Dream Fractal

immaculate teenage lesbian witch vibes

Revisado: 10-08-23

Sideways (a moniker too cool to be their wallet name) is a transmasculine butch lesbian, a social pariah at their high school in a conservative little town in rural America with the usual local features: an epidemic of drug use and homophobia, and a Christofascist white supremacist cult on the outskirts of town that's definitely A Problem. Sideways is also a witch, a real witch, with real magic. Their life changes, dramatically for the better, when the school's trio of pretty, cool (and maybe a little bit mean) girls invite them to a Halloween party to do actual magic. One act of magic leads to another and suddenly Sideways is head of a coven, the trio of cool girls now a quad of witches.

I love Sideways with my whole heart. They're the duality of the queer high school experience: either you were a goth loner that everyone was convinced would be the next school shooter, or you found your place among a bunch of fellow queers figuring themselves out, or both in Sideway's case. They are an immensely relatable useless lesbian, utterly convinced that their new friends are a bunch of straight girls, even as the coven trio make increasingly obvious passes at them. Equally, Sideways is an utterly relatable disaster, making the incorrect choices that any thirsty highschool lesbian would make. Who can say no when a hot chick asks you to paint a magic sigil of ownership on her skin, even if she's clearly sketchy and probably asking you to do dark magic? Like, that's better than sex, consequences be damned.

This book is mostly set up for the next two books in the trilogy, but it's the best example of a setup book I have ever seen. The queer in rural small town America feeling is true to life. You might not have had a Jing, Yates, and Daisy as your besties in high school, but if you managed the trick of finding queer friends, they were probably some permutation of these personality traits: at least one sapphic mean girl, probably two (teens tend to be little monsters), and if you're lucky a cinnamon role with better social skills added as glue to the mix.

The author, August Clarke (probably best to ignore the dead name on the cover), understands lesbians. Really, really understands lesbians, in all their disastrous, girl loving, messy glory. Sideway's transmasculine inclinations honestly only made this book more relatable for me. I'm transfeminine, opposite gender direction, but the experience of being genderfucked is the experience of being genderfucked, transmasc and transfemme rhyme more than they differ.

The best thing about this book is the voice. I don't mean Eilene Stevens' narration—though she fucking knocked it out of the park—but the colourful first person narration puts me so deep in Sideway's head that I know this lesbian, inside and out. And Sideway's is just so dryly funny and relatable that it's a joy to read every chapter. This book ends in a cliff hanger, so obviously I'm currently reading the sequel. The third book isn't out yet (as of late 2023) and so I guess I'm just going to pine for a while waiting for the conclusion. Easy 5 stars across the board. My only complaint is no trans girl witch in the coven but I got good news about book 2. Are you a lesbian? Read this read this read this.

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The Heathers but make it goth witch lesbian

Revisado: 09-01-23

Beautifully written exploration of queerness and trauma, haunting in a way that lingers with the reader for weeks or longer. It's like the Heathers, if the Heathers' horrible teenage girls were goth witch lesbians.

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Cozy space adventure with trans & neuro themes

Revisado: 07-20-23

Translation State is set in the same universe as the Ancillary Trilogy, but is a small cozy, space adventure in the spirit of Leckie's Provenance. There's little in the way of big stakes in this book, just small personal stakes. I found this book much more compelling than Provenance thanks to the fact that all three of the narrators—Enae, Qven, and Reet—are well realized and endearing characters. Moreover, you learn a great deal more about the strange Presger Translators from the Acilliary Trilogy and a little more about the mysterious Presger who created them. Trans and neurodiversity themes and/or characters are present in all of Ann Leckie's novels, but these themes are made central and explicit in this book as the characters explore the question of what it means to be human, and especially, what it means to be a human very much unlike other people around you. A charming, gentle, and empathetic book from start to finish marked by Leckie's incredible knack for world building.

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YA Space Opera fights fascism but pulls punches

Revisado: 06-26-23

What Some Desperate Glory is:

A well-paced space opera about fighting fascism and patriarchy with a group of flawed, but believable teenagers learning that the adults in their lives are wrong, and making mistakes and heroic choices under dire, fate of the galaxy circumstances. I really appreciated the choice of having a trans narrator read the book.

What Some Desperate Glory isn't:

Tamsyn Muir's praise is put front and centre on the cover, which can be misleading, as this book isn't anything like Muir's work. While Muir writes for adults, Some Desperate Glory is young adult (YA). While Muir is known for weird settings, Tesh's setting is standard, Mass Effect-esque space opera. While Muir's work is marked by deep insight into lesbian sexuality and lesbian understandings of gender, Tesh's work is not about lesbianism and the protagonist's sexuality is largely incidental. Tesh's protagonist is not in a relationship and she rarely expresses interest in women on the page.

What Some Desperate Glory should have been:

Some Desperate Glory wants to be a book about opposing patriarchy and fascism. Unfortunately, the book implicitly accepts core tenets of both fascism and patriarchy.

Some Desperate Glory says patriarchy is bad because it does violence to women, but the book also accepts and reinforces the idea that men are inherently better than women (this is reflected in near constant references to men being bigger and stronger and more dangerous than women). Patriarchy, as an ideological system, asserts that (1) there are exactly two immutable categories of person (men and women) and (2) that men are better than women. To reject patriarchy, one must reject both ideas (1) and (2), which would require having trans characters in the book to undermine (1) and to undermine (2) the book would need to feel less like the characters were created using the World Of Warcraft character creator, where all the men are hulking walls of muscle and women have no hope against them in a fair fight.

Some Desperate Glory says fascism is bad because it does violence to "the other", both aliens and any human who isn't white. But fascism as an ideological system asserts that (1) some people have better genes than others, and (2) sometimes it is necessary to do genocide in order to ensure the survival or your "race". Unfortunately, just as Some Desperate Glory says patriarchy is bad but tacitly accepts patriarchy's ideology, the book also tacitly accepts fascism's ideology. The protagonist is a War Breed, a genetically modified Aryan fascist super soldier, implicitly buying into the idea that eugenics (the idea that some people have better genes and you can breed them to get genetically perfect people) is correct. The actual science is that eugenics just doesn't work, selective breeding produces the British royals, not super soldiers. Worse, the book accepts that genocide is sometimes necessary, essentially arguing over the course of the plot that the aliens' genocide of the planet Earth was a necessary act of self-defence. I'm all for punching Nazis, and Earth in this novel is ruled by a fascist government, but genocide is the weapon of fascism. Saying "genocide is fine when used against a fascist government" gives cover to British and American war crimes, such as the bombings of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Tokyo, Dresden, Pforzheim, and Hamburg that annihilated each of these cities' civilian populations.

In sum, Some Desperate Glory wants to make bold statements about gender, racism, patriarchy, and fascism, but the result is a pulled-punch, a book that seems to agree with patriarchy and fascism at some, uncomfortable level.

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Queer Jane Eyre

Revisado: 06-26-23

The re-write of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre that I desperately needed. If you read Jane Eyre and thought, "Mr. Rochester is an asshole" or "Mrs. Rochester deserved justice for the abuse at his hands" or "what if Jane Eyre and Mrs. Rochester kissed?" then this book is absolutely for you. We've had re-imaginings of classic literature but with zombies, which is fun, but what we really need is re-imaginings of classic literature that are extremely gay, and Rose Lerner delivers.

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Must read for folks who've died & come back wrong!

Revisado: 03-12-23

Many stories feature people brought back from the dead by the magic of a loved one's wish—perhaps a parent, a child, a lover, a sibling—the monkey's paw curls and now there's knocking at your door and on the other side is your loved one, who has come back, not as you knew them, but terribly wrong.

These sorts of stories, with their fantastic Aesop that you should never wish for the dead to come back to life, are much like time travel stories, where the moral is invariably not to alter your past with a time machine. The dead character who has returned—but is no longer the loved one you knew and cared for—serves as a lesson to live a life without regrets, to let go and move on in the face of death and hardship.

But what about us, the returned dead, we who came back as monsters? Are we to accept being mere metaphors for the importance of moving on? Don't we deserve to be loved as we are now, even though we may forget to pretend to breathe, even though that dinner you have prepared for us tastes like ash in our mouth, even though the hunger coiling inside of us can only be sated with a human life? Don't we deserve love and family too?

Our knocking at the door has stopped. We heard your final wish on that monkey's paw. We're not the loved one you wanted. The good daughter with a heartbeat. So we'll go somewhere else. Find others who'll accept us. We'll move on too.

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Anarchist Utopian Fiction

Revisado: 03-07-23

Margaret Killjoy's "A Country of Ghosts" is best understood as a work of utopian fiction. Killjoy's utopia is the country of Hron, an anarcho-socialist society in the mountains on the edge of an empire. Hron is the real main character of the book and much of the novella is spent explaining how Hron functions as a country, as seen through the eyes of a foreign journalist from the Borolian Empire.

Leftist critics of anarchist politics tend to agree that an anarchist society would be pretty great in theory, but question how such a society can arise, and more pressingly, how it can defend itself without either a central government or a military. Margaret Killjoy sketches out the answer to the first question—Hron emerged through a combination of revolutionaries and idealists and refugees assimilating into the indigenous society of the mountains—and then answers the second by way of the novella's plot: Our story begins with an invasion of Hron already underway from the neighbouring empire of Borolia.

While "A Country of Ghosts" is utopian, it feels grounded and believable, real rather than rose-tinted. Anarchist societies have existed, and have fought (e.g., the Zapatistas for a current example). Good utopian fiction serves the purpose of encouraging us to imagine better for ourselves. We can make Hron real. We just have to work together.

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Mixed up fairytale meets grizzly hilarious dungeon crawl

Revisado: 05-10-22

I adore everything Tamsyn Muir writes and here she has written the perfect novella, a sort of grown up version of The Paper Bag Princess. A Bildungsroman via katabasis. A princess trapped at the top of the tower without any hope of princely rescue must fight her way to the bottom with the reluctant aid of a fairy who certainly isn’t her godmother. In amongst the grit and guts and humour is a fundamentally deeply relatable story of going through hell and learning to love the hard queer version of yourself you become at the end of it.

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Sapphic Ghost in the Shell

Revisado: 02-14-22

"Benjanun Sriduangkaew's beautiful, poetic, and sensuous prose weaves a tech noir murder mystery that will force our heroine—a doctor running from her past as an infamous mercenary—to work together again with her old flame, the cyborg femme fatale who betrayed her. Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes the cyberpunk I've always needed: unapologetically queer and human in a world transformed by machines yet still utterly familiar in its cruel dynamics of power."

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Gripping intrigue and heartwarming romance

Revisado: 11-21-19

I love princesses and dashing swords women. I love them even more when they kiss. Princess Tasia and her bodyguard Joslyn are endearing, well written characters and the odds are stacked against them as the princess’s enemies plot to steal the throne. Princess of Dorsa is a gripping read and I eagerly await the sequel, Soldier of Dorsa.

The narrator does a great job and defines distinctive voices for the characters, including accents. I recommend the audio book heartily.

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