Author: Patricia Elzie

Garland Moore used to be more of an optimist. She believed in true love and signs from the universe and finding everyday magic at any moment. She had a lovely marriage with the perfect guy, Ethan. When she and Ethan were at the airport for the honeymoon, rushing to catch their plane, Garland dropped a bracelet her sister Dara had made when they were kids. A guy picked it up and handed it back to Garland, where she was struck by a vision of sitting at a table with many people, across from this man, and they were laughing and sharing a moment. She shook it off and was on her way to have a wonderful honeymoon.

A couple years later, Ethan surprised Garland with divorce papers. A year after that, Garland had moved in with her sister Dara and was driving a rideshare when twin brothers became her passenger. They all hit it off really well and they told Garland that they bought their childhood summer camp and they’ve rebranded it as an adult sleepaway camp. Garland told Dara and they decided to take the opportunity to go that summer because it was something they dreamed of as children but never got the opportunity to do.

So this is where the story actually begins. Dara and Garland show up at Camp Carl Cove for its inaugural adult summer camp experience. Garland meets one of her cabin-mates, Stevie, in an incredibly awkward interaction. They decide to form a camp alliance and from that point on, you can tell they’ll be inseparable. When they go out to meet the rest of the campers, Stevie introduces Garland to her three brothers that are also there. They all went to Camp Carl Cove every year as children. When Garland meets Stevie’s brother Mason, she has quite a moment because Mason is the guy from the airport that had picked up her bracelet and she had that vision.

Stevie tells Garland she will do her best to hook her up with her brother but in the process, Garland finds that all she really wants to do has less to do with Mason and more to do with Stevie.

First, some obvious content warnings for discussions of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness and also warnings for discussions of transphobia, police violence, and sexual assault including molestation.

Much of the existing literature on anti-fatness and anti-Blackness, whether it be books, articles, Instagram reels, or otherwise is primarily focused on fat Black women and fat Black femmes. Belly of the Beast is a very important and fresh addition to the growing literature on the intersections of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness as it focuses on fat Black masc bodies. Masc (derived from ‘masculine’) as in cisgender man bodies and nonbinary trans masc bodies and transgender man bodies.

This book is rather concise but Harrison covers a lot of ground and interrogates certain topics that I’ve read about but maybe haven’t encountered as discussed in this way, such as what it looks like to talk about policing, police violence, and prisons with regard to how the fat Black masc body experiences them. I also appreciate how they discuss the idea of health as a social construct made specifically in a way that makes it inaccessible to fat Black people. I sincerely welcome their interrogation of body positivity and self-love as I have done in my own writing. In another chapter in this book I really enjoy, Harrison writes about the politics of desirability. Who gets to be pretty? Who is determined to be ugly? And what power is there in these labels? In one of the later chapters, Harrison talks with seven fat Black trans people and gives them all space to tell their own stories and it is really, really powerful.

Harrison cites many other related works such as The Body is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor and Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings. Harrison’s citations are not mere regurgitations, but sometimes a deepening of discussion or clear rebuttal. I think that one of the things I like about this book is that it truly feels like a discussion and an exploration.

This is a novel in verse and I think this is actually the first time that I’ve read a novel in verse. It was fun! It is a story about seven queer women, six of whom are trans, living and loving and failing in Brooklyn, NY. I think that some descriptions of the book only mention six women in total but the narrator is also an integral part of this story, though she goes unnamed through most of the book. She’s a bit like a Greek chorus, though not exactly.

The book starts on New Year’s Eve when everything feels fresh and new and the air is thick with possibility. Our narrator is at a bar and witnesses some interactions which possibly include some couples forming. First are Day and Bette. Bette makes money being a cam girl and Day has the 9-5 job that she had been in since before she transitioned. For a while, Bette and Day seem to improve each other’s lives. Day has a spacious apartment she is willing to share and Bette teaches Day to embrace her sexuality. Next we have Keiko and Gaia. Keiko is maybe nineteen or twenty years old and an artist. Gaia is a couple years older. They have a magical evening where they get drunk and play whiskey slaps and make out (no sex) and talk and talk until they fall asleep together at Keiko’s flat. Keiko has a huge crush on Gaia moving forward but it is unrequited. The final couple we have are Kate and Aashvi. Aashvi is the one cis woman in the story and she and Kate are trying to have a baby, which in this case means that Kate needs to start producing sperm again. In order to do that, she’s going to need to go off of estrogen and start producing testosterone again which is incredibly difficult in many ways and Kate has a bit of a freak-out after a few months and feels like she needs to dive head-first into trans community work and help the younger, newly-hatched trans women in navigating life.

Our narrator is not only the witness but also a participant in all the mess that ensues. I cannot speak specifically to the trans woman community but there are so many things in this book that are present in the wider queer community that are both hilarious and cringey. This book was quite a ride and a fun read.

This is a queer young adult anthology and I rarely say this about anthologies but, every single story in this collection is a winner. It was thoughtfully put together and features a racially diverse range of characters that are multiple different flavors of queer. It also includes a wide range of genre representation, which I appreciate.

There’s a vampire story titled, “What Happens in the Closet” by Caleb Roehrig that had me literally laughing out loud because of how awful the vampires are (and it’s not because of the violence). The same story made me cringe because of the awkwardness of being a teen, the awkwardness of being gay, and the combined awkwardness of being a teen who is gay.

Another story that has a nice balance is titled “Lumber Me Mine” by CB Lee. It has the rawness of a fresh breakup out of a toxic relationship with a person who is incredibly manipulative but then it also has a super swoon-worthy girl our lead character meets in Woodshop class. She’s only in Woodshop because she is avoiding the Nutrition and Household Planning class since that’s where her ex will be. I don’t want to give too much away but I really enjoyed this story.

One of my absolute favorite stories in this whole book is “Victory Lap” by Julian Winters. It is so sweet and I absolutely cried multiple times which is silly because it’s a short story! I would cry on one page, be fine for the next, and then start crying all over again a paragraph later. Luke Stone, our protagonist, is looking for a prom date with the help of his friends. We learn that Luke recently quit the cross country team to help his dad out more at his dad’s well-known barber shop. We also learn that Luke’s mother had passed away and also that Luke hasn’t come out to his dad yet. This story could totally be a recipe for disaster but it is filled with so much goofy dad goodness and I have a soft spot in my heart for dad jokes as well as for really good dads.

One of the many things I appreciate about this collection is that the characters are also all along different points in their queer journeys. Some are already well-established in their identities and some are figuring things out still and some figure things out by the end of the story and some don’t and that’s okay. There’s so much more in this anthology as well. A story that features LSD, a story including a few Greek gods, a story featuring a kitchen witch which is also another one of my most favorites in this book. Aliens! Selkies! Dystopian futures! A super fun read that has something for everyone.

Rebekah Taussig tells very personal stories and through them, teaches readers so much about her experience as a person who uses a wheelchair and about ableism and how ableism punishes all of us. The author does not pull punches when she writes about how awful people can be. She breaks down a lot of really crap behavior in films and television, such as when a character with a disability has that dream sequence where they suddenly don’t have that disability anymore which is based on the audacious assumption that all people with disabilities would be happier without them. There is also the common thinking that they would do anything to get rid of them, even evil things. I’m looking at you, Detective Pikachu.

She also tears into “inspiration porn” such as the promposals of the captain of the football team asking the disabled girl in class to prom. “Inspiration porn” is a term for using disabled people as props for videos for likes and clicks because “everyone” wants to see the heartwarming videos of these heroic people being so heroically kind. The rest of that chapter is absolute fire as well. Kindness is complicated and this book makes readers take a step back and think about acts of kindness and when they are actually selfish acts versus when they are something someone actually needs. Taussig gives the example of seeing a person using a wheelchair trying to reach a napkin from a pile of napkins on a high counter. The world doesn’t need the sort of kindness of another person handing them a single napkin. We need someone who will move the whole pile of napkins to a place where they are accessible to everyone all the time.

The author talks about how she was around a group of women and they were talking about experiences that are assumed universal experiences for women, such as catcalling or being told to smile; however, the author hadn’t because what, she’s less of a woman? Because the assumption that a person in a wheelchair has no reason to smile? This is not the author saying all women deserve to be harassed but what she is saying is that we really need to think about all women when we start to assume things about all women.

In another chapter I really appreciated she writes about the capitalist equation that hours + production + wages = value but when a person is disabled, their production amount might be different, the hours you can work might be different, and the wages you’re getting paid are likely to be different which, in a capitalist society, means they are valued less.

This book was thoughtful, enraging, and an absolutely essential read.

In this time-travel historical fiction, Kiku imagines herself as a teen. She and her mother are visiting San Francisco from Seattle. They go to Japantown to try to find the home where Kiku’s Japanese American grandmother and her parents lived in the city before they were forced into an incarceration camp during World War II. We learn that Kiku and her mother don’t really talk about Kiku’s grandparents or her mother’s upbringing much. Her grandmother passed before she was born and she never got to know her. Kiku knows very little about her grandmother’s experiences.

At one point, Kiku’s mother goes into the mall and Kiku gets sucked back into time for the first time. She describes it as “displaced.” Once she gets her bearings, she realizes she is seeing someone who might have been her grandmother, having a violin recital. She is able to look around briefly before being shoved back into the present. Kiku gets displaced another couple of times, again, back in time to her grandmother’s experiences. Kiku ends up being in the same incarceration camp as her grandmother, age 17, and great-grandparents. Kiku quickly realizes that there is so much she didn’t know about this completely heinous act by the U.S. government and she is learning it all firsthand.

Personally, I learned nothing about this in school. The only reason I knew about the Japanese incarceration camps is because my grandmother’s half-sister was forced into one. If a person was 1/16th Japanese or more, they were forced into a camp. My family was also in San Francisco and I wonder if they were sent to the same camp as Kiku’s family. As Kiku explores, she learns there is so much shame around what happened, especially by the people who experienced it and it doesn’t get talked about in many families nor taught in schools.

I had no idea that people protested within some of the camps and that some folks refused to sign paperwork that said they would join the U.S. military. I didn’t know that there were a lot of differences of opinion between the older generations who immigrated from Japan and the younger generations who were born in the U.S. Reading this was enraging on so many levels, from the fact that this happened, to the fact that this kind of awfulness continues to happen in different ways to different groups by this same government, and the fact that most of us were taught so little about it. This graphic novel is so important and a great read.

For folks who are socially — and/or environmentally — minded, trying to “do the right thing” is a never ending battle and it is really easy to fall into despair from overwhelm and hopelessness. While major changes need to be made via policies and business practices, this book gives readers some insight as to how we can each be consumers more mindfully and in ways that do the least amount of harm.

Fair warning, this book may tell you a lot of things that you don’t want to hear, like how much of what you put into your recycling bins doesn’t actually get recycled and goes into landfills. This is also true for items that are donated to thrift shops. While the primary advice is to consume less, that is, to buy fewer disposable items and to reuse what you already own, the author recognizes that it is impossible for most if not all of us to live a zero-waste lifestyle. Such a lifestyle is not what the author is promoting anyway and that’s what I appreciate about this book. We are in a capitalist society and so, how do we make decisions that do the least amount of harm while also remaining realistic for us to do as individuals?

The answers to how we consume are going to be different for each of us and this book offers resources for us to make the most informed choices. Is being vegan actually better for the environment? What if I can’t avoid fast fashion? Is buying organic important in the grand scheme of things? Am I causing harm by buying things from large department stores or multi-billion dollar websites? Is the bank I use evil? This book helps readers tease out the often complicated answers to these questions and more while giving us additional questions to ask ourselves when we make decisions about how we spend (or give) our money.

While so many folks are very heavy-handed and “black and white” about these things, this book does an excellent job of exploring the grey areas to help us each make decisions that we can feel good about.

The first chapter starts with the time of day and a date: November 17, 1929. Seattle, Washington. Each subsequent chapter of the book starts with a date in relation to that first date of November 17th, for example, “October 6, 1929, six weeks before” or “November 14, 1929, three days before.” The chapters are not in chronological order which makes this puzzle a very exciting one to piece together.

So we have Seattle, prohibition, and magic. There are different types of magic such as plant magics and elemental magics. There are also shapeshifters, like werewolves but some people shift into animals other than wolves.

Ambrose Earnshaw is Seattle’s Commissioner of Magi. They are not the Seattle police department though unsurprisingly, they work closely together. The Magi Commission purportedly keeps magic-users in line. Ambrose is a very wealthy man and when we meet him, he is interviewing a handler for his adult daughter, Fiona. The woman he is interviewing is Dolly White, who doesn’t have any magical abilities but she knows her way around potions and she went to a nice finishing school. Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter Fiona frequents a speakeasy owned by a Black woman. Fiona drinks way more than her father would like and she is also addicted to a drug she adds to her alcohol they call “shimmer-shim,” “shim” for short. Fiona is supposed to be married to a fine upstanding young man and she is off galavanting, jazz and gin and so on, so Mr. Earnshaw hires Dolly to keep Fiona in line, off drugs and booze, and definitely away from that speakeasy.

Ambrose Earnshaw has a son as well, Francis. Francis is incredibly creepy and he’s known for assaulting women. The family knows it and pays to keep the victims and the victims’ families quiet. Meanwhile, we have Violet Solomon, who owns Violet’s Hat Shop, the speakeasy that Fiona frequents. Violet’s brother is a shapeshifter and shapeshifters are looked down upon usually but now it seems like shapeshifters in the area are in a lot of danger.

I legitimately had a wonderful time reading this book and it’s a fairly fast read, too!

This book is an immersive fantasy with a lot of violence that I just couldn’t put down. It’s told in the first person by Deka, a 16 year old girl who lost her mother to a disease three months prior to the beginning of this book. She lives in a small village with her father. It’s important to note that Deka’s mother was not from the village and had deep brown skin. Deka too, has brown skin while her father has light skin, blond hair, and gray eyes and because of this, the town hasn’t been incredibly kind to Deka. The town is also very religious, pulling their rules and morality from a book called the Infinite Wisdoms and a god they refer to as the Infinite Father, Oyomo. Surprising no one, the vibe is ultra-patriarchal and misogynistic.

The book begins on the day of the Ritual of Purity. All 16 year old girls in the village need to go through the Ritual of Purity. Once a girl is proven pure, she is considered a full citizen of the village and is eligible to marry and have a family of her own. The Ritual of Purity itself involves a priest non-fatally slicing each girl’s skin with a blade. If her blood runs red, she is considered pure and passes the ritual; however, if her blood runs gold, that is an entirely different thing altogether.

Before it is her turn in the temple, Deka feels a few moments of foreboding before the village is attacked by large murderous beasts that could kill a person with a single scream. A huge bloody fight ensues and in a moment of terror and desperation, Deka yells for the monsters to stop and they do, before leaving entirely. The people of the town are freaked out by this, her own father calls her a demon, and someone tries to run her through with a sword. She does not bleed red and they lock her up.

After weeks of torture, a foreign woman shows up to offer Deka a choice: to either finally die, or to join the Emperor’s elite force of fighters he is creating. This woman has all kinds of information about what Deka is and she would be taking Deka to a combat school where she would meet other girls like herself. At the end of her military service, she would gain purity.

This was such an exciting read that kept me on my toes and definitely caught me by surprise more than once.

This book specifically takes place on the Virgin Islands when they were occupied by Denmark and the islanders were enslaved. It’s told through not only the present time of the book, but also through flashbacks and dreams and hallucinations.

It begins when our main character, Sigourney Rose, was a child. She is an islander and her family is the only, or one of the only, Black families that owns a plantation and has enslaved people. Her mother has promised that she will free people and many of the islanders held her in some kind of esteem. Since she was Black, of course, all the other kongelieg (which translates to “royalty” and basically means the slave-holders) hate her. In fact, the very beginning of this book is a flashback. As I mentioned, Sigourney is a child. Her mother, brother, and sister are ambushed at their own home during a party and murdered. Sigourney manages to escape, as all the enslaved and even other kongelieg at the party were also murdered.

After her escape, Sigourney was rescued by a servant who was basically on standby and waiting for something like this. Sigourney falls under the care of a relative who is also kongelieg. She changes her last name to her relative’s, and is no longer Sigourney Rose but Sigourney Lund. She spends the next many years planning her revenge on her fellow kongelieg and she finally gets an invitation to the King’s island to spend the storm season with the other kongelieg. The king is supposed to choose his successor at the end of this storm season and the kongelieg are not above killing each other. There is a lot of murder that happens in this book. At first I thought it was going to be a bit of a Hunger Games vibe but it is well beyond that.

The other very important thing you have to know about this world is that some people have supernatural powers, referred to as having craft or possessing craft. If an islander is found to have craft, they are executed. If the fjern, that is, any white people, have craft, they say it is a divine gift. Sigourney, an islander but also kongelieg, is not executed for her craft and she most definitely has craft. She can read minds and not only that, but she can control minds as well.

This book was such a wild ride and is the first in a complete duology. Content warnings for anti-Black racism and many types of violence.