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.

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

Reviewed by Courtney Heidorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Grace Gaynor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Evelyn C. White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in The Bay Area Reporter

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

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

Reviewed by Julia M. Allen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Shadows Meet
Patrice Caldwell
Wednesday Books, 2025, 320 pages
$20.00

Reviewed by Mandee Loney

Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell is a young adult novel perfect for lovers of vampires and those looking for a Black lesbian romantasy. Though the book falls into the YA category, it deals with some adult themes, as described by the author:

“Please know that this story contains depictions of blood (including the drinking of blood), death (including that of multiple family members), kidnapping, psychological abuse, murder, systems of oppression (pulling from my family’s history in the American South and the use of enslaved Black people as disposable labor but of course unfortunately relating to many different people across the world), and violence of all sorts. There’s also a character who has self-harmed and the showing of, and reference to, those scars. The actual self-harm occurred years prior and is not depicted.”

While these themes can be heavy, each develops both characters and plot. One character, Najja, experiences multiple deeply traumatic events that spur her into action, and Caldwell handles each instance with care and makes sure to not glorify them. Caldwell’s family history adds another layer to the text, as this history informs the world Caldwell creates.

The story follows the point of view of three main characters: Favre, Leyla, and Najja. A fourth character, Thana, appears in many of Favre’s chapters, but does not have any written from her perspective. Caldwell hooks readers immediately with a captivating fairytale-esque narrative of two young goddesses meeting in an enchanted forest. Favre, who is a touch naive, encounters Thana, who seemingly has ulterior motives.

The narrative then skips to over a thousand years later, when we are introduced to Najja, a girl born with the gift of prophecy, and Leyla, soon to be Queen of the Mnaran vampires. In the first half of the novel, Caldwell’s focus is the careful development of each character with nuanced personalities.

The plot can be somewhat difficult to follow at times, as there are frequent shifts between both time and characters’ points of view. However, readers who untangle the timeline will be rewarded with rich parallels between the pair of characters in each time period. Caldwell juxtaposes the somewhat toxic relationship between Thana and Favre with the blossoming relationship between Najja and Leyla, prompting readers to question—what should someone sacrifice in the name of love?

While the pacing of Where Shadows Meet feels a little off-kilter at times, Caldwell has crafted a compelling premise with room to build on the foundation of this mythical world. This sapphic take on the vampire origin story plays the incredibly important role of centering Black lesbian characters in a genre that often excludes them.

Mandee Loney interned with Sinister Wisdom and is continuing her pursuit of a career in editing and publishing.

The Lamb
Lucy Rose
Harper, 2025, 336 pages
$22.39

Reviewed by Sydney Minor

Lucy Rose’s debut novel, The Lamb, blends elements of folktale, horror, and coming-of-age genres to craft a deeply original story about cannibalism and what it can metaphorically represent. The use of cannibalism as a metaphor in art and literature dates back to Greek mythology and early modern literature, but it has experienced a resurgence in recent years with works like Yellowjackets, Bones and All, Fresh, A Certain Hunger, and Tender Is the Flesh.

I approached the novel with some skepticism, concerned it might be derivative or capitalizing on a trend. Instead, I found it to be one of the most allegorically rich interpretations of this trope.
The story follows Margot, a young girl living on a homestead near the wilderness, raised in a household where cannibalism is the norm. Her mother, Mama, takes in strays—lost and wandering travelers—makes them comfortable, then kills them to use as food. When another woman, Eden, stumbles upon the homestead and embeds herself into the family, the dynamic Margot is used to begins to shift. As the story unfolds, tension builds toward an inevitable conclusion.

Both Margot and Mama grapple with inner conflicts that linger throughout the novel. Margot begins to question the morality of Mama’s actions, while also confronting her own emerging sexuality. Mama, on the other hand, struggles with her identity as a mother and the tension between that role and her personal autonomy. These internal battles are reflected in their relationships with consumption. Margot, for instance, eats a strand of her crush’s hair, hoping it will keep her close, while Mama’s relentless hunger mirrors her desire for independence and selfhood.

The novel also offers a compelling exploration of the theoretical concept of abjection. Coined by philosopher Julia Kristeva and often used in horror analysis, abjection refers to the human response of horror or disgust when faced with a breakdown in meaning—typically when social order collapses or the boundary between self and other disintegrates. These boundaries form the foundation of identity, morality, and stability, so their dissolution provokes deep psychological discomfort.

Cannibalism is perhaps the most taboo, and therefore abject, subject in horror. To make it more palatable or comprehensible, narratives often depict the cannibal as animalistic or the victim as less than human. The Lamb employs both: Mama sees her victims—the strays—as subhuman, while Margot increasingly views Mama as monstrous for her actions.

The most powerful aspect of the novel is the atmosphere and setting that Rose constructs through deliberate ambiguity. Much like a fairytale, The Lamb takes place in an unspecified time and location—an ambiguous part of England. The homestead feels otherworldly in its descriptions, yet occasional references to televisions or telephones snap the reader back to a recognizable reality. About a quarter of the book occurs at Margot’s school or during her bus rides, further grounding the story and amplifying its tragedy through contrast with the everyday world.

The novel is also highly readable. With around seventy chapters, each only three to five pages long, it’s easy to move through quickly—I finished it in about two days. While this structure may reflect a broader cultural shift toward shorter attention spans, it also builds a strong sense of momentum and looming dread as the story progresses.

The Lamb is a dark, genre-defying, and thought-provoking novel that will keep you on edge from beginning to end.

Sydney Minor (she/her) is a New York-born, London-based writer and musician currently interning with Sinister Wisdom. She recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music and will begin a master’s in musicology at Cambridge University this autumn, with a focus on the intersection of queer studies and twentieth-century opera. You can find more of her ramblings regarding music, art, and culture on her Substack, Salome’s Veil.