About Book Marks
Leah Von Essen
Recent Reviews
Megan Giddings
Mixed Booklist The book doesn’t tread much new ground in the genre of feminist dystopia, and the world-building can be a little unevenly executed. That said, this new book by Giddings is an interesting and often thought-provoking novel that looks at a world that enforces heteronormativity in a very limited fashion, and considers how it suffocates women’s autonomy and ability to truly live in their world.
Sunyi Dean
Rave Booklist ... a powerful story of overwhelming mother love, as something both powerful and potentially horrific. It’s a book that delves into the need to survive even when a system is built to break you or determined to crush you; a powerful queer story about difference that refuses to flinch away from difficult choices or the impact of trauma, both generational and inflicted. Readers will devour this compelling, rich fantasy.
Sarah Gailey
Rave Booklist Delightfully creepy and heartbreakingly tragic, Just Like Home is equal parts raw terror of a dark childhood bedroom, creeping revelations of a true-crime podcast, and searing hurt of resentment within a family. It’s a must-read for all gothic horror fans.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave Booklist Thrust is kinky, queer, and razor sharp—Yuknavitch knots stirring stories of exploitation and hurt into a tapestry of human hubris and climate disaster, then sprinkles them with BDSM and female pleasure, absurd humor, and a whale named Bal, who swears she has never once swallowed a man...All this comes together to form a stunning novel about the future we might be able to create if we listen to voices we’ve previously ignored—a strange, emotional story about the rush of freedom, about welcoming in the world around us from earthworms to fungi, and about being willing to start again.
J M Miro
Positive Booklist Miro’s debut has a fascinating magical system—it’s rooted in the ability to manipulate dead cells, in the human body or in the air—and satisfying moments of tense suspense and frightening monsters. The characters are convincing, and readers will be quickly drawn into the narrative. While the book is long for the first in a trilogy, the unfurling of the story and the vivid cinematic quality of the world and its magic will appeal to classic-fantasy lovers.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Positive Booklist Fajardo-Anstine’s compelling writing paints a convincing portrait of a city in flux, haunted by white violence, and portrays a complex female friendship, a vivid love story (or three), and a story of family and memory in the American West.
Jennifer Saint
Rave Booklist Saint\'s electrifying follow-up to Ariadne tells the story of some of the most iconic women of Greek mythology...The toll of the Trojan War, the unfeeling gaze of the gods, and the power-hungry violence of men all fall disproportionately on the shoulders of these women, and Saint\'s vivid writing brings their pain, love, and grief to the page in short, intense chapters that make the novel difficult to put down...It\'s an emotion-laden story of revenge and rage driven by loss and fills a gap by giving Clytemnestra a voice...Both readers who know the Greek myths well and readers who only know glimmers of the story will enjoy this new, epic retelling.
Kelly Barnhill
Positive Booklist Barnhill’s novel and its wild premise expertly satire the patriarchy and its machinations—from the suppression of information to the indoctrination of gender roles. The narrative turns female rage and joy into weapons, all while resisting the rigid gender binaries that gender-focused magic systems can fall prey to. It is infuriating in all the best ways and finds the raw magic within women’s determination to break free.
Nghi Vo
Rave Booklist In this stellar novel, Vo (The Chosen and the Beautiful, 2021) turns Hollywood into a fairyland—the kind from the old stories, sharp and dangerous—and laces the sparkling silver romance of the movies with a dark, exploitative, hungry greed ... Luli must hide her sapphic romances as well as her best friendships, because no one at the studios is safe from exposure, betrayal, or simply being emptied out. Pair that vivid world with the stubborn, passionate Luli and a pace that turns from slow and delightfully sexy to vast and terrifying with the turn of a page and you have the brilliantly searing Siren Queen.
Vaishnavi Patel
Rave Booklist The novel is compelling and rich, drawing on the source material while furnishing its characters with new complexity and motivations. Fans of Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018) will fall hard for this story about a woman determined to do what’s right for her kingdom and its women, walking the fine line between rebellion and convention.
Janelle Monáe
Rave Booklist In five satisfyingly long short stories, singer Monáe and her five collaborators paint a picture of a technocapitalist dystopia ruled by an organization that monitors the memories of its populace ... blistering, hopeful, and richly written ... All readers will finish the book craving more of these extremely queer, bold stories that battle gatekeeping and erasure, digging into both the worst potential of a surveillance state and the gritty glimmer of the rebellion that can defeat it.
Ed. by Sheree Renée Thomas, Troy L. Wiggins and Pan Morigan
Rave Booklist Thirty-three stories fill this collection’s vibrant pages ... The tales are creative and vary widely across genre and tone ... The collection is compelling and full of inventive stories.
Max Gladstone
Rave Booklist Gladstone’s thick, brilliant novel is atmospheric, painting tremors around the dark shapes in the corners of our eyes and exploring the concept of constant surveillance and the dangers of seeking rigid control. Last Exit is thoughtful, action-packed, terrifying, and hopeful all at once, and has true, complicated friendships, found family, and queer love at its core. It’s an epic story with a complex, believable cast that asks the reader what it would truly take to find a world that’s better than our own.
Scotto Moore
Positive Booklist ... [a] wild riot of a science fiction novel ... It’s a twisting story that’s at turns snarky, absurd, and stimulating. Moore’s novel does fall into some awkward exposition and leaps of internal logic that may frustrate some readers, and Isabel’s geeky excitement can overshadow her reaction to real-world consequences of the plot turns. That said, Battle of the Linguist Mages is so fantastically inventive that many video-game fans and sf readers will fall hard for the linguistics-rooted magic and the shimmering adventurous universe of Sparkle Dungeon, not to mention its pop-culture references and fun nods to the quirks of video games and the community of people who love to play them.
Mike Chen
Positive Booklist As always, Chen has written a science fiction novel rooted in a deeply emotional core: the focus is on this family and their tensions and pain, and whether they can find a way to trust one another moving forward. This soft sf story is strongest when digging into the complicated dynamics between big and little sister: Kass and Evie struggle to understand each other and accept the other’s mistakes. It’s a vivid, strong novel that will enchant sf fans who enjoy concentrated, touching stories that narrow in on relationships and emotional consequences.
Gregory Maguire
Rave Booklist The Brides of Maracoor once again shows Maguire’s rich, mesmerizing world building, full of small, frustrating human absurdities—from the silliness of government norms to the small betrayals within a family. It also shows off his gift for crafting compelling characters—Helia, the eldest bride, is a fascinating matriarch, and Lucikles is a relatable man just trying to do his job without alienating or losing his family. It’s an intriguing, witty start to a fantastical proposed trilogy.
Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson
Rave Booklist The footnotes are a brilliant touch: they expose the ways that society has been irreparably changed, as the writers cannot understand Miri’s emotion, often editing down her most painful moments \'for clarity.\' They frame Miri as an unreliable conspiracy theorist, yet the reader can see a different story unfold. It is a thought-provoking, haunting story about the sacrifices a society is willing to make to ensure its survival.
Charlie Jane Anders
Rave Booklist Readers will fall in love with its zany, dark weirdness ... Stories touch on found family and queerness, on the ominous horrors of being pursued or policed, and on gentrification and finding the places where you belong, however weird they may be. Anders is an author who finds an exciting, riotous joy in invention, and that passion breaks through into each and every story.
Robin McLean
Positive Booklist This grim novel of revenge has an ironic tone with the surreal touch of a fever dream—the narration dives into the far future, or adopts the point of view of the mules carrying the party’s supplies. McLean’s novel is equal parts absurd and bleak, a startling story about survival, violence, and the thin divisions between animal and human, perfect for fans of dark, gritty Westerns.
Charlie Jane Anders
Positive Booklist Anders gifts readers with digestible and motivating writing advice dipped in a satisfying coating of snark. Using her own life and writing career as inspiration, Anders cuts through preconceived notions of what it is to be a writer, dismissing dichotomies and spilling truths about imposter syndrome ... Through her encouraging counsel and intriguing questions, she encourages writers to keep writing and continue telling stories, brainstorming, daydreaming, listening, and to have faith in their own abilities and their heart. Anders gives both new and experienced writers questions, exercises, and encouragement that will spark ideas and keep them motivated to continue their work.
Ryka Aoki
Rave Booklist This warm, hopeful novel features this entertaining tangle of women all trying to find their true place in a difficult world. Katrina’s passion and hard-working determination drive the novel; she stuns Satomi with her intuitive, self-taught playing of video-game-inspired pieces even as she deals with the effects of trauma from the domestic, verbal, and sexual abuse she’s endured. Aoki’s novel is an exciting, wild web of an adventure, a unputdownable book about music, found family, and identity. Diving into the tough subjects, Aoki’s book emerges with a joyful, queer, radical ballad of a story that will appeal to fans of TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020).
Cadwell Turnbull
Rave Booklist Multiple viewpoints and protagonists are easy enough to juggle while being compelling, and the inclusion of asexual, trans, and other non-conforming identities and relationships adds a rich layer of truth and reality to the text. This novel is built out of the shadows in the corner of a dark room, out of disembodied voices and meta-universes, out of blood, conspiracy, and mind control. Readers will itch for the next book in the Saga.
Shelley Parker-Chan
Rave Booklist ... an epic tale of the power of desire, the role of free will in deciding a person’s fate, and the twisting machinations of power. Zhu is a powerful queer anti-hero, her means sometimes questionable, her desire overflowing. The side characters in her story and the plots and betrayals that swirl around the book’s events are themselves intensely compelling, but it is Zhu’s strength of will and passion that give this novel its spark.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Positive Booklist The pacing of Okungbowa’s novel can be shaky, the narrative slowing much more than it has to. But Son of the Storm has a strong core in its vivid world building of ibor, magic, and folkloric creatures. Most of all, the story is powered forward through Esheme, Danso’s intended, a calculating, cold woman with a fierce thirst for power, and her meteoric rise that begins when she discovers the secrets of ibor.
Elizabeth Brooks
Positive Booklist ... atmospheric and creepy, and as needy, nostalgic Freya is pulled deeper and deeper into its shadows, the reader’s worry for her grows—and, with it, the novel’s suspense. Freya is haunted by words she wishes she could take back, the sister she lost, the love that never was, the hopes for the future that she couldn’t attain; all of these materialize in the deep shadows and shifting portrait-eyes of Byrne Hall. Brooks has crafted a slow-simmering, psychological, gothic novel about grief and longing.
Sarah Gailey
Rave Booklist ... a razor-sharp psychological thriller ... twisting thought experiment about both the creation and the humanity of clones. Evelyn is a fascinating character, a brutal, practical scientist who often grates at the reader with her stubborn refusals to apologize ... a slow burn, but the emotional intensity simmering under Evelyn’s skin and the revelations that spin out of the plot are well worth the investment. Gailey’s expertise with suspense and their success in presenting the reader with impossible choices about the ethics of cloning, biological programming and editing, and of Evelyn’s specific, difficult situation, will leave the reader thinking about the novel long after the final page.
E. Lily Yu
Rave Booklist Yu’s debut is rooted in Firuzeh’s fervent desire for stability and in her mother’s rich emotional center. Yu occasionally dives into a peripheral character’s perspective—the English tutor teaching Atay and Abay, a guard working at the refugee camp—giving a grounding vividness to the story of the Daizangi family’s quest for home that is both vast and intensely intimate. Yu’s writing is poetic, the lines of her dialogue strumming into one another, mirroring the way that Firuzeh’s stories begin to blend reality and folklore—as Firuzeh crafts tales to make sense of her reality, and as the incomprehensible tragedies around her morph into imaginary friends that Firuzeh and Nour can’t seem to shake. On Fragile Waves is a lyrical fabulist novel that will enchant readers of both literary fiction and fantasy.
Mike Chen
Positive Booklist ... vivid ... The heart of Chen’s latest lies in Zoe’s stubborn, impulsive attitude, and Jamie’s practical, grounded approach. Their richly developed characters and the inner workings of their friendship root the action as the plot dives and twists. Chen’s novels always put character first, and We Could Be Heroes is no different, inspiring fierce loyalty to both protagonists as they run spy operations into a mad scientist’s lab, encounter blue electric men, and try to keep each other alive while figuring out their origins. The growth of these flawed but relatable super-people power this fast read.
Anna North
Positive Booklist This is a lovely slow draw in the world of the Old West, a story about the people who don’t belong, portraying a realistic, close-minded world that only accepts women willing to fit into a specific mold ... It’s exciting to read a Western tale that features such a range of women and queer characters ... North’s new book is perfect for fans of Sarah Gailey’s Upright Women Wanted (2020).
Christiane Vadnais, Trans. by Pablo Strauss
Positive Booklist ... a lush, haunting book of climate fiction ... Vadnais’s prose is unsettling, imbued with a weighty, wet sensuality and an encroachment of life that is both frightening and strangely seductive in a Kafka-esque world of dread and bodily transformation. Survival and contagion swirl around each other in deadly battle as Vadnais’s characters rebel, fight, or give into the bitter, primitive hunger that threatens to swallow their world whole.
Max Seeck
Rave Booklist This rich, intensely suspenseful thriller begins with the murder of Maria Koponen, a woman who happens to be married to the author of a series of books about witches and inquisitors ... Seeck’s debut is dark and intricate—the moments of revelation are as vividly cinematic and impactful every time. Seeck has an uncanny ability to unspool reveals at just the right pace to get the reader’s heart pounding as they make the connection at the same moment as the detective on page. His expertise with pacing, his careful plotting, and his choice to use short, quick chapters all combine to create a vivid, robust thriller.
emily m. danforth
Rave Booklist ... at once a sexy, funny, and spooky tale ... Plain Bad Heroines is visually luscious, from the buzz and sting of yellow-jackets and the sheen of black Oxford apples to the strange skim of black algae on water ... Dark, affectionate, creepy, this is a new classic in queer fantasy ... a suspenseful rush that will leave the reader flipping furiously to the end.
Cherie Dimaline
Positive Booklist The setting of the novel is richly written, populated by the Canadian Métis community and their legends of the Rogarou, a werewolf-like creature that haunts the woods and preys on the misbehaved. Dimaline’s writing is sharp and quick, and as the novel develops, teeth and bone and horror begin to lurk at the edges of the story, and while some plot twists are jarring, the book moves rapidly towards its finish. Dimaline’s weaponization of her female protagonists’ sexuality can be excessive, and the two female main characters, Joan and romantic rival Cecile, are often preoccupied with their jealousy and blind dislike of each other. That said, Joan’s stubborn determination, and her nephew Zeus’s loyalty, bring a strong emotional core to the book, which is supported by their loyal but volatile family.
Madeleine L'Engle
Positive Booklist This collection spans many genres, and holds stunning tales that are realistic, autobiographical, science fictional, or fantastical. L’Engle’s stories are softly tragic with sparkles of hope and a sincere faith, told in a simple and earnest voice. ... These newly discovered stories, written in the 1940s and 50s, will spark the interest of the approximately one bazillion fans of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.
Katie M. Flynn
Rave Booklist In a dystopian California paralyzed by quarantine...readers watch characters struggle with fascinating questions of loss and memory. What does it mean to be alive—to be human, to be real? And what is the cost of remembering what it was like to die? Flynn tells an emotive, mesmerizing speculative story in her excellent debut.
Nghi Vo
Rave Booklist This novella tells an epic story through small moments and intricate details, and its world-building is done with care, from the codes hidden in fortunes and linguistics to the folktales mentioned in passing in Rabbit’s story. In-yo is a transfixing figure, and Rabbit is a moody, fascinating character in her own right. Vo’s debut has it all: from sapphic love to cruel betrayals; from political intrigue to lakes that glow red to ghosts that continue to walk old paths. Despite its length, The Empress of Salt and Fortune will appeal to all fans of epic fantasy, and readers will be excited to read whatever Vo comes up with next.
Tina May Hall
Rave Booklist Hall has written a lovely, lush, surrealist book set in a cold, snowy village in a world where environmental collapse is beginning ... The book is atmospheric, compelling, and beautiful, infused with gentle, earthy fantasy and a soft push into the future, drawing deeply on the gothic genre. Hall’s book is poetic and ghostly, haunting the reader with its intriguing story and its evocative imagery of ice.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Rave Booklist ...strange, provocative ... In Verge, characters find their meaning and faith in their own bodies, grounded in physicality and anatomy, pain and desire. These stories are daring, provoking, and incendiary.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Positive Booklist Percy is a quirky and vivid narrator who feels an immense anxiety and malaise in the face of the ‘nebula’ growing inside her ... Stevens’ debut is a compelling and visually rich novel that explores alienation in all its forms. The book’s poetic language and realistically absurd characters will keep readers intrigued until the final page.
Mike Chen
Rave Booklist ... rooted in deep, realistic human emotion ... the best kind of dystopian novel: one rooted deeply in the hearts of its characters and emphasizing hope and connection over fear. Chen has a true gift for making the biggest of worlds center around the most complex workings of the heart, and his newest is compelling, realistic, and impossible to put down.
A. J. Hackwith
Positive Booklist ... an engaging fantasy ... Hackwith writes a fast-paced, suspenseful story set in an intriguing world where storytellers can duel with words and souls are not what they seem. Bookworms will love the creative spin of a library system rooted in imagination, of interworld book loans flying out to places like Valhalla, and of characters rising off the pages. Readers will eagerly await the sequel.
Sarah Pinsker
Rave Booklist Pinsker’s first novel...is a riveting and plausible look into what our world could be if we become consumed with fear and dependent on social media. It is also a love letter to live music and underground shows, imagining futuristic musical innovations and the punk rebel scene that could emerge in response to a closed-off world. Pinsker tells her story through the eyes of two complex queer women who ground this fascinating, emotional narrative.
Positive Booklist ... brings together an exciting table of contents that features many of the best speculative fiction and surrealist authors of the moment ... These 14 intelligent and complex stories hold both hopes and fears for our future, presenting poignant and fascinating tales of what we should consider as we alter our world.
Annalee Newitz
Rave Booklist Newitz’s carefully built narrative of time travel and conflict is rooted in the drive and joys of intersectional feminism, sex positivity, and acceptance ... This riot of a book will have readers delighting both in the thrilling battle over timelines in an intricate, alternative world and in the joys of inclusive feminist solidarity.
Sue Rainsford
Positive Booklist ... haunting ... Rainsford fills her book with an artful, disconcerting prose that never quite allows the reader full access, bringing the surrealist, haunting dread to life and artfully mirroring the mixed feelings of the local Cures who both trust Ada and fear the legends about her. With an evocative novel bending fantasy into a universe of subtle horror and bodies cracking open to be healed, Rainsford pulls the reader into a frightening, tangible world of monstrosity, humanity, and healing.
Erin Morgenstern
Positive Booklist Morgenstern’s new fantasy epic is a puzzlebox of a book, full of meta-narratives and small folkloric tales that will delight readers ... Morgenstern...uses poetic, honey-like prose to tell a story that plays with the very concept of what we expect and want from our stories; she also asks questions about accessibility, and what it truly means to guard something as precious as the library. She trusts her readers to follow along and speculate, wonder, and make leaps themselves as she dives into tales of pirates, book burnings, and men lost in time, giving the book a mythic quality that will stick with readers long after they put it down.
Peg Alford Pursell
Positive Booklist Pursell’s surreal stories together form a familiar picture of a world full of love and yearning, parents and children, lovers and their broken hearts, human contradictions, loneliness, longings, and failures to connect.
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Rave Booklist What unfolds is a twisting, sapphic time travel fantasy love story that never stops surprising: El-Mohtar and Gladstone have written the ultimate in enemies-to-lovers romance, but with an intricate layer of lush, uncanny descriptions of the fantastic strands the agents are shifting; not to mention a careful net of time travel and parallel universes. This suspenseful novel is a superb realization of a difficult concept bulging with details: a time travel rival-secret-agent epistolary romance interspersed with descriptions of fascinating secret missions. Readers will reach the end and want to turn back to the start.
Suzette Haden Elgin
Rave Booklist The book is expansive, exposing the reader to the institutional and familial sexism that infects this world; but it is also focused, rooted in the private rebellions and inner fury of women ... This carefully crafted, fascinating dystopia is a call to action even decades later, and highlights the importance of language and its uses in politics of power.
Karen Lord
Positive Booklist Lord has pulled together a strange, surrealist novel for those who don’t mind wading into a fantasy world and letting themselves be pulled along by the tide. This book, inspired by the inscrutability of angels and by Caribbean storytelling, dips in and out of myth, of branching possible futures, and of spirit worlds, leaving the reader constantly questioning what is real. Unraveling is twisting and fantastic; readers will contemplate the nature of memory as they dive into the tale, rooting for Miranda to make it through and succeed, even as the story approaches a climax impossible to see coming.
Elvia Wilk
Positive Booklist Wilk’s first novel is a strange, vivid thought experiment ... Anja’s quiet, shy analysis turns a critical eye to our future, asking daring questions of how the desire to change the world for the better could instead turn on it a new kind of toxicity. Wilk makes the reader ponder how relying on corporations to invest in art and sustainability could put us on a perilous path. In Anja’s world, artists are corporate entities, and the drive toward sustainability gentrifies communities. Oval is a book of plot twists and turns that roots itself in Anja’s relatable, practical soul and scientific passion for inquiry.
Kris Waldherr
Positive Booklist This novel is an unexpected delight that grows steadily more compelling as its pages fly by. Waldherr plays with gothic tropes, from the plot devices of misty moors, unexpected fires, and uncovered letters to the gendered conventions of tragic romance. The novel builds into a surrealist, haunting tale of suspense where every prediction turns out to be merely a step toward a bigger reveal.
Seth Fried
Positive Booklist \"The obnoxious antics of artificial intelligence OWEN, who finds both children and seniors suspicious, and who spends much of his time figuring out how to replicate the sensation of becoming drunk, contrast brilliantly against the serious Henry, a man with few friends and a love of trains and transit, whose main personality trait is dedication to his work. Fried’s skill at making their friendship so dynamic, mismatched, and often ridiculous is what makes this novel so effective—OWEN and Henry’s quest to defeat an evil genius becomes a touching and funny caper that keeps the reader intrigued through the final pages. Meanwhile, in the background floats a quiet debate about the modern city. Fried gestures to city-planning thinkers such as Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs, revealing his careful research and thought into the ways that targeted infrastructure and funding can encourage neglect and gentrification.\
Leife Shallcross
Mixed Booklist Parts of the story remain overly attached to classic versions of this tale: the Beast’s despondency often comes off as emotionally manipulative, and the end-goal for all of the women in the novel is portrayed as marriage. But Shallcross does well to use the magic mirror as a device giving the reader a window into the social world of Isabeau’s family; unlike in the original tale, Isabeau’s sisters redeem themselves, becoming contented, hard-working women. Isabeau and her two sisters provide the emotional core of Shallcross’ retelling, and the emotion-rich romances and family relationships of this book are what keep it so compelling.
Mike Chen
Positive Booklist Stirring ... dedicates detail and precision to the vagaries and paradoxes of time travel, without sacrificing its vital emotional core ... Chen carefully balances heart, humor, and precise world building to bring alive an emotional and genre-bending story that will please fans of Doctor Who.