To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage
Avid Reader Press, 2025, 448 pages
$30.00

Reviewed by Sam Carter

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage is an absolutely stunning novel following Steph Harper from adolescence to adulthood as she runs from the dissatisfaction of her life and toward the farthest possible destination—the moon. Largely beginning in the Cherokee Nation’s capital, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Ramage’s debut novel spares no expense in taking readers on a journey spanning across geographies, time, and of course, space. As a sucker for messy and occasionally frustrating queer characters, To the Moon and Back offered all the sorrows and joys I was looking for. With NASA having just launched their first mission to the moon in over fifty years, there is no better time to dive into this book!

What to say about this novel that can possibly do it justice? To the Moon and Back is incredibly rich, holding a mirror to readers and characters alike and challenging us to reflect upon our pasts and how we’ve come to understand them. Particularly Steph, our lesbian lead, is fantastically messy and self-focused. As she moves throughout the story, every bit of resistance Steph faces is met with a greater assertion of control. Paralleling the incredibly strict guidelines to astronaut candidacy, Steph attempts to mold her life in the way she desperately wants it to be. Her near apathetic focus creates a shaky fabrication of reality at constant risk of collapse.

Ramage additionally foregrounds a number of other women throughout the story such as Steph’s sister Kayla, her mother Hannah, and her college girlfriend, Della, weaving together intersections and diversions regarding race, class, sexuality, and indigeneity among them. From those uncritically nostalgic toward their Cherokee heritage, to those who want nothing to do with it, to those who were divorced from their history and culture in infancy, Ramage displays an amalgamation of experience that never feels too convoluted or rushed.

Della is introduced to the novel near the end of Part One, bringing a refreshing narrative that contrasts Steph’s growing self-obsession. Della, separated from her Cherokee heritage by a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) when she was a baby, strives to reaffirm authority over her life. Enacted in 1978, the ICWA was a piece of legislation intended to disrupt the forceful separation of indigenous families and communities, granting tribes jurisdiction in the fostering and adoption of indigenous children. Della’s and Steph’s narratives immediately collide as they begin college, culminating in illuminating—if tragic—revelations for them both.

Overall, To the Moon and Back is about love and how we internalize and engage with our past in the present. Temporalities are not confined to a strict binary of good and bad, just as love is not isolated to a single notion of purity. Steph’s journey depicts the parallel and intersectional experience of life, in which one’s ambition can act as both a balm, and as a hubris-fuelled form of self-destruction. However, in engaging with the differing cultivations of our pasts, Ramage foregrounds the power of reflection, in which looking back can incite a future bettered by change.

Sam Carter is a butch archivist and MA student at University College Dublin in Ireland. When she’s not reading, you’ll find her listening to dreadfully loud rock music and wandering toward the beach. You can find her on instagram @sam.carter83.

Hauntings
Vernon Lee, in conversation with Gretchen Felker-Martin and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Smith & Taylor Classics, 2025, 198 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by Rivaa Ubrani

Vernon Lee’s Hauntings is a lusciously gothic quintet of stories whose intricate Italian settings echo with the ghosts and goddesses of half-remembered girls and women. Writing behind the pseudonym “Vernon Lee,” Violet Paget was one of the forerunners of supernatural fiction whose various stories were serialized in British literary journals during the late 1800s.

Despite writing amidst the general late Victorian craze for ghost stories, Lee distinguished her tales with their embodied settings, at once intimate and alienating to readers. Drawing from her own rich history of travelling, Lee’s nomadic characters radiate an “in-betweenness”; they neither fit into Lee’s Italy as locals nor into Lee’s world as persons, tending as they do to flicker between the real and the spectral realms of being.

Lee’s tales, with their ambiguous endings and psychological half-thrills, are in a sense deeply queer stories. Lee herself was both a staunch feminist and a pacifist who used her pseudonym proudly in both her private and public life and was known to dress in “mannish” attire. This, coupled with her refusal to abide by the heteronormative marital norms of the late Victorian period and her intense friendships with women, has led critics to read Lee as a queer woman.

Though confirming such a claim is elusive and perhaps historically invasive, lesbian experiences nevertheless color the pages of Hauntings. Morally gray women and feminine men take the starring role in all Lee’s stories, blurring the lines between guardian angels and succubi. They play witches, murderesses, and phantasmic Italian noblewomen who both bless and curse the tales’ protagonists with equal vigor.

What truly haunts Lee’s characters, though, is the power of art. Whether in sculpture, as song, or as a carefully-crafted portrait, the artistic looms over Lee’s Hauntings as a wraith-like presence—an unattainable ideal at once hankered-for and horrifying. Her collection thus operates in line with one of poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s most notable quotes: “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, / and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains / to destroy us” (“The First Elegy”).

The most moving of Lee’s tales is her opening story, “Amor Dure.” A short story conveyed in epistles that frames the slow coming-of-age of a sea witch from an uncannily detached perspective, this tale combines mythic tropes and Mediterranean imagery to bolster the emotional impact of its slowly unravelling yarn. Cursed to bring every soul she encounters to romantic ruin, this sea witch inverts the norms of the seaside Italian coast she washes onto, effectively annihilating them with her beauty.

I invite everyone to be annihilated by this and the rest of Lee’s uncannily gorgeous meditations on the artistic process as soon as you can.

Rivaa Ubrani (she/her) is an Indian poet, editor, and aspiring children’s book author, based in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Shakespeare Studies and interning at Sinister Wisdom. Her work often traces the intersections of mental illness, myth, and the hyperreal.

Missing Sam
Thrity Umrigar
Algonquin Books, 2026, 320 pages
$29.00

Reviewed by Kara L. Zajac

Missing Sam is a deeply moving story about the multifaceted depths of loss and the rebuilding of strength in relationships during recovery. In this gripping, suspenseful novel, Umrigar sheds light on moving past the trivial nuances that stagnate our lives, like going to bed angry, navigating the gender bias of traditional families, or trying to survive the bitter, spiteful criticism of social media as a queer, brown, Muslim in a supposedly liberal, open-minded suburb in Ohio.

After a fight the night before, Sam goes on a morning run all alone, leaving her wife, Ali, and her phone at home. When Sam doesn’t return home after several hours, Ali is unsure if Sam is trying to get even or if something terrible has happened. Thinking she must wait 48 hours before reporting her wife missing, Ali makes a few mistakes before going to the police, who ask why she waited so long. I can understand why she would want to delete the anger-fueled texts, those hurtful words spat back and forth that led to Sam sleeping in the guest bedroom the night before she disappeared. Fighting with your spouse could definitely appear incriminating in a missing persons case. Soon after, a grad student inappropriately obsessed with Sam oversteps boundaries with social media posts, and newspaper articles imply Ali could be doing more to aid the safe return of her wife, turning the local opinion against her. The media’s scrutiny is bringing the town’s Islamophobia, as well as their homophobia, bubbling to the surface as they criticize Ali’s every move and her intentions as an Indian-Muslim in the U.S., even canceling pending contracts with her interior design firm. Suddenly, Ali feels like a suspect and is caught defending herself when she should be trying to locate her wife.

In this untypical, don’t-know-what-you-have-until-it’s-gone story, we experience the power of forgiveness as Ali reaches out to both of their estranged families.

We will fight, we will make mistakes, we will say angry things to one another. But then as mysteriously as a flower blooming from a seed, as impossibly miraculous as an earth covered with flowers, we will find our way back to one another, we will recognize that we are both stranded in our own histories, that the only antidote for our difficult past is to double down on love, and we will forgive (303)

Using the strength of family bonds to get through the most difficult of times and learning that the unrelenting capacity to love doesn’t always mean forgetting, but understanding each other’s differences and choosing to love anyway, we see the character’s humanness grow with the story. “I’ve wasted all these years trying to change Ali, when all along, the only person I could’ve changed lived within me” (304). With relatable, yet flawed characters, the reader has no choice but to root for them. Umrigar’s lyrical, yet fast-paced writing will leave you wanting more, staying up later than your bedtime because you just can’t put it down. Missing Sam is a great, thought-provoking, heart-string-tugging read perfect for book clubs.

Kara Zajac is the author of The Significance of Curly Hair: A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss, which won the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Inspirational Nonfiction and was chosen for “The Best Books We Read in 2024” by the Independent Book Review. Its follow-up, The Special Recipe for Making Babies, was a finalist in 2022’s Charlotte Lit/ Lit South Awards for Nonfiction. Kara’s work has been published in Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian.com, Voraka Magazine, Story Circle Anthology, and Imperfect Life Magazine. She can be found at www.KaraZajac.com

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
Megan Milks
Feminist Press, 2026, 336 pages
$17.95

Reviewed by [sarah] Cavar

Milk: It’s everywhere, in everything (12). So says Megan Milks in Mega Milk, a wide-ranging reflection on race, gender, size, species, and milk, a secretion that looms large in the U.S. corporate-cultural zeitgeist. Milk has undergone something of a transition in the decades since Milks’s childhood, shifting shape from a hallmark of the healthy, all-American, and notably white diet, into something of a commercial downward spiral, blame for which has been attributed to anything from Gen Z, to veganism, to allergies. With this fluidity in mind, Milks is invested in the “trans potentiality of milk” (28), the capacity of the fluid to shift shape and meaning not only in rhetoric, but in the bodyminds of those who produce, exchange, and consume it.

In approaching milk’s trans potentiality, Milks begins with what might be understood as the cis potential of milk, detailing the lives of cows subjected to abusive breeding and milking regimes, either as incubators or as inseminators. For Milks, the lived experience of cows is entangled both with life-giving (sustenance for their late cat, Claude) and life-taking (the premature killing of those cows that have outlived their “production value” [86] as well as the suffering of migrant workers, including children, forced to work on these farms). Likewise, they acknowledge that, as a formula-fed baby, cows have been something of a “foster mother” (132) to them—coming into uncomfortable proximity with the racialized and classed position of prior centuries’ wet nurses.

The trans potentiality of milk also emerges in its crossings from word, to name, to material necessity. “Milk,” as a word, summons “cow,” a term appended to fat, feminized people, Milks’s child-self included. Milk, and its absence, becomes symbolic of Milks’s disordered eating. Additionally, the material attachment of milk to the breast—and, by extension, to femininity, motherhood, and the concept of femaleness itself—is rich territory for trans exploration: in “The Letdown: Lactation Suite,” Milks historicizes their relationship to a body coercively assigned female at birth; the complexities of binding, intimacy, and self-knowledge; and to the expectations and demands placed upon nursing parents.

Much like the contradictory expectations placed upon trans people—both to transition “fully” for legitimacy’s sake, and not to transition at all—nursing parents (understood as “mothers”) face dual pressure to embrace the “naturalness” of the breast and to embrace the science of formula so as to preserve their looks and properly nourish their children. This places people of marginalized genders, whether nursing or not, into what Milks correctly puns a “double-bind”: there is no way to fully satisfy a cisheteropatriarchal system in its insatiable hunger for subjugation across species, gender, and positionality.

Race, too, is implicated in the commercial and symbolic impacts of milk, particularly for the U.S. In the essay “MAGA Milk,” Milks quotes a speech by then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in 1923: “Upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depend upon it the very growth and virility of the white race” (172). Indeed, the racialization of milk—not to mention its embeddedness in systems of white, christian supremacy—extend further back than U.S. empire: in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, breastmilk was understood as excess menstrual blood, saved and transmuted in order to feed newborn babies. “Bad milk,” including milk contaminated by unsanitary dairy practices, was an affront not only to a baby’s health but to its selfhood, a kind of ontological contamination informed by racist, classist ideologies. Later, after a cultural flip spurred on by the American eugenics movement, healthy, “pure” milk became a hallmark of the fit family—once again, milk consumption (albeit of a different kind) was a prerequisite for purity, goodness, and normality.

It is no surprise, then, that Milks’s best moments in this collection are moments of profound impurity—moments where their thoughts cross from human to nonhuman, diluting the myths of fitness and purity the image of milk now offers. Milks, in escaping themself, escapes the inevitable inadequacies of anthropocentric interpretation when attempting to approach nonhuman ways of knowing. In the startling essay “Milking the Bull,” Milks decides to inseminate themself with the sperm of a bull, and in so doing, internalizes and ultimately reproduces his story in a queer, literary (re)birth. The latter pages of the essay are devoted not to Milks’s experiences, but the bull’s, and the reader follows the narrative to his life’s inevitable end. This essay—perhaps the most uncomfortable in the entire collection—is a highlight, both for its taboo subject matter and for the empathy and intentionality of its portrayal. In this moment, more than any other, Milks sits in the crevice between their body and another’s, and asks what it means to cross that boundary, to trans it, together.

As a constellation of essays on milk’s many meanings and potentialities, Mega Milk is deeply, powerfully uncomfortable. At times, I felt impatient with the text, eager to move from moments of observation and reflection to critical analysis, particularly regarding the nonhuman animals on whose bodily fluids the book relies. Particularly in moments where milk is present but its nonhuman producers, notably, are absent (such as in “Tres Leches”), it feels as though cows are a specter haunting a story that tries to be about something else—about gender, about economics, about family, about identity. While touching on the ethical and environmental urgency of critique, Mega Milk is persistently reflective in a way I did not expect, and struggle to collect my feelings about.

At the same time, Milks anticipates my critique, meets it before it escapes my mouth, or my hands, onto the page. “No, it’s personal essays,” they explain to a Hindu physical therapist, who asks if the collection is “making a case against dairy” (265). In a roundabout way, Milks has, throughout the course of the text, called out some of my own bona fides: whiteness and rurality of upbringing, transness and chosen distance from the “femaleness” yoked to us from birth, experiences of restrictive, disorderly eating. Then there is veganism, part of my life for twelve of my twenty-seven years, and the attendant expectations that this collection do the polemic work that it neither claims nor seeks to do. This is a trans book, a queer book, a book about openings and potentialities. There exist dozens of polemics describing accurately and in detail the evils of industrial animal agriculture, not to mention the white supremacist nationalisms embedded in American food production and distribution. So I let the text rest, took time to think. Let my thoughts gestate, squeeze out what remains. And at that ending is how I begin this review.

[sarah] Cavar is the author of Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026). They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies from the University of California, Davis, and can be found online at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.

Big Swiss
Jen Beagin
Scribner, 2023, 352 pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Kelsey McGarry

Beagin’s novel centers on Greta, a middle-aged woman in Hudson, New York, whose life has quietly drifted into an unusual orbit. Once a pharmacy technician, she now earns a living transcribing audio recordings for a spiritual sex coach. Through this job, Greta witnesses the private confessions of strangers, including Flavia, a Swiss gynecologist whose voice and story capture her attention. When Greta later encounters Flavia at a local dog park, recognition sparks a connection that soon deepens into an intimate relationship—one complicated by the knowledge Greta carries but cannot reveal.

The story follows these two women as they navigate the shadows of formative experiences they have never fully processed. Their relationship unfolds alongside a chorus of eccentric secondary figures and a stream of therapy transcripts, which inject rhythm into the narrative. As Greta’s own history gradually comes into focus, the novel reveals subtle textures in its settings and character dynamics, beautifully showcasing how inner lives shape the spaces people inhabit. With its distinctive voice, unconventional structure, and memorable protagonists, this book offers a bold and darkly playful exploration of intimacy, secrecy, and connection.

Stylistically, the novel is reminiscent of the popular theme in contemporary fiction of flawed women making arguably unlikeable choices.The book wastes no time introducing several key figures in Greta’s life, introducing Greta’s eccentric roommate, Sabine, who she has lived with since seemingly abruptly leaving her husband. Greta is both alienating and oddly relatable. She is impulsive, lonely, and driven by immediate desire rather than reflection. The reader quickly sees many idiosyncrasies in Greta’s current way of relating to people through her relationships with Sabine, the dogs and animals that they cohabitate with, the old dilapidated farmhouse they share in Hudson Valley, and the new community Greta drops into upon her cross-country move. The exaggerated personalities and situations help contribute to the book’s surreal atmosphere. However, I was left wanting slightly more from ancillary character development, because Sabine and Greta’s ex-husband characterizations are slightly underbaked.

As someone familiar with the impulse to destabilize a perfectly functional life, I recognized the emotional fallout this novel captures. Beagin understands how the body can move without or ahead of the mind, pulling you into situations you don’t yet have language for. I was most impressed by how the book suggests that whether you drift through life or fixate so intensely on the present that you ignore the past, you can still end up in the same unhealthy dynamics when too much about the past goes unspoken. The fact that the novel manages to explore all of this while remaining genuinely funny is a large part of its appeal, and a reminder of why I love reading fiction.

Overall, Big Swiss balances emotional weight and wit, using sharp dialogue and unexpected situations to keep the tone lively and engaging—an unconventional, often funny exploration of obsession, desire, and loneliness. Readers who enjoy awkward, character-driven narratives and dark humor will likely find it engaging, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Kelsey McGarry (she/her/hers) lives in Los Angeles, CA and loves spending time outdoors with their queer community.

The Sea Gives Up the Dead
Molly Olguín
Red Hen Press, 2025, 152 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Cheyenne Stone

Molly Olguín’s The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a haunting collection of short stories that examine death, grief, and identity. Her stories feature attempted murders, drownings, natural disasters, terminal illnesses, car accidents, the violence of war, and the human response to the aftermath of these losses. Above all, however, Olguín examines the grief that comes from a loss of identity—and the hope that comes from embracing it.

Olguín’s collection begins with a series of tragic horror stories, creating a sense of dread in her reader as she leaves off just before the final scene of a tragic ending. “Seven Deaths” promises that the cycle of revenge will continue despite the blood already shed. “Devils Also Believe” promises that a little girl’s mother will die of the flu, leaving her alone in the world. “The Princess Wants for Company” promises death for a still-living creature in order to retrieve the already deceased baby in its stomach. “The Undertaker’s Dogs” promises that death will come for a young puppy at the hands of a woman who has failed to find a natural maternal instinct for it or its now deceased siblings. Olguín litters her stories with tragedy but withholds the narrative’s final tragic event from the text, leaving readers haunted by what must come next. This narrative choice provokes a powerful sense of dread in the reader, creating horror more effective than what could be achieved through gruesome violence on the page.

However, Olguín’s collection isn’t all tragic endings. “honey from the rock” provides a short examination on how even the mundane can leave its mark on a person, exploring expectations and assumptions versus reality. “Clara Aguilera’s Holy Lungs,” “My Husband and Me,” “Small Monuments,” and “Esther and the Voice” each explore the ways we can be haunted by a loss, whether it be a sister, a younger self, the ex-girlfriend we regret refusing to marry, or a wife lost too soon. These middle stories are melancholy but gripping, delving into technology gone too far, fantastical faith and religion, and balancing grief, resentment, and forgiveness.

The final stories, “Captain America’s Missing Fingers,” “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” and “Foam on the Waves,” bring the collection full circle, providing hope instead of tragedy, even as the stories are tinged with horror. Children disturbed by the violence of war reject an identification with the idealized notion of the noble American soldier. A mother who rejected and lost her son accepts and becomes reconciled with her daughter. A young girl refuses to commit a violent act and regains her voice, finding her heart’s desire as she creates her own identity. These stories show us what can be when what dies is our old, ill-fitting selves, our resentments, and our attachments to how we think things should be instead of how they could be. Olguín doesn’t show us these characters’ endings, the same as in her tragic stories, but the reader feels assured that their future is hopeful.

Reading this collection, what most interested me was Olguín’s exploration of identity. Many of the characters are struggling with their internal versus external identities, as normative assumptions about gender, class, and race have boxed them into roles that don’t seem to fit. Parents force their children to use names that don’t feel like their own. Women are expected to be natural nurturers and mothers, horror creeping into the story as they realize their lack of a real maternal instinct. A dead girl’s life is disregarded as she is sanctified in death, her afterimage as a holy saint more important than remembering who she actually was. These identities are ones imposed onto the characters despite their ill fit. The first several stories are tragic, one sad end after another as characters try to fit into the molds they’ve been placed in, and it is not until the characters begin to refuse these impositions that the endings begin to be more hopeful. The happy endings of “The Sea Gives Up the Dead” and “Foam on the Waves” are directly tied to a mother’s acceptance of her child’s gender identity and a young girl’s refusal to comply with her family’s heternormative expectations of her, respectively. Ending on these two stories, Olguín seems to suggest that the antidote to disappointment, anger, violence, and the tragedy they bring is acceptance of ourselves and others, allowing people to speak with their own voices and tell us who they are.

A tense, haunting, and mournful read, The Sea Gives Up the Dead is also at times hopeful and cathartic. The prose is dynamic and the characters are well-developed, compelling, strong personalities anchored in realistic problems and feelings, creating character-driven narratives that explore the intrinsically human—even if that exploration is set to a backdrop of dragons, futuristic AI cyborgs, or disembodied, breathing lungs.

Cheyenne Stone (she/her) is a writer and editor based in Huntsville, Alabama. She has a background in Shakespearean drama, queer literature, feminist criticism, and queer theory. Her research and creative works focus on understudied female characters and perspectives, events in queer history, and issues in gender and sexuality.

Baby Blue
Bim Eriksson, translated by Melissa Bowers
Fantagraphics, 2025, 264 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Ash Lev

From Stockholm-based writer and illustrator Bim Eriksson, Baby Blue is a graphic novel that tells the story of Betty, a citizen of a dystopian, fascist society where human emotion is heavily policed, and the underground world of resistance she finds herself involved with after violating the rules of the regime. Translated from the original Swedish text by Melissa Bowers, this is the first of Eriksson’s works to be available in English.

In the world of Baby Blue, any and all expressions of sadness—crying in public, Googling “how to be happy,” or even listening to a Lorde song—are strictly prohibited. This law is enforced by Peacekeepers, a Gestapo-esque force that surveils and eventually detains Betty after a public emotional outburst. What follows is a scene that reads as only a slight exaggeration of how it feels to seek mental health support from medical professionals. As she fidgets anxiously with her hands, Betty is asked to describe how she feels in detail, where she significantly downplays the depressive symptoms she has been experiencing. When the nurse calls her out for lying, Betty is belittled, threatened with institutionalization, and eventually forced into a suspicious twelve-week “treatment program.” This is where she meets Berina, a charismatic member of the resistance who takes Betty under her wing and helps open her eyes to the truth of their world. With Berina’s guidance, Betty learns not only how to rebel against their fascist leaders, but how to accept herself, sadness and all. As someone who often struggles to find the value in my negative emotions, Betty’s character arc is something that really stuck with me. I also particularly enjoyed that the story is set in Sweden, which allows for the dystopia to be read as a twisted satirization of Nordic exceptionalism.

The standout feature of the graphic novel is by far its unique visual style. With blue-ink illustrations, Eriksson creates uncanny characters with huge bodies and tiny heads that wear facial expressions so detailed that they’re almost grotesque. These same characters blow heart-shaped puffs of cigarette smoke and do drugs that look like crushed-up emojis. The world of Baby Blue is decorated with massive advertisements, smiley faces, and feel-good newspaper headlines like “Here Comes the Sun” and “GDP Hits Record High!!” (20), all used in an attempt to numb and redirect the minds of its citizens away from their own suffering. What the illustrations lack in variety of colour, they make up for in spades with depth and texture, placing Betty’s minimalist but distinct character design in front of elaborately detailed backdrops that seem to directly point to how out-of-place she feels in her environment.

Eriksson’s graphic novel is an imaginative, absurd, visually striking, read-in-one-sitting type of book, and exactly the thing I needed to get me out of my recent reading slump. Baby Blue is an unfortunately relevant story of how fascism thrives on implicit submission, but a much-needed reminder that a better world is always worth fighting for.

Ash Lev is a butch writer and photo-based artist currently living in Tkaronto. In Ash’s free time, you’ll find him kissing his cats’ heads, overanalyzing TV shows, or contemplating grad school.

The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
Avid Reader Press, 2024, 272 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

The Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted novel, The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden, is a visceral exploration of the relationships women hold, and the identity that keeps them tied to place. The novel, set fifteen years after World War II, follows Isabel (Isa), a reclusive young woman living alone at her family home, whose life is upended when her brother’s new girlfriend Eva must stay for the season. An exhilarating story unfolds in the summer heat as synergy between the two women unravels all that they know about themselves, and the spaces in which they exist.

The text navigates erotic desire and its development between Isa and Eva, who birth a new meaning of place through their relationship to one another. To achieve this, Van der Wouden traces the mundanity of sharing spaces, and heightens tension through the unbreakable obsession Isa has with Eva’s presence—her doing, her being, her existing. Attuned so deeply to the house, Isa cannot ignore the way Eva initially unsettles her. But as the novel continues, Eva rewrites Isa’s understanding of home, where “she would never leave a room again and not leave half of her behind” (258). The building of their relationship in the domestic space becomes a shared creation of queer space, moulded by them, rather than the circumstances that force them together.

For most of the text, queer desire is unspoken. It teeters on the edge of repulsion, on agitation and torment, as Isa feels antagonised and exposed by the mere presence of Eva intruding on her solitude. Yet, over pages of discovery and unbecoming, their relationship softly falls into a romance that they never intended to pursue. It becomes a vulnerable connection with an unwavering tension under the surface, right to the end—when an even greater connection, tying the pair, is revealed.

Yael van der Wouden masterfully crafts a protagonist deeply masked by her isolation, her demand for control, and her identity. Isa is intimately tied to the walls, furniture, windows, and crockery of the home. Left amongst the ruins of her family, the home becomes a space of obsession for Isa, to define her existence through order and possession. Eva, nonchalant, irreverent, and tantalising, is the antithesis to Isa’s comfort. Her presence disrupts Isa, who “had spent a whole life without this woman, without her in this house. . . And now her heart raced at the sound of tires on gravel. . .” (155).

The Safekeep does not shy away from confronting the aspects of social standing and gender roles that form the complexities of the characters. Isa and Eva, like Van der Wouden’s other characters, are layered. The lifestyle decisions of Isa’s brothers Louis and Hendrik, who are able to travel and philander, are privileges made possible by their status as Dutch men in a post-war world.

Their mobility contrasts the necessity of Isa’s attachment to the house “in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her” (33). Thus, Eva’s need to orchestrate and deceive in order to succeed in the world, as an unmarried queer woman.

Van der Wouden’s writing focuses on the intricacies of expression, dialogue, and circumstance that shape our relationship to spaces. The Safekeep ultimately follows two women softly becoming home to one another, a home crafted by their shared love and affection. The Safekeep left me reflecting on every word, every motif, every aspect of the writing, and is a uniquely brilliant work of literature that I will undoubtedly recommend.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major 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.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
V. E. Schwab
Tor Books, 2025, 544 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Ruby Stefanucci

In her latest novel, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, a queer vampire romance, Schwab enchants readers once again—especially those who fell in love with the aching beauty of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Bury Our Bones follows the lives of three female protagonists across centuries, across lives and dreams left behind, as they are born anew. Sabine, whom we are first introduced to, is a whirring storm through the text, born with a natural hunger for freedom and a heart that takes without regret. Alice is a melancholic junior, searching for meaning in her mourning and revenge for those who changed her. Lottie captures our hearts with her softness across time, chased by a past she cannot outrun. We watch Schwab’s characters grow into women who flee, love, dream, and navigate the costs of choosing to live forever.

Schwab entices us from her first chapter, reminding us how effortlessly she creates worlds and imperfect characters within her text. In Bury Our Bones, she forms a story intertwined through centuries, spaces, and places that simultaneously build the lives of her characters. Weaving back and forth in time, Schwab marks the centuries, lessons, and lovers her characters experience over the years. Throughout her works, Schwab uses the history and upbringing of her characters as a way for readers to understand their motives and desires. Her characters are individual, they come alive within the pages, through the years and places they inhabit and through their presence in each other’s lives.

At first glance, Bury Our Bones seems YA-queer-vampire romance-esque, but the nuances of Schwab’s characters, their challenges, and their morals extend into the adult genre. The novel contrasts themes of youthful fantasies against the darkness of mortality and power imbalances. Schwab depicts feminine hunger and female desire in human and immortal lives and shows readers what happens when hunger is never satisfied.

Schwab does not shy away from capturing female queerness, conveyed through each lesbian protagonist in their perception of people, spaces, and self. Her queer romances explore the intricacies of lesbian relationships as they defy conformity over centuries, showcase the beauty and terror of navigating fantasy realms, and capture the erotic desire and cravings of sapphic attraction. Depicting this in the fantasy vampire genre heightens the yearning and craving, as expressed in: “because I like you. . . Because I want you. Because there are too many kinds of hunger, and I can’t pick them apart. Because I’m afraid” (212). Here, Schwab exhilarates readers with this interdependent hunger.

Brought to life by complex queer protagonists, Bury Our Bones is a provocative, haunting exploration of desire, hunger, and the cost of immortality. Schwab compels us to question how far we would go for freedom and whether we could trade our souls for it—or how women might survive without it.

Ruby Stefanucci (she/her) is currently based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, Australia. She recently completed her undergraduate studies, 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.