Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin, translated by Silvester Mazzarella

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Tove Jansson by Boel Westin cover

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A queer, iconoclast, anti-fascist, anti-war comic artist, and joyfully adventurous woman, the Tove Jansson brought to life by Boel Westin’s considered pen is a complicated, innovative creative in resolute pursuit of independence—in both her art and romances.

Meticulously researched but rarely dry, this is a book for Moomin fans and art history lovers alike. It provides a deep look into both the personal life and recorded experiences of Tove Jansson, as well as the historical circumstances that gave rise to her singular artistic vision—which was, it turns out, far more oriented towards painting than illustration.*

While the book focuses more on literary-minded analysis of Jansson’s illustrations (including examining the events that inspired them, namely her formative experiences in the wake of the first world war and under the shadow of the second) than the technical aspects (past a chapter dedicated to her years at art school), its cross-sectional look at the cultures of the particular artistic milieus she inhabited during her life helps provide further insight into her inspirations.

There’s a sincere affection for her subject in Westin’s writing, but it never reads as overly fawning or glamorizing. Readers will feel like they’re walking through a gallery, looking through windows at an artist as she grows through painstaking practice and experience.

One of the loveliest things about biographies is that they remind us how we’re not alone.** Sometimes what becomes globally iconic starts off humble, and critically panned. Westin doesn’t shy away from Jansson’s early struggles, and it’s that grounding that makes what could easily become a fairytale-style homily to creative perseverance—she lived and worked in a literal tower for most of her life—into something much more real.

As a kid, I was obsessed with the Moomin books. The soft, rounded shapes were so tactile in my mind’s eye, and the stories had this sense of being about something bigger and just a teensy smidge darker than they immediately let on. Returning to that world decades later, I’ve found myself bookmarking some of the pages to revisit when I need a bit of a pick-me-up regarding my own aspirations. Westin’s elaboration of Jansson’s ambitions and struggles will likely hold meaning for modern creatives, illustrators in particular. The book does not shy from going into frank detail on Jansson’s need for financial independence to pursue her singular vision, and her later efforts to maintain control of how her art was presented, particularly once the popularity of the Moomin books brought an avalanche of possible licensing deals down on her doorstep. The descriptions of her fierce dedication to preserving her integrity as a creator are inspiring. Even as Jansson’s whimsy is celebrated here, so too is her ambition in equal measure.

In summary, this biography shines a light on the human behind the characters, and her love of compassionate, thoughtful, boundary-pushing stories on the page and in her own life. While it clocks in at nearly 500 pages, it’s well worth checking out if you want to read about:

  • Biographies of sapphic artists
  • Biographies of sapphic comic artists/illustrators
  • Biographies that humanize their subjects through detailed study
  • The history behind the Moomin books
  • The way art is both deeply individual and a reflection of the world the artist inhabits
  • Post-war European art outside of the more well-trodden English-French perspective: Next time someone asks me if I’m familiar with Francis Bacon, I’m asking them if they’re familiar with Tove Jansson.

You can now order the book from the University of Minnesota Press!

Footnotes:

*Reading this book gave me new appreciation for the 2020 biopic Tove, which focuses on her life and career just before the first Moomin books really took off. It’s a delightful homage to her passion for painting, too, as well as earlier romantic partnerships that this websites’ readers might not know as well as the one with Tuulikki Pietilä. It’s streaming now on Kanopy, for anyone interested.

**As Jansson’s diary entries reveal, it appears that queer horror-loving women are not a recent phenomenon!

Grief in Utopia: The Seep by Chana Porter

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The Seep cover

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This review contains spoilers.

The Seep might be one of the most refreshing takes on alien invasion I’ve ever read. This novel follows Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, a middle-aged trans woman, as she and her wife Deeba, along with almost everyone else in the world, are forced to live with something called the Seep. The Seep is an alien unattached to concepts like linear time and physicality that invades humanity and simply… makes life perfect. People can alter their appearances at will, ingesting the Seep feels like getting high, and there are restaurants that only give you good-tasting food that will help your body out, along with a bunch of other seemingly-awesome changes. After a few years of living under its power, Trina doesn’t love the Seep as much as her friends do anymore—and then her wife Deeba decides she wants to be turned back into a baby and give up the life they’ve built together.

Trina does what I think any of us would be tempted to do in that situation: she drinks herself half to death. Living under the Seep, though, means that her actions don’t go unnoticed, and what really kicks the story off is someone coming to Trina’s place and telling her that she’s hurting the entire community by not taking care of herself or her house. This sends her on a mission to hunt down an old friend of hers and to save a boy she meets along the way who comes from the Compound, one of the only places untouched by the Seep.

What I really liked about this story is how deep Trina is in her grief. It’s been about five years since Deeba left, but the way Porter writes Trina is like it happened yesterday. Deeba isn’t dead, not really; she is a small child being raised by a lovely couple far away from Trina. However, to Trina, it’s like she is, and that comes through spectacularly through Porter’s writing. Trina hasn’t moved on at all in those years after Deeba’s departure. She could move on: she could let the Seep erase her memory of Deeba, or she could let it change her feelings into something more manageable. But Trina is all about the old days and the old ways. She misses what art was back when humans still routinely felt things like pain and sadness, and she doesn’t get the appeal of having an all-knowing alien rooting around in her skull and changing her brain chemistry every second of every day of every week.

So when she meets this kid from the Compound who wants to know about the world outside and wants to join with the Seep, it’s like her brain finally has something to focus on that isn’t Deeba. It’s never really about the kid; in the end, Trina doesn’t really care about him, not like she tries to convince herself that she does. It’s a distraction from the pain she has carried with her since Deeba’s departure. All of it leads her to a friend (ex-friend) who goes around wearing his dead boyfriend’s face and pretending that he is a different race than he actually is. It takes Trina finding him again and confronting him for any real change to happen within her, and Porter goes exactly where you want her to go when Trina is shoved back into the past for a little while. She watches her wife from the same place she watches her in a scene from the beginning, caught in a memory, and the pain of losing that part of her wife hits Trina all over again. She’s been lost in her grief, and she has been for a while now. This is simply when she finally realizes it.

Trina’s conversations with the Seep are also a high point of the book. The Seep talks to Trina by changing the writing on a pamphlet she is given, then by changing the writing on a pamphlet that the boy drops, and then it actually speaks to her from the pamphlet cover and heats up in her hands when it wants to tell her something. Trina tries to get the Seep to understand that sometimes humans need to be able to choose bad things or things that hurt, but it takes the Seep a long time to grasp that point. If the Seep isn’t there to make life perfect and wonderful, then what is it for? The relationship between Trina and the entity known as the Seep is the thing that drives the story onward when Trina’s previous excuses and distractions run a little thin. In one of the most moving scenes of the book, Trina and the Seep talk to each other in a sort of talk show style set-up where every person in the audience is a different iteration of Deeba. Deeba left her because of the Seep; we know that, the story literally begins with that. Seeing it laid out so viscerally, though, with the Seep wearing somebody’s face and talking to Trina while every version of Deeba she ever knew laughs out at her from the background really made it hit home. That’s what this sort of grief is like, and Porter captures it so perfectly. I’ve been thinking about that scene for days since I put the book down. It takes having this conversation with the Seep for Trina to decide to try to move past everything with Deeba, and the story ends optimistically with Trina beginning to take care of herself and the house she used to share.

I know I’m a little late at finding this story (it was published in 2020), but I’m just glad I found it when I did. It’s moving, thought-provoking, and exactly the sort of thing I’m into. The only reason I’m not giving it five stars is because there are a couple plot issues it took me a minute to get past (she’s on a Do Not Admit list to her ex-friend’s shows, but she’s able to go in anyway?), but other than that, I really liked it. The way that the novel is bookended by “Tips for Throwing a Dinner Party at the End of the World” is really cool too and ties the story together. I would absolutely recommend this.

Triggers warnings for: death, slight suicidal ideation, loss of bodily autonomy, and drug use (kind of).

A Blossoming, Neurodiverse Love: Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings

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Late Bloomer cover

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After winning the lottery, Opal Devlin puts all her money in a failing flower farm, only to find an angry (albeit gorgeous) Pepper Boden already living there. Though she’s unable to find her grandmother’s will, Pepper claims she’s the rightful owner of Thistle and Bloom Farms. While they agree to cohabitate, Opal and Pepper clash at every turn. Can something softer blossom between these polar opposites, allowing a new dream to take root and grow?

Oh. My. (Sappho.) Goddess. You may think you know Mazey Eddings’ writing style, but I assure you, you do not. Many of us read The Plus One and/or Tily in Technicolor last year, but Eddings has far exceeded herself with this one. As a neurodivergent author, Eddings’ stories often have some element of neurodiversity/mental health, shining a light on the different ways people’s brains work while embracing those differences through beautiful, realistic characters. Opal and Pepper are no different, both on the spectrum yet unique in their behaviors and view of the world. These women are not predictable, pre-programmed components of a story; they are ever-blooming, learning how to plant roots alongside one another, share sunlight, and rise despite being different species. Both plants, growing and adapting to different elements, yet very much the same. While Opal and Pepper have always struggled to fit in with the world around them, they manage to cultivate a safe, healthy garden for one another.

This is one of those overwhelming, layered, awe-inspiring sapphic stories that will tug at your heartstrings long after you read it. Eddings’ language leaps off the page, making it a little reminiscent of One Last Stop (be still, my little sapphic heart). I’ve beyond annotated Late Bloomer, when I’m usually selective about choosing quotes. You don’t just see love blossom between these two women; you feel it. It made me smile, laugh, get all messy and misty-eyed. As I said, neither woman is predictable. Opal feels directionless at the story’s start, allowing her (fake) best friend and (on/off) ex to step all over her. I expected her to be the wallflower, especially with the BITE we see from Pepper (pun unintended) in her first chapter, but the two balance each other out. When Pepper feels uncertain or anxious, Opal steps forward, bold and unwavering. When Opal begins to crumble, Pepper holds her up. They support each other, never allowing the other to wilt.

Unfortunately, this book relies heavily on miscommunication. Both women are eager to hide their real feelings at the risk of scaring the other. That lack of communication continues until almost the last chapter.

Recommended for fans of One Last Stop and Imogen, Obviously. Side note: please, please read the author’s note. Good goddess.

✨ The Vibes ✨

❀ Neurodivergency/Autism Spectrum
❀ Sapphic Romance
❀ Grief/Healing
❀ Forced Proximity
❀ Spicy/First Time
❀ Cottagecore Vibes
❀ One Bed
❀ Touch Her and You Die
❀ Dual POV
❀ Miscommunication
❀ Flower Competition
❀ Grumpy/Sunshine

 Quotes

❝Slowly, she leans toward me, and my heart pounds so violently in my chest that my head swims. Is she . . . It almost seems like she’s going to press that smile to my mouth. Teach me how it tastes.❞

❝Ah. There’s the you I missed.❞

❝I used to stress over finding a label that fit me. Lesbian. Bisexual. Pan. Demi . . . I’ve filtered through them all many times over, none ever feeling quite right. Just say queer and move on with your life, Diksha finally told me late one night after what was probably my sixth sexual identity crisis of my early twenties. But what does that mean? I’d wailed, draining more boxed wine into my plastic cup. My brain loves order and labels and concise frameworks to understand things, and not knowing where I fit feels unbearable. It means you’re you, and only you get to decide who you like and when you like them, Tal had said from their chair in the corner. The name of your feelings isn’t anyone’s business but yours.❞

❝But instead, she reaches out to me—opening her hand like a flower unfurling its petals to the sun. I stare at it. The ink stains and calluses and chipped nails and bitten cuticles. For a moment, that hand looks like a second chance.❞

❝Her poems spoke softly—as intimately as confessions between lovers—about the terrible, wonderful ache of being in love.❞

A Zombie Invasion at Pride Novel Doesn’t Nail the Landing: The Z Word by Lindsay King-Miller

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The Z Word cover

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I was so excited to pick this up. I read Eat Your Heart Out by Dayna Ingram more than 10 years ago (!) and I’ve been searching for a similar fun and gory sapphic zombie adventure ever since. At first, I thought I’d found it with this, but I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough at the ending to recommend The Z Word. Something about me as a reader is that I can hang with almost any weird premise and will sail over plot holes without hesitation, but I care deeply about characterization, and that’s where this one fell short for me.

Wendy is a messy bisexual main character who is still mooning after her ex-girlfriend, Leah. Leah broke up with her because Wendy cheated, but Wendy was sure Leah was about to break up with her anyway. I could definitely see why Wendy was obsessed with Leah: she’s a fat, confident activist who is at the center of the queer community in their city and is always working to try to improve things. All the sapphics seems to be at least a little in love with her.

In a scenario most of us can relate to, Wendy keeps running into her ex at Pride. Leah is working with an alcohol company who is sponsoring Pride and funding an LGBTQ health center, so she’s at the center of the festivities. Wendy is determined to make a showing at Pride, even though it’s painful to see Leah… especially because Leah is sleeping with their mutual friends, a married polyamorous F/F couple.

During one of these Pride parties, the zombification begins, and Wendy, Leah, and some of their friends try to survive the night together. I have no complaints about the absurdity of the zombie plotline, even when it involves a pizza delivery driver so dedicated to their work that they equip their vehicle to mow down zombies. I guessed the cause of the zombie outbreak early on, and while it’s obviously not realistic, it’s a fun and relevant metaphor. I think excessive gore and flimsy reasoning is perfectly valid—even encouraged!—in a zombie book.

No, where The Z Word lost me was characterization. This is impossible to describe without spoiling a major plot point, so highlight to read. It turns out that not only is the alcohol company responsible for starting the outbreak (called it), but it was deliberate, and Leah knew about it. I can see what the book was trying to do in terms of making Leah complicit and showing the dangers of her white saviorism, but the specifics of it lost me. Leah knew that the drinks would make people violent, and she thought it was okay because it would be… good publicity that would help raise money for the health center? That reasoning is so strange, and I just don’t understand how she could justify it to herself. You’re basically talking about drugging people at Pride to make them violent. That’s not morally grey, that’s supervillain stuff. I don’t see how that lines up with the Leah who thinks of herself as a great activist. Then you combine it with a scene where we learn that Leah would leave her friends to die while she had the antidote just to avoid being found out. And somehow, Wendy still forgives her! If Leah was meant to be a supervillain all along, I don’t understand how her prior characterization lines up with that. I could see Leah as pushy, overly confident of her own worldview, and having a savior complex (tied up with her whiteness), but not as someone who would agree to drug people to make them violent and who would watch her friends die a preventable death in front of her.

It just didn’t make sense to me, and leaving it on that note soured the whole reading experience, unfortunately. I can see what the book was trying to do, but it didn’t come together for me.

Identity Crisis via Teleportation: Star Splitter by Matthew J Kirby

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Star Splitter by Matthew J Kirby cover

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Content warnings: violence, death

A note: I listened to the audiobook of Star Splitter. It’s a good one, but may have led to misspellings in this review.

Let’s say you lost all memories of the past three days. You’re still you, right? You’re just you minus a few days. You’re still the same person in the same body.

But what if you weren’t?

What if a body died with those memories, but an older version of you remained—would you still be you? Would the dead body be you, and would you have died?

These sorts of questions define Star Splitter by Matthew J Kirby. To explore the universe, humanity uses a sort of teleportation that uploads a person’s data and sends it lightyears in a matter of days. The person’s data is stored, and they can be re-downloaded, or updated based on their new experiences. That person might have their data uploaded, live several years, and then have the data sent home.

Before I give too many spoilers, let me just say that this is a book well worth the read for any science fiction fan. It engages consistently with deep, thematic wonderings while telling a story of space travel and disaster. It has characters a reader can easily hate one moment and sympathize with the next. If you’re on the fence about reading this book, go and do it! Don’t let my review take any surprises away!

The book is about Jessica Mathers, a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to cross the universe and become her parents’ research assistant. She wakes up (Before) on a ship, but her parents are delayed. The ship’s crew is less than thrilled with a sulky teen. It’ll be okay when her parents arrive, though. Right?

The book is about Jessica Mathers, a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t want to cross the universe and become her parents’ research assistant. She wakes up (After) in a crashed lander on an alien planet. There are signs someone else is here. Graves, too. Someone else is better than being alone, though. Right?

I rarely encounter a book that so thoroughly uses its genre to explore a theme. Questions of identity, experience, and loss of one’s self are personal and universal at once. The book affected me while I read it; I cared deeply for the outcome of the story and the fate of the character(s). Throughout the dual timelines, I got to know Jessica twice. I started to ask myself which was “the real” Jessica, if there was one, if both could make it, and what outcome I could possibly hope for. It was an intense read!

When it comes to men writing queer women, I’ve seen mixed results. Some are honestly pretty awful, some well-intentioned but wide of the mark. This one is a bulls-eye. The society portrayed is queer-normative, with no coming out, and an adult lesbian couple is among the supporting cast. Jessica has an unrequited crush on a girl called Avery, someone with a wicked unicorn costume, a bit of an awkward streak, and not too much ego. Jessica is just the right amount of smitten. She thinks fondly of Avery, imagines telling her the truth, jokingly names a constellation after her. Jessica is a lot of things—she needs to be, for the themes to work. She’s proud, petty, determined, loving, childish… she’s a lot. Being queer is a piece of that complex identity.

I can see how this wouldn’t appeal to some readers—not everyone enjoys sci-fi, and Jessica is a realistic character, which means sometimes she’s hard to like, though that is the point in this case. If those are not deal-breakers for you, then I strongly recommend Star Splitter.

A Slice-of-Life Manga Good Enough to Eat: She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat by Sakaomi Yuzaki

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the cover of She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat by Yuzaki Sakaomi

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When I was younger, I wasn’t aware of many f/f manga about adults, so I’m glad to be able to enjoy series like She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat by Sakaomi Yuzaki. After reading the first three volumes of this ongoing series, I’m gobsmacked by how exponentially my investment in it grew over the course of just three volumes. 

Usually, if I find it difficult to express why I like a work without spoilers, it’s because the initial premise is in some way flipped on its head. She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat is exactly what it says it is: a story about two women who bond over food, with one providing for the other. It remains a slice-of-life series focused on their relationship as they cook and eat various meals together. That premise builds on itself beautifully as their routines develop new layers of significance. 

The first volume introduces Nomoto, a woman with a passion for cooking that outmatches her appetite, who dislikes the societal pressure to use that interest to provide for a man. When she meets the woman who lives two apartments down, Kasuga, and happens to learn that she has a large appetite, Nomoto offers to cook for her. The two enjoy this so much that they continue meeting up to cook and eat. 

I was already charmed by this premise, especially with how Nomoto outright swoons over Kasuga voraciously eating her food; it usually isn’t depicted as desirable for women to have big appetites. However, at that end of volume one, I still felt that the series had a chance to become somewhat forgettable or repetitive. I’m rarely this glad to be wrong. By the end of volume three, this series had thoroughly gripped my heart. 

As said, it’s difficult to get into why. What I’ll say is that the characters begin to open up about their lives outside of their time together, which adds new context to their interactions. By the time the reader learns why the main characters’ dynamic is particularly meaningful, that dynamic is well established, letting the reader sit with the implications of that meaning as it continues to deepen. Over time, new characters are also introduced as effective narrative foils to the protagonists, and a delightful ensemble dynamic develops. 

What really struck me about this work is how affirming it is. It affirms that women should be allowed to have whatever relationship to food suits them, and explore that in their own way, without judgment. Ultimately, it’s a story about how special it can be to share space and time with others, and the importance of being able to choose who you share that with—specifically, people who accept you for who you are and accommodate whatever needs come with that. 

The food itself is, of course, rendered in many drool-worthy panels. I also appreciated the depiction of asexuality within the lesbian community, and how sexuality is portrayed as something with no one-size-fits-all mold. I’ll definitely be gobbling up the rest of this heartfelt series as soon as more volumes are localized.

Content notes: This manga includes content warnings before the relevant chapters. As a general overview, I’ll warn for one chapter depicting homophobic language, as well as depictions of familial abuse, food-related trauma, and misogyny. These topics are brought up thoughtfully rather than gratuitously. 

Murder by Crowdfunding: Crowded Vol. 1 by Christopher Sebela et al.

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Crowded Vol 1 cover

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The Crowded comic book series tells the satirical story of a dystopian world not too far in the future where the gig economy has become unhinged. In this world, everything has a price, including putting out hits on someone’s life through an app called Reapr. Anyone can be a target and anyone can crowdfund a kill, and loopholes in technology laws make it easy to get away with it while law enforcement and government officials look the other way.

Following the antics of Charlie, the hit in question, and her hired protector, Vita, the story unfolds into outrageous mayhem. It all seems so farfetched, yet in light of our reality, perhaps it’s not too far off target. Live streamers become famous for their Reapr kills and their followers can become patrons of their feeds for exclusive content and other rewards.

The vibrant and oversaturated artwork lends itself well to the story and characters. It creates a sense of inauthenticity and fabrication that makes everyone so fake. It feels fitting that the story takes place in Los Angeles, infamous for being filled with disingenuous people. It also adds to the fast-paced action as Charlie and Vita fight their way out of sticky situations (caused by Charlie’s reckless choices).

Neither Charlie nor Vita are likable characters, but Charlie especially makes it hard to root for her as a heroine. Despite her constant careless behavior and terrible treatment of others, including her bodyguard Vita, she has moments of humanity and vulnerability that make you not want to give up on her. But much like Vita, you also can’t trust her. Their bickering dynamic points the story toward these two possibly getting together. However, the shared moments in this first volume feel forced, so it doesn’t seem like that relationship has been earned yet.

Charlie is openly and unapologetically bisexual. She has no problem talking about her many conquests, man and woman alike. There’s even a sequence at a club called Bifurious where the artwork is entirely done in “bisexual lighting” in case it hasn’t been made clear until then. She flirts shamelessly with Vita, which Vita doesn’t directly engage in at first, but she doesn’t discourage it either.

Vita is revealed to have had an ex-girlfriend in the police force, making her solidly sapphic. However, it hasn’t been made clear or stated outright that she is a lesbian. As the story progresses, she gets close to Charlie, and it’s hard to tell if she flirts with her client to gain her trust or if she genuinely likes her.

Overall, this first volume is a fun and zany read. And the plot twist at the end (which I won’t spoil here) left me wanting to find out what happens next.

Content warning: extreme violence

A Wacky Adventure Through Working Retail and the Multiverse: Finna by Nino Cipri

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the cover of Finna

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Ava just broke up with her partner, Jules. They both work at an Ikea-like furniture store, but they’ve been managing to work different shifts after the breakup… until today. That’s already awkward enough before they discover a portal and are tasked with going through it together to retrieve a customer’s grandmother who wandered into it and is now lost in the multiverse. Don’t worry: in exchange for risking their lives, they will receive a gift card from corporate.

This was exactly what I was hoping it would be. Finna is a novella, and it feels almost like a montage as they run through different multiverses, including ones with carnivorous armchairs and hivemind employees. It’s a zany adventure that reminded me a bit of Doctor Who, especially the episodes that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Grounding the wackiness of the setting is the dynamic between Ava and Jules. You can see how much they care about each other and why they were together for so long—and why they broke up. Ava has anxiety and depression, and Jules is neurodivergent. Often their different ways of thinking end up with them clashing: Jules rushes into things and can be a bit erratic, which is hard for Ava to plan for and stresses her out. This isn’t really a second-chance romance story: there’s good reason they broke up, and because it’s so fresh, they have a lot of anger and hurt around it still. It’s more like a second-chance friendship, trying to recover any sort of friendship from the rubble of their breakup.

I thought the balance between the over-the-top adventure story and the very human main characters worked well. Jules is nonbinary and Black, and we also see how they have difficulty being accepted and fitting in, especially in combination with their neurodivergence. It creates layers of conflict: the life-or-death, sci-fi, world-jumping stakes of the plot with the complicated, painful complexities of their relationship as they’re forced to work together to survive. As you’d expect from the premise, it’s also an anti-capitalist story that explores the horrors of working retail.

If you’re a fan of books that use an out-there premise to explore characterization and relationship dynamics, I highly recommend this one. It was the perfect book to read in one sitting during a readathon.

A Bisexual, Palestinian American Coming of Age: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

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You Exist Too Much cover

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Earlier this month, during a trip to Portland, Oregon to cheer on the UConn Women’s Basketball team in the Sweet 16/Elite 8 (Go Huskies!), my partner and I visited the renowned Powell’s City of Books.  We were perusing its gorgeous shelves when You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (she/her) caught the eye of my partner, who has a knack for making book recommendations that are right in my wheelhouse.  I had been looking for a queer book that highlights the female Arab American experience and the front cover of this book had a single blurb from Roxane Gay, which stated: “My favorite book of the year.” I was sold.

You Exist Too Much was published in 2020 and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction.  Arafat’s debut novel follows an unnamed, bisexual, Palestinian American protagonist from her adolescence through her adulthood as she navigates identity, sexuality, addiction, intimacy, and her fraught relationship with her domineering mother.  While the story proceeds in a linear fashion, Arafat uses vignettes into the narrator’s past to contextualize her real-time thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

Initially, the narrator’s lack of a name made me feel frustrated.  A name is important; it confers value and respect. Why would Arafat not name her protagonist when the stories and voices of queer women of color are already so stifled?

As I made my way through the novel, Arafat’s choice became clearer. The narrator is constantly fighting to create space for herself.  Her mother often tells her, “You exist too much.” When the narrator broaches even a hypothetical discussion regarding her sexuality with her mother, her mother effectively disowns her, telling her, “Stay away from me and the rest of my family.” The narrator continues to struggle with space in all her romantic relationships, sometimes worrying about taking up too much space, other times feeling like she doesn’t even exist. The narrator’s lack of a name is, in part, a reflection of her disengagement from her mother and the expectation that she take up as little space as possible.

Arafat has a real aptitude for creating characters with depth.  The unnamed protagonist is endearing, yet maddeningly messy, full of love, but also prone to disastrous decision-making. I did not always like her, but I did find myself rooting for her and admiring her resilience and her desire to cultivate healthy love. Her deep empathy for her incredibly flawed mother was achingly beautiful. 

While I did not enjoy the book as much as I hoped I would, I do think it’s an interesting read from a talented writer that’s worth picking up.  If you’d like to read more of Arafat’s writing, she is currently working on a collection of essays.  You can also find her at @zainaara on Instagram.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault, domestic violence, racism, disordered eating, self-harm, homophobia, and biphobia.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey.  She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

TAGS: ***, Raquel R. Rivera, You Exist Too Much, Zaina Arafat, Queer, Bisexual, Bisexual Main Character, Palestinian American, Arab American, Palestinian, Coming of Age, Addition, Homophobia, Biphobia

A Sapphic, Victorian Parent Trap: Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban

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Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend cover

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Pretty much as soon as I discovered Emma R. Alban’s Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend, I was excited to read it. From the frothy cover to the Taylor Swift lyric title (admittedly I don’t actually know Taylor Swift’s music well enough to recognize that on my own, but I generally love the vibe of song lyric titles) to the actual book description, it seemed incredibly up my alley. A hijinks-filled sapphic historic romance? Sign me up! To my absolute delight, the actual contents of the book completely delivered on the promises its outside made.

Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend takes the familiar premise of a reluctant young debutante, Beth, who must find a wealthy husband for the sake of her family and adds a dazzling lesbian, Gwen, with an idea—their parents have clear chemistry and a history, and it would really solve all of their problems if Beth and Gwen set their parents up instead. Over the course of the season, the two come up with a variety of schemes, and as their parents grow closer, so do Beth and Gwen.

I had so much fun reading this book! It was exactly the kind of sweet, banter-and-shenanigans-filled romance I hoped it would be. I read most of the book at work, and it still had me smiling and giggling throughout. I loved both Beth and Gwen, and I believed their romance from the beginning, as well as their friendship. I understood immediately why they liked each other, which I think is particularly important in a friends-to-lovers romance like this. They constantly made each other laugh, as well as myself, but there were also plenty of those delightfully agonizing finger brushes one expects to find in a historical romance.

Beth and Gwen’s relationship was not the only important one in this book, of course. Considering the setup of this book hinges on a parent-trap plot, it’s particularly important to manage the balance between making me care about and believe the parents’ romance as well without them taking the spotlight away from the romance I actually came here for. Admittedly, I was a little worried this book wouldn’t manage it, but I actually thought it did a fantastic job of that. It even made me care about an entirely separate background romance, and the epilogue provided a wonderful preview of the next book’s romance, which I am very much looking forward to. I really loved the characters here.

I will note readers looking for historical accuracy may find themselves frustrated. The language in particular tends a bit more casual than I would have expected. However, I personally did not find myself bothered by it at all. As casual as the language was, the many detailed clothing descriptions and the subplot centered around the social politics of the Matrimonial Causes Act made it clear that this was a deliberate choice. And besides, a strong sense of verisimilitude was not my main concern when I picked up a parent-trap-inspired sapphic romcom with a Taylor Swift lyric in the title. I came here simply to be delighted, and I got more than my money’s worth of that.  If that is what you too are looking for, I heartily recommend Emma R. Alban’s Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend.