lavendersbook

[lavendersbook]

Any time someone asks “Hey, does anyone have any good aromantic representation that they can recommend?”, the responses are always like:

Alloromantic asexual character

Headcanon

Asexual character who doesn’t use the separate attraction model (because the writers didn’t do enough research to know what that is) but who is vaguely implied to not like romance

Character confirmed as aroace via twitter post

Headcanon

Side character in a heavily romance centric story

Headcanon

Aroace character who is actually pretty decent representation but who is also from some incredibly obscure webcomic or podcast or something, so you end up becoming incredibly fixated on a piece of media that no one will talk with you about :(

Character from a book written for teenagers (but which closeted teenagers can’t access without the risk of outing themselves to their parent(s)/guardian(s), because it’s very obvious from the cover and summary alone that it’s an LGBTQ+ book)

Headcanon

And of course, there’s never a single alloaro or non-SAM aro on the list.

[lavendersbook]

i have these scapegracers character cards that i have been working on for forever but I just can't figure out getting the final look how I want it to, lol. here's a preview tho!! hopefully I'll finish them sometime this year

[lavendersbook]

just to get the Ladies all in one place

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In my excitement for A Power Unbound, I've been relistening to A Restless Truth and remembering how much I love this book, ahhhhhh.

A Maud and Violet to match my Robin and Edwin drawing :)

[lavendersbook]

(They're definitely Up To Something)

[lavendersbook]

Review: Metal From Heaven by August Clarke Rating: 5/5

I received an ARC of this title through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

Marney Honeycutt works in the Yann I Chauncey Ichorite Factory but when their sister leads a workers' strike that turns into a massacre, they are suddenly all alone. Touched in the head by the metal they worked from birth, Marney has to get out of the city. They fall in with a gang of thieves who whisk them away to a mansion high in the hills by the sea. But Marney will come back. Because they are going to kill Chauncey and they're going to marry his daughter to do it.

August Clarke has done it again. I was captivated from the very first page by Clarke's signature dizzying, dazzling prose. I was utterly immersed in this rich world that blends fantasy and science fiction absolutely perfectly. I loved the different cultures, I especially loved the way Clarke emulated butch/femme lesbian culture, I loved that trans-ness was just part of the world and Marney never had to fight to be who they were.

The queerness really was my favourite part. It was so nice to finally read a book about a trans stone butch that feels like the trans stone butches I know. Marney felt and talked and behaved like so many of my friends do and that representation is so sorely needed. I have a list of friends a mile long to recommend this book because I know they ache to see themselves and their lives represented in media. I'm very grateful that August Clarke is able to do that with their books.

And the prose! Clarke has such a specific way of writing that just latches into your brain and doesn't let go. It flows so beautifully but has a staccato edge that I can't get enough of. I especially enjoyed how Clarke intermittently used second person to elevate how Marney was telling the story and the reason why they were doing that became so satisfying as the story went on. It was utterly brilliant.

If you are looking for a truly unique speculative fiction story that centres queerness and working class people in a story of revenge, I implore you to pick up Metal From Heaven and allow yourself to be swept away in this enthralling book. It's an absolute masterpiece.

Metal From Heaven releases October 22nd, 2024!

[lavendersbook]

do you have any like good books/literature/media you recommend for learning more about the butch community? ik there’s a deep history and wanna learn more about it before ik for sure that’s how i identify.

like. a lot of stuff i see on tumblr is butch/femme and like chivalry and all that which i vibe with but also. idk. i’m very much more androgynous for androgynous so some of that stuff doesn’t really hit home if if that makes sense. sorry for rambling so much.

I highly recommend this butch and masc sapphics database made by @lavendersbook. Filter by "butch" or "butch4butch" for best results.

But for the obvious rec, read Leslie Feinberg. Zie made Stone Butch Blues available for free online prior to hir passing: https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/ There's also Drag King Dreams and Transgender Warriors.

For some personal recs, read Wherever Is Your Heart by Anita Kelly. It's a novella about two older butches and it's really sweet and a little spicy. Super cute.

Girl Mans Up by ME Girard is about a tomboy teenager. (Butch/femme though) Affirming to imagine a masculine adolesence if you never had one, or if you did.

Hijab Butch Blues is another good one, a memoir.

Gideon the Ninth for a popular with lesbian tumblr book that I personally couldn't parse. (I think it's because the audiobook was 20 hours long and narrated by a British woman who I couldn't understand, lmao.)

For TV/movies, check out Roberta Colindrez, Lena Waithe, Tig Notaro, Sara Ramirez, and Vico Ortiz and the things they've starred in.

[lavendersbook]

Happy Pride! Featuring my nine favorite wlw books.

Mahit/Three Seagrass from the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine

Catherine/Lucy from The Lady's Guide To Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Kath/Lily from Last Night At The Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Zanja/Karis from the Elemental Logic series by Laurie J. Marks

Jude/Síle from Landing by Emma Donoghue

Ead/Sabran from The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Emi/Ava from Everything Leads To You by Nina LaCour

Thenike/Marghe from Ammonite by Nicola Griffith

Red/Blue from This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Ordered by theme, not by preference.

[lavendersbook]

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone This Is How You Lose the Time War

[lavendersbook]

asa clematis once said

What bordered on being intolerable was the sense that I no longer knew where Wist ended and I began. The sense that I had started consuming her. Or that she had started eating into me. Or both at the same time. It made me want to finish the job. It made me want to pack her away safely inside me. No embrace could ever seem tight enough after you felt someone starting to meld with the very fabric of your secret self.

I need everyone to get into the lowest healer and the highest mage. it's a self published lesbian fantasy/romance series on Amazon by Hiyodori and I know it's not for everyone but if its your thing it's like yuri catnip. it's madoka and the locked tomb rolled into one butch4butch series.

asa clematis is the most arrogant little shit ever and a great protagonist. she's in prison for treason but her ex who is very clearly still in love with her is the most powerful being in the world. clematis literally invented a new branch of healing. the government hates her. she physically cannot stop making annoying remarks to others. she's butch. she does the wildest shit. it's great

it's on KU

[lavendersbook]

I need everyone to get into the lowest healer and the highest mage. it's a self published lesbian fantasy/romance series on Amazon by Hiyodori and I know it's not for everyone but if its your thing it's like yuri catnip. it's madoka and the locked tomb rolled into one butch4butch series.

asa clematis is the most arrogant little shit ever and a great protagonist. she's in prison for treason but her ex who is very clearly still in love with her is the most powerful being in the world. clematis literally invented a new branch of healing. the government hates her. she physically cannot stop making annoying remarks to others. she's butch. she does the wildest shit. it's great

it's on KU

[lavendersbook]

Author Spotlight: Talia Bhatt

We're excited to highlight Talia Bhatt, author of the current club read Dulhaniyaa. Read on to hear how her identity and experiences informed her writing, and how queer love is a jailbreak.

“Desi trans lesbian” feels, sometimes, like an ephemeral identity.

I am situated nowhere transhistorically and barely transculturally, having to borrow the language, social trappings, and forms of identification of the nation(s) that colonized and impoverished mine to even express my embodiment and positionality coherently. In a world where Afsaneh Najmabadi can pose the question “Is any one of you a lesbian?” to a room full of Iranian transsexual women and get blank stares, as she relates in Professing Selves, or where Deepa Mehta notes in her groundbreaking lesbian romance Fire that Hindi lacks even a word to express the concept of a woman loving another intimately, romantically, carnally, I am unmoored and unfixed, an anomaly because I dare to imagine my transsexuality independent from men.

“Woman are for men”, assumes every culture with harsh patriarchal contradictions—which does not entirely exclude the West—and trans women doubly so, since the abhorrence of non-heterosexual modes of living and social organization leads many from cultures like mine to presume that a woman would only transition to be with a man. A profound loneliness dogs my very existence, alerting me to the wispy shadows of a shrouded past that barely had a record of women like me prior to the midpoint of the 20th Century, only whispers and rumors and sensationalist gossip scrawled in academic journal by Esther Newton, alluding to the idea of a “man” that, having availed of hormones and surgical interventions, now sleeps with lesbians—the scandal. 

No ancestors that are mine to claim.

Dulhaniyaa is not a particularly melancholy book, though a certain pensiveness pervades the opening chapters. There a story within the story written in subtext, in allusions and word choices and snippets of dialogue, that Esha and Billu and Dolly and others are aware of: my homeland, my motherland, my culture and my nation and my state—it is not a place for queer women. It is certainly, emphatically, not a place for a trans woman who fancies herself still attracted to other women, or even indelibly non-binary in a way. Women like us have no names, no pasts, and almost certainly no futures within the narrow confines of the constructed and stifling heterosexual hegemony.

A reviewer was kind enough to sum up Dulhaniyaa for me better than I ever could, stating triumphantly that “Queer love is a jailbreak.” It’s a quote that has stuck with me both for how simply it states a core theme that I certainly labored to convey without necessarily consciously meaning to, as well as for how profoundly vast and unencompassable the prison I find myself in is. My shackles are Time and Language itself, my cell the land I was born in, my wardens its people. I am a refugee in a sense that many, many queer and especially trans people tend to be, evicted and disowned and erased from hearth and homeland.

I wrote Dulhaniyaa because someone broke me out of that cell. She saw the woman I was as well as the woman I could be, and helped me bridge the gap between the two. She is now my wife.

Queer love is a jailbreak. Get your pickaxes ready.

[lavendersbook]

wow chain gang all-stars really just ends like that. i knew it was going to happen but it's the abruptness and the lack of follow up or closure that really gets me. the thing you knew would happen happens and then it's over and you're left with it so the feeling has to just sit there and fester. many of adjei-brenyahs short stories from friday black ended in a similar fashion so i don't know why id expect differently, because really what else is there to say. i feel hollow and angry and mournful and something else i don't have a word for. 10/10 amazing book instant favorite. i need to stare at a wall for 5 hours.

[lavendersbook]

Loretta Thurwar from Chain-Gang All-Stars

[lavendersbook]

"This is a love story to its blade-dented bone."

Jun the Red Peacock and Keema of the Daware Tribe from The Spear Cuts Through Water 🌊

i haven't seen any fan art for them, so i offer this bumble offering to the gods 🙇🏽‍♀️

[lavendersbook]

The number of YA books coming out this year or next year set in college... I'm sure the 12 years old will be thrilled

[lavendersbook]

new reblog game: what are the worst books you've ever read?