#LGBTQ book review

[thequeereview]

Book Review: Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin ★★★★★

A decade after the publication of The Days of Anna Madrigal, Armistead Maupin returns to his beloved Tales of the City with a delectably satisfying new addition—the tenth book in the series—Mona of the Manor. Transporting us to Gloucestershire, England in 1993, we’re reunited with Mona in her late forties, ten years after she became Lady Roughhton as the not-so-blushing mail-order bride of Lord…

[floral-ashes]

My favourite part of the Cass Report is where she goes: “Florence Ashley and others have shown that gatekeeping doesn’t work and should be abandoned. We disagree, not based on any evidence but because it’s incompatible with the way we’ve already decided we wanted to do things.”

[enyasaints]

I am in need of a lawyer for my Sexual Assault case.

I am a sexual assault survivor seeking justice from my repeated sexual assault I endured in the workplace. I’m urging everyone who views this to spare $1 all it takes is 10,000 people to spare $1 for me to retain a lawyer to help me fight my case. This is not only a sexual assault case, this is a hostile work environment, racial discrimination case. Please help me keep fighting

Direct Aid:

PP: enyasaints@gmail.com

[mxjackparker]

Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology is officially out today! We're published!

Those who've been watching this book through its creation may be tired of hearing me hype up all the contributors for this, but it's worth repeating. All of the 20 transmasculine sex workers in addition to myself who wrote about their experiences for this are amazing and have incredibly worthwhile stories to read.

"I genuinely think anyone who wants to talk or form an opinion about sex work needs to read this book, since it not only offers thoughts about transmasc people but also reflects about what sex work means in a society like ours and what reasons does someone have for engaging in it."

The book includes many kinds of sex workers, from those who sell sex in-person to professional dominants to Onlyfans creators. You can read the experiences of Felix Mufti, Dakota Nevaeh (18+), Eddy (18+), Sunan, Trip Richards (18+), Liam, Arc D, Julian Yang, Mister Saul (18+), Ron Beastly (18+), and many others!

"This is a diverse collection of work - from cutting analysis of the camming industry, statistics on violence against transmasculine sex workers, to personal stuff that reads like prose poetry. Care was taken to include minorities within the minority, especially people of color."

Such a huge proportion of transmasculine people have done some kind of sex work, yet awareness of this is low! As a sex worker myself who often struggles to be understood and has become frustrated with the lack of resources out there or things to read describing feelings and difficulties like my own, I'm so happy to have been able to put together this anthology. When I transitioned whilst selling sex and making porn, I'd have strongly appreciated a book like this.

"The "multiple texts" format is really easy to apprehend for people who's primary language is not english (like me, so sorry for the typos and such), compared to a huge essay in one block."

You can order a copy from most online book stores, or get an e-book here.

[xiaq]

Ok, I just finished A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall and I am ashamed I waited so long to read it purely based on the cover (I don't like covers with real life humans on them, no matter how pretty).

Listen. I would die for Alexis and also his characters. This book wrapped my love for Austen with queerness and doubled down on the banter. I loved every word from start to finish and people on Goodreads complaining it was too long or the plot was too unwieldy need to take several seats; I gladly would have read 500 more pages about these characters. Anyway. I highly recommend ALFAD if you want historical fiction with trans rep and happy endings for everyone.

This may be the best book I read this year.

[lakecountylibrary]

If you liked Camp Damascus, try Hell Followed With Us

and vice versa!

There's a lot to love in both Camp Damascus by @drchucktingle and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. As horror novels about queer youth with, shall we say, complicated relationships with religion, they have a lot in common - if you liked one you very well may like the other. Let's take a closer look.

Characters:

Both books feature queer, autistic youth fighting back. The characters are trying to survive in a world created for them by abusive adults and religious institutions that hold power over them.

In Camp Damascus we follow Rose (autistic, lesbian). In Hell Followed With Us we follow Benji (neurodivergent, trans) and Nick (autistic, gay).

Genre:

Both books are horror, but with two distinct flavors. Camp Damascus has more of a creepy factor, while Hell Followed With Us leans more toward gore. In Camp there is some mystery to the evil, but in Hell the evil has a name, a face, an address - and a to-do list.

Both books deal with Christian cults and the horrors of indoctrination. They deal with the characters' complicated relationships to Christianity as an institution and God as a concept. They also both quote Christian scripture heavily.

Vibes:

While both books are horror, they do feel very different, largely because the primary emotion that drives each story is different. In Camp Damascus, it's love. In Hell Followed With Us, it's rage. You'll certainly find both emotions in certain quantities in either novel, but what they primarily put forward distinctly changes the vibe of both books.

-

So there you have it! Two fantastic reads in close thematic conversation with each other - but still quite distinct. If either sounds good to you, do yourself a favor and check out both today!

See more of Robin's recs

[galina]

Anyone's Ghost, August Thompson – enjoyed this advance review copy way more than I expected, it broke through my cynical shell and turned me into a soft wobbly mess. An angsty cheesy beautiful queer love story that will be a perfect crying-on-holiday read, comes out in July.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Emil Ferris’s long-awaited “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book Two”

NEXT WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Seven years ago, I was absolutely floored by My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, a wildly original, stunningly gorgeous, haunting and brilliant debut graphic novel from Emil Ferris. Every single thing about this book was amazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

The more I found out about the book, the more amazed I became. I met Ferris at that summer's San Diego Comic Con, where I learned that she had drawn it over a while recovering from paralysis of her right – dominant – hand after a West Nile Virus infection. Each meticulously drawn and cross-hatched page had taken days of work with a pen duct-taped to her hand, a project of seven years.

The wild backstory of the book's creation was matched with a wild production story: first, Ferris's initial publisher bailed on her because the book was too long; then her new publisher's first shipment of the book was seized by the South Korean state bank, from the Panama Canal, when the shipper went bankrupt and its creditors held all its cargo to ransom.

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters told the story of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Karen narrates and draws the story, depicting herself as a werewolf in a detective's trenchcoat and fedora, as she tries to unravel the secrets kept by the grownups around her. Karen's life is filled with mysteries, from the identity of her father (her brother, a talented illustrator, has removed him from all the family photos and redrawn him as the Invisible Man) to the purpose of a mysterious locked door in the building's cellar.

But the most pressing mystery of all is the death of her upstairs neighbor, the beautiful Annika Silverberg, a troubled Holocaust survivor whose alleged suicide just doesn't add up, and Karen – who loved and worshiped Annika – is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Karen is tormented by the adults in her life keeping too much from her – and by their failure to shield her from life's hardest truths. The flip side of Karen's frustration with adult secrecy is her exposure to adult activity she's too young to understand. From Annika's cassette-taped oral history of her girlhood in an Weimar brothel and her escape from a Nazi concentration camp, to the sex workers she sees turning tricks in cars and alleys in her neighborhood, to the horrors of the Vietnam war, Karen's struggle to understand is characterized by too much information, and too little.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

These monster-comic throwbacks are absolute catnip for me. I, too, was a monster-obsessed kid, and spent endless hours watching, drawing, and dreaming about this kind of monster.

But Ferris isn't just a monster-obsessive; she's also a formally trained fine artist, and she infuses her love of great painters into Deeze, Karen's womanizing petty criminal of an older brother. Deeze and Karen's visits to the Art Institute of Chicago are commemorated with loving recreations of famous paintings, which are skillfully connected to pulp monster art with a combination of Deeze's commentary and Ferris's meticulous pen-strokes.

Seven years ago, Book One of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters absolutely floored me, and I early anticipated Book Two, which was meant to conclude the story, picking up from Book One's cliff-hanger ending. Originally, that second volume was scheduled for just a few months after Book One's publication (the original manuscript for Book One ran to 700 pages, and the book had been chopped down for publication, with the intention of concluding the story in another volume).

But the book was mysteriously delayed, and then delayed again. Months stretched into years. Stranger rumors swirled about the second volume's status, compounded by the bizarre misfortunes that had befallen book one. Last winter, Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston published an article detailing a messy lawsuit between Ferris and her publishers, Fantagraphics:

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/fantagraphics-sued-emil-ferris-over-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/

The filings in that case go some ways toward resolve the mystery of Book Two's delay, though the contradictory claims from Ferris and her publisher are harder to sort through than the mysteries at the heart of Monsters. The one sure thing is that writer and publisher eventually settled, paving the way for the publication of the very long-awaited Book Two:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

I've been staring at the spine of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book One on my bookshelf for seven years. Partly, that's because the book is such a gorgeous thing, truly one of the great publishing packages of the century. But mostly, it's because I couldn't let go of Ferris's story, her characters, and her stupendous art.

After seven years, it would have been hard for Book Two to live up to all that anticipation, but goddammit if Ferris didn't manage to meet and exceed everything I could have hoped for in a conclusion.

There's a lot of people on my Christmas list who'll be getting both volumes of Monsters this year – and that number will only go up if Fantagraphics does some kind of slipcased two-volume set.

In the meantime, we've got more Ferris to look forward to. Last April, she announced that she had sold a prequel to Monsters and a new standalone two-volume noir murder series to Pantheon Books:

https://twitter.com/likaluca/status/1648364225855733769

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#oh-my-papa

[0thello]

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires too.”

Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark (2020).

[maggiegrace]

It has been a LONG TIME in the making, the curse of ADHD 😒, BUT I DID IT!

I FINISHED my first book of poetry! 🎉💕

HONEYBEE

📖🐝

Help me celebrate!

Available now at:

Amazon.com

Hard copy and Kindle

Honeybee https://a.co/d/65dtsDr

It’s currently available in four languages.

Thank you for the support. 🙏🏻🥰

[oracleofmadness]

This was such a delight! Gwen is a princess at Camelot, years after Arthur Pendragon has turned to myth. Arthur is her betrothed. However, neither is looking forward to their future together because both are queer.

Gwen has spent years falling for the one and only female knight that takes part in the tournament every summer while Art is falling for Gwen's brother. This story is not only romantic but is full of meaningful moments. The dialogues, the banter, is so funny and enjoyable.

The ending completely surprised me. I thought this would never get too serious, but the ending is intense!

Out November 28, 2023!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

[franticvampirereads]

I can’t believe that people are sleeping on this series! I think it’s one of the best witchy series that I’ve read in a really long time. It’s got everything you could possibly want in a dark witchy story: it’s got neon drenched horror vibes, it’s queer as fuck, it’s got a funky little spell book turned ink demon, and it’s got an unhinged group of teenage witches who aren’t afraid to fuck your shit up. And I loved every unhinged second of it!

I loved getting to see more of Sideways and the girls being their unhinged selves. I loved getting to see them be soft with each other and being shards of broken glass with everyone else. I also really loved that they took in Shiloh (a former witchfinder) and giving them the space they needed to just be themself. All of it was so good! The Scratch Daughters is getting five stars, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the next one.

[jessread-s]

✩🕯️📜Series Review:

Core concepts

⋆ The Atlas Six - Physics

⋆ The Atlas Paradox - Psychology

⋆ The Atlas Complex - Philosophy

“The Atlas” series is so much more than dark academia or romance. This series studies what happens to human beings when they are promised access to infinite knowledge and power. It is about how quickly we turn on each other and abandon our own morals to gain. said knowledge and power. Each installment blew me away as I watched Blake’s six protagonists gradually find and/or destroy themselves. My mind was continuously expanded by her prose and it made me question my every decision. It’s a soul crushing read, but perhaps also a necessary one.

Cross-posted to: Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

@torpublishinggroup @olivieblake

[jazzy125]

WATTPAD Link Above 🡡🡡🡡

Do You Enjoy Reading A Grteat Boy Love Romance?

THIS IS A MUST READ! Ive Read It 2 Times! ❤️‍🔥

I Recommend "Athenian Arrow" A Beautiful Love story About A Forbidden Romance Set In Ancient Greece <3 BRIEF SYNOPSIS BELOW🡣🡣🡣

Set during the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Sparta are battling their differences. While the leader of Sparta argues uncompromisingly with the leader of Athens, the Spartan leader's son Andreas is sent on a quest to steal supplies from Athens, unarmed. While running through the capital of Greece, he meets Athens' finest archer, Alexi. Believing that an unarmed man should not be killed, Alexi decides to not shoot the arrow he had aimed at the Spartan. But when troubles of trusting a Spartan arise, Alexi finds himself in a predicament that would change the course of his life forever, especially when the two start to develop a unique connection the more time they spend together. But with Andreas being Spartan and Alexi being Athenian, how will the two come to love while their cities are at war? Their predicament only grows more complicated when the elderly Athenian leader offers the lead position to one of his most trusted soldiers, Alexi, to lead Athens into victory and stop this war once and for all. Will Alexi accept this fortunate opportunity? Or will conflict of interest be the start of Athens' downfall?

[purplebunnyreads]

👾Radio Silence👾 by Alice Oseman

“It’d take hours to explain,” I said.

“I’d listen to you for hours,” he said.

“Being friends with Aled made me feel like I’d never had a real friend before, ever.”

“I couldn’t quite believe how much i seriously loved Aled Last, even if it wasn’t in the ideal way that would make it socially acceptable for us to live together until we die.”

“Why are you so nice to me?”

“Because I’m an angel.”

“You are.” He stretched out his arm and patted me on the head. “And I’m platonically in love with you.”

Oh, to have a friendship like theirs.

Alice Oseman understands me on a fundamental level. Reading this book, especially the first half of it, felt like someone had invaded my soul and put it on paper. I related to Aled and Frances more than I’ve related to any characters possibly ever. Put them together so they are one person, and they are me. You wouldn’t be able to spot a difference.

Here are some quotes from the book that I especially related to:

“You’re an idiot,” said Mum, when I relayed to her the entire situation on Wednesday. “Not an unintelligent idiot, but a sort of naive idiot who manages to fall into a difficult situation and then can’t get out of it because she’s too awkward.”

“Yeah, he’s that sort of person.”

“What sort of person?”

“The sort of person who doesn’t speak spontaneously.” She folded her arms. “Who won’t say anything if you don’t ask.

“Honestly, I need to stop being scared of being a normal teenage girl.”

“Long ago, I was afflicted with a terrible predisposition to never say a word, and I honestly cannot understand why or how that happened.”

I love this book more than I can put to words. Even though I literally just reread it, I'm itching to read it again. I think it's my favorite of Alice Oseman's books. Maybe even one of my favorite books of all time. If I could give it more than 5 stars, I would.

If you liked anything else Alice has written, if you are/grew up a weird, quiet, fandom-obsessed kid with a minimal amount of friends, or if you're tired of only seeing romance in the YA genre and are looking for a book that centers around a platonic relationship instead, then please, please, PLEASE read this book.

“Art reflects life,” said Carys. “Or… Maybe it’s the other way round.”