible, watching Idgie and Ruth live, love, and build a life together—raising a child, running a café, and supporting each other—gave me a lot of validation during a time when I didn’t get to see much of myself in the world around me. But Fried Green Tomatoes reiterates a narrative of whiteness and white saviourism that we cannot and should not ignore. I encourage you to read “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe aka A Little Old Lady’s Charming and Sweet and Racist Memoir” by Marcie Alvis Walker for a more pointed explanation of the issues, with text examples, in the book and film.

For those considering reading Fried Green Tomatoes because it’s a southern lesbian classic, I would urge you to explore and invest your time and money in a different sapphic classic—one that doesn’t downplay racism or pretend colorblindness is a viable form of anti-racism. You can find a post here by Katrina Jackson about some great queer romance recommendations. If you’re interested in reading explicitly southern queer love stories, I’m working my way through Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson and like it so far, but if you’re looking for something a little more story-like, you may like Johnson’s Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women.

Allison Quinlan (they/she) works in the UK non-profit sector. They enjoy a good duck-watching session on weekends and a nice oat milk latte.

The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies
Maggie Cooper
Bull City Press, 2024, 49 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

Maggie Cooper’s The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is a short book of stories, or more accurately, portraits, of a wide variety of fictional environments formed around women. Each story is just a few pages long but depicts an intricate world that is vividly and beautifully imagined: a convent that specializes in making jams, a vast system of caves and the women exploring them, a ship of female pirates who leave their old lives behind, a lush, growing island formed by bodies. Although some stories have characters who develop and change, for the most part, it is entrancing enough just to watch each world unfold and discover its inner workings. It was with reluctance that I moved from story to story, wishing I could remain longer in each.

Cooper masterfully moves between genres, styles, and tones, with each story having a unique voice. Some stories are fantasies, some are dystopian, and some are more grounded in reality with hints of magic or the supernatural. Some read like fables, and some are blunt and conversational. The overall effect is a rich and rewarding reading experience that kept me excited to see what would come next.

Often, one brief detail adds a huge amount of depth and imagery to a story. I found these details often—details like the mention of a cathedral ceiling in “The Cure,” which introduced a huge amount of new context and implications, or a brief remark made by a jaded tour guide at the end of the titular story, which flipped my perception of how much of the tour was officially sanctioned and how much was just commentary. These worlds easily stretch beyond the limits of the pages and raise many unanswered questions, creating opportunities to think more deeply about each story after reading. In this way, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is an immensely rewarding and thought-provoking read.

What is The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies trying to say, though? The blurb on the back of the book indicates an intention to “point to the ways that narrowly defined femininity feeds exploitation and violence, inviting readers to consider the breadth of ‘woman’ as a category with a wide-ranging history, present, and future.” This is most successful in “The City,” which at first presents a society of women that seems almost utopian but gradually reveals its limitations and narrow, exclusionary nature, as well as a bit of context about the outside world. Without giving too much away, this story deals with queerness in a way that is interesting and unexpected and leads to more speculation once the story ends.

Of the other stories that more overtly address the theme of narrowly defining femininity and the harm this causes, many depict environments where women are reduced to the acts of giving birth and raising children and where those who don’t—or can’t—face consequences. Other stories center on the harm and exploitation women uniquely face and depict environments that harness this exploitation for a variety of purposes. For the most part, though, these themes aren’t explored in a particularly innovative way or one that differs from other media that addresses these same ideas. Like “The City,” many allude to or overtly address queerness with a broader understanding of the category of ‘woman’ than this book’s older counterparts. However, the motif of queerness generally isn’t factored into the plot or worlds in a significant way—for the most part, it often feels like an added detail without which the story could have easily existed.

But in the end, nothing detracts from what makes The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies a truly memorable, intriguing, and beautifully-written read. What will stay with you is the sticky feeling of jam and sun in vineyards, the dark, damp echo of an ancient cave, the creak of limbs twisting into a tree, the sulfurous scent of a pool of water, and the taste of a red cherry shake.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and educator living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has previously worked with Sinister Wisdom on A Sturdy Yes of People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle.

Payback
Penny Mickelbury
Bywater Books, 2025, 436 pages
$23.95

Reviewed by Judith Katz

Penny Mickelbury’s fifteenth novel is a switch from her well-loved detective fiction and a foray into the historical. Payback is a jam-packed, fast-moving story of gay Black life in Harlem in the early 1950s.

Mickelbury’s background as a playwright is in full view here, as Payback’s rich cast of characters drive this fast-paced story. The lead player is Elleanor Roberta “Bobbie” Hilliard, a handsome, no-nonsense butch. She not only works the bar at her Black-women-only night club, the Slow Drag—she owns the building and one or two others. Her generosity and street smarts are apparent as soon as we meet her—dressed to the nines in high butch drag, she rescues a young gay man from a bashing, brings him home, and from that point on makes him her fast friend and unofficial little brother. In short order we also learn that Bobbie has provided a livelihood for her dear friend Jack—a woman who has survived a gang rape and a beating—by employing her as a driver. She has also provided fair and decent employment for all the women who work in her club.

Central to Mickelbury’s story is Bobbie’s romance with alluring femme Grace Hannon. Grace is an accomplished OB-GYN at Harlem Hospital, beloved by her patients and nurses, and put upon by her disrespectful white male colleagues. And while we readers spend a good amount of time with Bobbie and Grace together—eating Grace’s wonderful cooking or munching on burgers from the local joint; luxuriating in satin pajamas in a beautifully made bed; or throwing fabulous parties, the two are more than just a socializing power couple. Grace is called on repeatedly to aid a battered woman and Bobbie is always ready to take part in a protest or jump in with a crowbar when some eponymous payback is needed.

The historical people and places who make cameos in Payback add to the richness Mickelbury has created here. In addition to her entrepreneurial and fisticuffs skills, Bobbie is a talented pianist and an early supporter of Black Mask, an evolving arts organization in Harlem. Notorious, real-life gangster and madame, Stephanie St. Clair, makes multiple heroic appearances and forges an unlikely community alliance.

The combination of Mickelbury’s skilled storytelling and complex characters makes Payback a rich, fast-moving, feminist adventure—as satisfying as one of Dr. Grace Hannon’s legendary meals, and as generous and open-hearted as Bobbie Hilliard herself.

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.

Lucky Red
Claudia Cravens
Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2024, 320 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Catherine Horowitz

According to author Claudia Cravens, Lucky Red was inspired by the “limited menu” of character archetypes in Westerns, like the “mysterious stranger who rides into town” and the “hooker with a heart of gold.” Lucky Red plays with, and in many ways inverts, these tropes. The hooker is the protagonist, Bridget, and the center of her own adventure, instead of contributing to someone else’s. Bridget is a young girl who finds herself orphaned, far from home, and with no money in the semi-fictional town of Dodge, Kansas. There, she finds work at the only female-run brothel in town, the Buffalo Queen, where she meets a variety of characters and finds herself in the center of trouble more than once.

Lucky Red centers on Bridget’s relationships: with Spartan Lee, a female gunfighter who brings a notorious criminal into town for his trial; Jim Bonnie, Dodge’s deputy sheriff; and her fellow workers. Jim initially has an arrangement with the Buffalo Queen’s owners to spend time with Bridget for free in return for providing security. However, over time, he falls in love with Bridget and asks her to marry him, which she ultimately declines because, well, she’s gay. She has various infatuations with women at the Buffalo Queen, first Sallie, an out-of-town friend of one of the owners, and then Spartan, who makes a similar deal to Jim—time with Bridget in exchange for elevating the Queen’s image through association.

Bridget’s romance with Spartan escalates quickly: it begins as a few brief interactions, then a drunken tryst on a night off, and then sanctioned sexual encounters that mean far more to Bridget than those with her regular patrons. I can’t say it’s unrealistic for gay girls to get swept up in their first “relationship” so quickly and act recklessly because of it. However, as a reader, I felt like a frustrated friend on the sidelines, totally unconvinced by their relationship. It seemed far too rushed to warrant Bridget’s extreme feelings and actions. Bridget’s relationship with Jim was much more well-developed, with more time to grow and a real rapport between the characters.

This wasn’t the only frustrating part of Lucky Red; Bridget is often a frustrating character and can be difficult to root for. She is naive and impulsive, which is part of her initial charm to the Buffalo Queen’s owners and patrons. However, her immaturity often leads to trouble and sometimes unintentionally wrongs people. In the end (spoiler alert), one of these people returns for revenge and, with Spartan’s help, robs the Buffalo Queen—which they get away with because of a lack of security. Almost every element of this betrayal was inadvertently caused by Bridget, from trusting Spartan too easily to losing the security Jim once provided. However, as is a pattern throughout the book, she doesn’t realize her fault in this when it happens.

In the end, though, Lucky Red was satisfying. While I thought Bridget and Spartan’s relationship would end with a literal “riding off into the sunset” moment, I was surprised to see it plummet into disaster in a way that made far more sense—and is more realistic for a first whirlwind lesbian love. Bridget hunts down Spartan, helps take back the stolen money, and kills her in an epic showdown. This was a sort of redemption for Bridget, who proved that she could recognize and begin to learn from her mistakes. I can’t help but hope everything works out for her.

There are other great parts of Lucky Red, too. The worldbuilding of Dodge is full and vivid, true to the lively atmosphere of the Western genre. It has a fun array of side characters whom I grew to genuinely like and some twists and turns that are hard to anticipate. And ultimately, Bridget is a complex character, and for a book with a goal of reimagining the Western genre and bringing new depth to a two-dimensional archetype, that is an achievement.

Catherine Horowitz is a writer and educator living in Washington, D.C. She earned a B.A. in English and Jewish Studies from Oberlin College. You can find her other work in Bright Wall/Dark Room, New Voices, and the Jewish Women’s Archive. She has previously worked with Sinister Wisdom on A Sturdy Yes of People: Selected Writings by Joan Nestle.