Author: Patricia Elzie

At the beginning, Shori wakes up in darkness and in terrible pain, both from injury it seems and from extreme hunger. She doesn’t know why she is injured and badly scarred, why she is in so much pain, nor why she is waking up just laying on the ground. She doesn’t even know who she is. She eventually regains some strength and is able to go out to hunt. She comes upon an area of burned down houses and buildings which she doesn’t recognize but she felt pulled there somehow.

She realizes right away that during the day, when the sun was out, the light is painful and she needs to hide in darkness and rest. She hunts and sleeps for a few days until she gets restless. There is a paved road nearby so she walks down it. She vaguely remembers the idea of vehicles. She still has no memories and she gets picked up by a driver named Wright. Now, what Wright sees is a Black adolescent girl covered in blood and dirt walking down the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in the rain. She is suffering from severe amnesia. Wright offers to take her home, or at least to the hospital since she looks like she was a badly injured child.

We learn, however, she is not a child. At least, not a human child. She is a 53 year old vampire. As we learn bits and pieces of Shori’s history, things get creepier and creepier. She bites Wright to get him under her control and makes him take her to his home. He is now loyal to her and joins her on her search to find out who she is and what happened to her family.

This book is both subtle and overt in its creep-factor. I was uneasy the entire time I was reading this book. Sometimes it was the sex. Sometimes it was the racism. Sometimes it was something else entirely. Content warnings for violence, adults having sex with a vampire in an adolescent body, and racism. Yep, racist vampires.

I feel like this book has been a long time coming. It is for former fans of Harry Potter who are tired of the author’s transphobia. Specifically, the sweet spot is fans who were maybe in middle school or junior high when the Harry Potter books came out and are now in their 30s. This book is definitely geared toward adults, as it contains violence, transphobia, and sex on the page.

The book opens 25 years earlier, at the ceremony where our main five childhood girlfriends become witches. They are Helena, Elle, Leonie, Ciara, and Niamh. Flash forward to the present. Helena Vance is the High Priestess of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, the HMRC. It leans towards very white, especially in it’s “feminism.” At one point before this time, there was a schism and Leonie, who is Black and queer, forms a different, more inclusive coven outside of the HMRC. This coven is called Diaspora. Niamh lives out in the country a bit, trying to mind her own business and does some veterinary work. In the last 25 years there was a huge war and a lot of lives were lost, both witches and warlocks alike and all our adult characters are dealing with that trauma in their own ways.

Well, the action in this book doesn’t take long to start. Helena teleports into Niamh’s yard unannounced and asks for Niamh’s help. There’s been a prophecy and it is very, very bad. The awful thing that is supposed to come to pass is, apparently, started off with a child of immense power. Helena believes that they have apprehended the child, who is a teen that they have locked up until they figure out what to do. Note: this is all conjecture on their part. That being said, the teen has more unbridled power than any warlock they know. Niamh can read minds and Helena hopes she can help because the teen is not talking. Helena eventually allows Niamh to take the teen, Theo, home with her to help teach them and maybe keep the apocalypse from happening.

The magic battles in this book are amazing and so much more than just waggling wands at each other. Clearly it is a direct response to HP and specifically the author and sometimes this book is heavy-handed and quite on-the-nose but oh, it’s delicious and fun! A strong opener to this forthcoming trilogy.

The story is told primarily from two points of view. First is teenage Ivy who at the beginning of the book has just broken up with her boyfriend Nate. They are in his car, leaving a party, and he is driving recklessly. He swerves, crashes, and gets out of the car while telling Ivy he saw something. Specifically, a woman, or at least older teen girl, standing naked in the middle of the road. Nate says she ran into the woods (because of course there’s creepy woods right there) and both Ivy and Nate run in to find her because it was unclear if she was hurt and needs help.

The other point of view is told from Dana, Ivy’s mother. Dana and her best friend, who Ivy refers to as Aunt Fee, are local witchy-types and they run an herb shop that is well-known in town. Dana’s chapters are mostly flashbacks about when she and Fee were teens and getting into witchcraft in troubling ways and definitely deeper than they should have. Ivy knows nothing of this as she and her mother have a very strained, cold, distant relationship that is borderline antagonistic. Dana doesn’t let anyone in, especially her daughter. She has some big secrets and it’s very clear that she is deliberately keeping things from Ivy.

Of course, weird, creepy things start happening. Without spoiling anything, I will say that Ivy is spending the summer grounded. She shouldn’t have been out at that party with Nate so her summer’s gonna be a bummer. On top of that, her mom has gone incommunicado. She’s not home and Ivy’s sure she’s with her Aunt Fee doing stuff for the shop but she doesn’t come home and she’s not responding to texts. Is she missing? Is she just doing the distant and aloof thing she does? Before Dana left, Ivy witnessed her doing some super suspicious things in the garden and wild stuff keeps happening to and around Ivy while her mom is nowhere to be found.

Content warning for violence to animals, namely rabbits.

Sol (short for Solomon) Katz is a Jewish trans man who is also an archivist and also a vampire. Most people don’t know he’s a vampire. Well, human resources at the archives where he works knows but his co-worker, Florence, doesn’t. Florence is really transphobic and every interaction she has with Sol makes me clench my jaw and shout expletives. They work at the Historical Society of Northern California.

The archives are, of course, in a basement devoid of windows so Sol is totally safe from the sun down there. He has been living in/sleeping in his office, which is totally against the rules. He is too terrified of trying and maybe failing to sun-proof an apartment so he just lives and works in the archives and sometimes goes out around town at night. He goes out at least once a week or so to get his blood transfusion. He doesn’t actually attack people. Vampires are a known entity in the world of this book and there are night clinics where they get blood that can’t be given to the living, such as blood that has viral infections.

Our other main character is Elsie. She has decided to donate her deceased wife’s papers, ephemera, etc. to the Historical Society and Sol has accepted. The deceased, Tracy, was the creator of Feet of Clay, a ’90s cult classic show that was kind of a knock-off of the X-Files. Sol was absolutely obsessed with Feet of Clay back in the ’90s and was super into the fandom.

Elsie, it seems, is super into Sol and flirting blooms into a tentative romance. More than once in the book, Sol comes out as transgender. And then as a vampire. And sometimes both at once. The book is not only told through Sol’s point of view, but from bits and pieces of Tracy’s papers that were donated, old emails, fan fiction, and scripts. It’s an intricate story about the histories of the main characters involving meditations on identity, grief, love, and empathy and it is absolutely lovely.

Our protagonist is Celeste (aka Cel). Cel has some mental health issues that are unmanaged. She has been prescribed medication that she refuses to take and she gets very sharp when her boyfriend offers any sort of help. Due to a mental health incident, maybe a panic attack, maybe a series of incidents or panic attacks, she has lost the only job she has ever had. She worked at a library and absolutely loved it. She doesn’t have a degree and library jobs are hard to get even with a degree so she worries she won’t find anything else.

Eventually she does find something that looks promising: a position as an archival assistant at the incredibly creepy Logan Museum and Library. It’s one of those places that is full of skulls, maybe some “medical oddities,” and it definitely feels like it is haunted. The museum was founded in 1934 but before that the building had been a variety of things such as a hospital, an orphanage, and a sanitorium, specifically a psychiatric hospital. The thing about such museums and exhibits is that many folks don’t often think too deeply about where the skulls and other bones and specimens come from.

Cel takes the job anyway. The job requires that she actually live on the premises in a little apartment that has no internet or cellular signal. She has to live there because she does her work of scanning and digitizing images from the archives after the museum closes and before it opens. Cel is also occasionally experiencing blackouts, which add to the creep factor when they happen at her new job because strange things are also happening. Cel doesn’t know if these strange things are actually happening or if it is because of the state of her mental health.

Wendy Darling lives in a small coastal town in Oregon at the edge of the woods. She is terrified of the woods and with good reason. At the start of the book it is her 18th birthday and around five years since she was found alone in the woods. Six months prior to that she and her two younger brothers had gone missing and only she turned back up. She remembers nothing, except that the woods terrify her.

On her 18th birthday another child went missing. Any time a child goes missing in the town, the cops want to interrogate Wendy, who clearly already has a lot of trauma. This recent abduction makes two kids currently missing (aside from her brothers lost years ago).

Wendy’s best friend Jordan is a constant support in her life and the only one that Wendy can share things with. Lately, Wendy has been unintentionally drawing things. For example, if she has a pen in her hand to make a list or sign a receipt or take notes she suddenly spaces out and when she gets her attention back, she sees that she has drawn a tree. A big, gnarly tree that she doesn’t recognize. Or that she has drawn a boy. The same boy, each time. An imaginary boy who ends up being Peter Pan.

Peter shows up, which is already a problem because he’s not supposed to be real and asks Wendy to once again help him find and reattach his shadow. The shadow has grown beyond only mischievous and is straight up evil. Peter believes the shadow has to do with the missing children.

This book is incredibly creepy and really, really good. Content warnings for child abduction and violence against children including gun violence.

I have tried multiple times to connect with Brené Brown’s work. I’ve watched her TEDTalk, I’ve read The Gifts of Imperfection, I’ve read Dare to Lead. But as a queer Black woman, I do not have the luxury to show my vulnerability. I rarely have the privilege of safe workplaces or a safe society that allows me to be anything less than perfect, strong, and inspirational.

Tarana Burke reached out to Brené Brown to collaborate on this book to try to bridge that gap and I found it to be so much more accessible. In the introduction, Burke talks about how she would have to try to contort herself and do some wild acrobatics to try to fit into the sphere of experience covered by Brené Brown’s work. This book is an anthology of deeply personal essays by Black writers who stepped forward and laid bare their experiences with vulnerability and shame, something we are taught to never, ever do.

There are some really phenomenal voices included in this anthology: Jason Reynolds, Austin Channing Brown, Marc Lamont Hill, Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Sonya Renee Taylor, Laverne Cox, Imani Perry, and so many more. The content warnings are extensive. There are a lot of hard things talked about, from abuse and domestic violence, transphobia, drug use, houselessness, racism, and the list goes on. This is far from a light read. That being said, these are not stories of “I was vulnerable and it was the end of the world” or “my shame consumed me until I had nothing left.” These are stories about how people, Black people, found strength in their shame and how they found their truth in their vulnerability. In order to get to these places of hope and these stories of triumph we first dive deep into how the trauma inflicted on Black people in this country is ongoing. We don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder. The trauma is present and unending. The trauma is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is passed down intergenerationally and so is shame.

This book was so incredibly good. I’m really grateful that is out in the world so that you all can read it.

I am a big fan of this informational graphic novel series. These are small guides that can fit in a large pocket. This particular one is under 80 pages. The intention is to give an overview, dispel some myths and stereotypes, offer some advice, and have a few references at the end for further education.

This is a helpful book for people who are asexual (AKA ace), folks questioning whether they might be ace, and anyone who wants to understand a bit about asexuality. It is written and illustrated by folks who are ace themselves. While these things are not depicted in graphic detail, there are mentions of sexual violence, acephobia, depression, rejection and invalidation, and medical discrimination.

Since this is a quick and easy guide it is by no means comprehensive. Asexuality isn’t widely understood by most people in our society and this book wants to offer a positive exploration. The authors go over basic questions such as, “What is asexuality?” As with many things, asexuality is a spectrum and this book gives a bit of an overview of that, though being ace is different for everyone. I love how this book doesn’t make assumptions about what people may or may not already know.

There’s a fun cake metaphor that is used when describing different expressions of asexuality and I was happy to see it illustrated and included in this book. If you’re not familiar with the cake metaphor, then you are in for a treat (pun intended).

Along with general information, Muldoon and Hernandez also offer some personal shares about how asexuality is for them and their experiences. Learning about something academically is great but it is so helpful to ground what we learn in actual people’s lived experiences. There are sections on dating, growing up ace, and much more. The amount of information they have packed into this book is impressive. Most importantly, this book seeks to normalize asexuality and let folks know that they’re not alone.

I’m going to lead with the content warnings and there are many: sexual assault, homophobia including violent attacks, ableism, sexual molestation, more homophobia, racism, misogyny, assault, injury, isolation, suicidal ideation, fatphobia, and surely there may be some I am missing.

If you are reading this and say, “But Hannah Gadsby is a comedian, this should be funny!” it’s understandable. If you are reading this and have seen Hannah Gadsby’s special titled Nanette, then you are probably nodding your head solemnly.

This book is very much like her show Nanette. While it is a memoir and the tale of how she became who she is and how Nanette came to be, the book in itself has a very similar feel. That is to say, while reading this book I could be doubled-over, absolutely choking with laughter one minute and two sentences later feel like I’ve been punched in the face. This happens repeatedly. Uncontrollable giggles then it’s like the wind was completely knocked out of me and I need to sit because I found I was suddenly trembling. Gadsby is phenomenal at what she does on stage and it has translated well to this book, which I cannot say for most other comedian memoirs that I’ve read.

Much of the book is about Gadsby’s childhood growing up in Tasmania as the youngest of five children. She intermittently provides a history lesson on homophobia in Tasmania and Australia as a whole which colored how she thought of queer folks and ultimately, herself. She also talks about being diagnosed with autism as an adult and is able to look back on her childhood through that lens, clicking together pieces of the puzzle of her life.

Gadsby also talks about how she got into stand-up comedy and her experiences in comedy leading up to Nanette. I am fascinated by her breakdown of how Nanette came to be, how it was pieced together and grew and changed and what her intention was with it and finally, why she stopped performing it.

I cannot get over how good this book is and it is certainly one of the best books I’ve read this year.

This book does an excellent job at capturing how incredibly lonely it has become for Black people who have (or had) a racially diverse group of friends. Or in my case of being mixed, a whole side of the family that is not Black. As the author learned, and as many of us have learned, we can love people and also no longer have them in our lives. Supporting white supremacy is a deal breaker and that is at the heart of this book. Over and over, the author comes to the realization that systemic racial injustice isn’t going to be solved by individual conversations with racists. The “all we need to do is love” mentality isn’t actually effective at bringing about change.

The author covers a lot of ground through his own journey of awakening. His activism is woven through his performance art and music. His writing incorporates history about the civil rights movement, both historically and present day, both violent and nonviolent means as well. He also incorporates his knowledge of the bible, having graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

It was painful to read about his repeated attempts to have heartfelt, honest conversations with white and other non-Black friends and loved ones and every time it was just another punch in the face. No one was interested in having a conversation, only in being right and also being able to uphold white supremacy. Over and over with “I don’t want to talk politics” when really they mean “I don’t want to acknowledge my role in your oppression so be quiet about it.”

The author posits that we don’t actually have to convince everyone that racism is wrong to achieve justice. Maybe winning over white people should not be the main goal. He offers some concrete advice for folks in the struggle such as not debating and not engaging with trolls, whether they are anonymous or people we know. Among other things, he writes about the importance of hope in this fight, not least of all because it’s so easy to lose hope.

Content warnings for anti-Black racism and graphic descriptions of police brutality.