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.

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.

Cities of Women
Kathleen B. Jones
Keylight Books, 2024, 288 pages
$16.99

Reviewed by Dot Persica

Cities of Women by Kathleen B. Jones begins with a beautiful premise: it is a book dedicated to all the women artists who have been made invisible. Her love for and commitment to historic lesbians is clear and indubitable from the very beginning, and it shapes her narration.

Jones has much in common with Verity Frazier, the protagonist—a disillusioned academic whose curiosity is rekindled by Christine de Pizan, or rather by the suspicion that the hand responsible for the artwork in her manuscripts may have belonged to a woman artist called Anastasia. This idea propels a journey in search of the truth (as a native Italian speaker, the choice to name her Verity, veritas, is a little bit on the nose, but I imagine for readers who aren’t accustomed to Latinisms this is more subtle), as Verity is dying to unearth tangible proof of her theory.

What counts as fact is open to question—Verity speaks these words to her ex, Regina, with whom she has a strange (alas normal in lesbian terms) friendship. The incessant search for the real truth behind the accepted, dogmatic “truth” defines this book and the queer experience: what are we if not love’s archaeologists, tirelessly digging for proof that we aren’t the first or the only people to have loved the way we love, in the face of the world telling us that we are solitary exceptions?

Some descriptions of Verity’s amazement when interacting with valuable artifacts during her research reminded me of my experience at the Lesbian Herstory Archives—to touch the texture of the past, as Kathleen B. Jones says, provides a closeness to the subject that just can’t compare to simply reading about it, and the author succeeds in describing it as an almost religious experience.

Readers are accompanied back and forth between Verity’s present day and Christine’s late medieval Europe, both studded with political considerations about two eras that at first glance couldn’t seem more different but have much in common, touching on modern gentrification and its predecessors, the ever-present corruption of Church and State, and misogyny. The narration spans multiple characters’ points of view: an ambitious choice which is definitely called for in a book like this, though it’s not always executed smoothly.

To me, the author seemed more comfortable and truthful when writing in heightened language, leaving me with a feeling that she was holding back, almost restraining herself when writing in a more modern style. This made me yearn to be catapulted back into the thirteenth century.

Altogether, I thought the concept was wonderful, though very difficult to concretize.

I did not think it was unrealistic for Verity to encounter someone with the same name as the woman she was researching: Anastasia. As a lesbian whose existence is constantly altered by unbelievable coincidences, and who has observed the same in her lesbian friends’ lives, I found this a perfectly accurate, reasonable, and frankly quite brilliant form of representation.

As lesbians, every event in our existence is somehow brought on by strange forces we can’t define, and maybe it’s none other than our Lesbian Ancestors having their way with our little lives. I think this book captures that.

Dot Persica (any pronouns) is a lesbian performer born in Naples, Italy. They are a classically trained soprano with a vague dance background; they have experience directing opera, helping out here and there on film sets, and doing stand-up. They are a co-founder of the Italian lesbian+ collective STRASAFFICA*, with which they have organized community events, raised funds, and created beautiful bonds. They also write poetry, like all lesbians.