A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Literally every single one of you who took the Lesbihens poll was wrong about what this book was about. And so was I, and I DID read the blurb before making this regrettable purchase.



Despite the title and cover, The Lesbihens has nothing to do with chickens. It is not about lesbian chicken shifters, lesbian chicken farmers, lesbian chickens, human lesbians with pet chickens, or lesbian chickens with pet humans. It does not even involve chicken metaphors.

The Lesbihens, inexplicably, is about the romance between a lesbian yoga teacher and a lesbian lighting designer. That's it, that's the book.

The blurb is highly misleading given the context of the cover and title:

When she moved to the city from the great rolling farmlands, Natasha never dared to bring hopes of romance along with her.

But everything changes when Peach, a gorgeous woman full of confidence and sunshine struts into her life and builds her nest right next to her, and Natasha knows that she has found something truly extraordinary.

I misread this as Natasha moving from the city to the great rolling farmlands. It's actually the other way around. I GUESS, as her coming from the farmlands is never mentioned at all in the first half of the book and if it comes up later (I started skimming) I blinked and missed it.

Also, the girlfriend's name is not Peach. Her name is Sawyer Martinez. Her nickname is not Peach. She is never called Peach. I did a search of the book to check this.

Not only is this book an amazing example of wildly misleading marketing, it's also an example of the power of word usage in making characters seem appealing or not. Sawyer whines, squeals, shrieks, screeches, screech-laughs, yell-laughs, and generally makes the kinds of sounds that make her exhausting just to read about. She's also an annoying hipster generally, but the words used to describe her really don't help.

Too much screeching girlfriend, not enough peeping poultry.

Kalikoi, a new F/F publishing house, will launch on May 3.

Kalikoi brings you the best fiction about women in love with women. Our diverse authors know how to stir your imagination, speed up your heart, and make you laugh or cry. But by the end of a book, your only tears will be happy ones: Kalikoi books guarantee happily-ever-after or happy-for-now endings!

Our heroines all identify as women, but beyond that, the sky’s the limit. They may be trans or cis; they may be lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual; they may call themselves queer or Sapphic or prefer no labels at all. Kalikoi celebrates ALL women who love women.

Whether you’re looking for an action-packed paranormal romance, a fantasy to transport you to a magical world, a historical full of sensual detail, a moody noir, a lighthearted comedy, or a space adventure, Kalikoi has the book for you!

Kalikoi is a project I've been working on for a while, and I'm delighted that it's about to become a reality.

We have ARCs available for our first two books, Watercat Cafe by myself (originally published in Her Magical Pet) and Fire Control by Elva Birch. Please contact me via email or PM if you'd like a copy of both or either.

Also, please email or PM me if you're interested in writing for Kalikoi.

Watercat Cafe, by Rachel Manija Brown

Love cats and cake and cottagecore? This book is for you.

Ruthie is this close to achieving her life’s dream: launching the first cat café in her post-apocalyptic world. But the mysterious, wounded stranger she rescues could doom her dream–or save it.

Fire Control, by Elva Birch

A Princess and a Firefighter...

A dragon princess who can’t shift or control her fire, Dalinya finds solace in flying a helicopter for Alaska Forestry fighting wildfire. When she accidentally drops a bucket of swampwater on a firefighter, she isn’t expecting to discover that the hapless victim is actually her fated mate. This definitely wasn’t the first impression she was hoping to make.


ETA: Could someone please iconify the Kalikoi logo for me, please? Thanks!

This just might be the scariest book I’ve ever read. Reading it in January, along with Wylding Hall, makes for a great year of reading horror even if I don’t read anything else in that league for the rest of the year.

The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.

It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...

Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.

Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.

Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...

The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.

This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.

Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.

But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.

And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.

This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.

Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!

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This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.

The Red Tree



This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing:

A sweet and extremely relatable F/F second-chance romance by the author of Briarley.

Olivia is on a one-week trip to Florence with her college class when she spots someone she hasn’t seen in seven years – Ashlin, who was her best friend when they were both thirteen, before that relationship came to a disastrous end. She can’t resist approaching her, though she’s nervous about whether Ashlin will still be mad at her.

From then on, the story alternates chapters from when Ashlin and Olivia were both thirteen, and in the present day when they’re both 21. At first it feels very cozy and idyllic, but it soon becomes clear that that’s a reflection of how Olivia idolized Ashlin. The depiction of what it feels like to be 13 and have a friend who’s your entire world and who understands you like no one ever has before, and how you create a two-person reality together, is incredibly vivid. And so is the depiction of the downside of that, and the intensity of being 13 in general.

There’s nothing melodramatically tragic going on – just ordinary pain and ordinary joy –
but it’s intense in a way that captures the intensity of those particular experiences. If you’ve ever experienced social anxiety or had a bad experience trying to introduce a new friend to old friends… let me put it this way, I am still gunshy about that.

It’s a romance, and a very believable, sensual one at that, but a bit of an unconventional one in that its main concerns are slightly to the side of the usual concerns of romance. (Perception, memory, a specific set of real-life experiences – there’s a moment involving crushed magnolias that is just brilliant.) The ending is more romance-conventional than the rest of the book, and I could have used it being either more open-ended or for it to be longer.

A lovely story and one that I think a lot of you could really relate to.

Only $2.99 on Kindle: Ashlin & Olivia

(Well, I read it on Friday.)

A gorgeous, unusual, post-apocalyptic F/F science fantasy riff on “Beauty and the Beast.”

Yen is a young scholar living with her mother, the town healer, in a world that was ruined and then abandoned by the mysterious Vanishers. When her mother makes a desperate attempt to save a dying patient, the dragon Vu Con, answers her call… and takes Yen back with to her beautiful and deadly home, full of magic and science and alien geometries.

This short novel is amazingly inventive at every turn, with magic made of visible words, alien viruses, and medicine understood in both ancient and futuristic terms. The central romantic relationship is F/F, but romance is only one aspect of the web of relationships: familial, friendship, surrogate family, teacher-student, wary co-existence. The base culture is Vietnamese, with both Eastern and Western folklore and fairytale elements. It’s set in a very dark world, but is ultimately about people (and spirits) grappling with the damage of the past and trying to change things for the better in the future. I liked it a lot.

In the Vanishers’ Palace

If you enjoy F/F, please consider joining fffriday, where we review or rec fiction, fanfic, or other F/F things every Friday. This review is linked from there.

A re-read. This vivid and satisfying science fiction novel, Griffith’s first, has no male characters in the entire book.

Anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives on Jeep, a planet owned by the sinister Company that seems to control everything, willing to give up everything for the chance to study its people and cultures. The Company’s first expedition found that Jeep was entirely populated by women, and only belatedly discovered why when all its men and 20% of its women died of a plague. The remaining women were quarantined there until a vaccine could be found, and have spent the last five years avoiding meaningful contact with the locals and trying to preserve their existing culture untouched by change.

Marghe has taken an experimental vaccine which may or may not work, and only lasts for six months even if does. She sets out to discover what became of her missing predecessor, and finds that when you look into other cultures, they may also look into you.

Though aspects of the plot are a bit wobbly and there’s enough loose ends that I wonder if a sequel was intended but never materialized, this is a very enjoyable book if you like detailed cultural worldbuilding. (I sure do.) Though character is somewhat secondary to worldbuilding, Marghe’s outer and inner journey is satisfying and her eventual romance with a local woman is believable. She also has an interesting relationship which is neither sexual nor romantic, but otherwise similar enough to a ton of heterosexual genre romances popular at the time that I have to wonder if Griffith was doing a deliberate take on the problematic nature of captive-to-lover romances.

And, of course, if you want to read a book where all the characters are women, there still aren’t many and this is a good one. There’s multiple societies involved, all female and all different and not one partaking of any stereotypes of how women are or how all-female societies would be better or worse than the ones we have. They’re societies. They’re people. No more, no less.

This concept is still neither dated nor much imitated; gee, I wonder why...

Ammonite

When Seattle insurance investigator Sarah Pinsker is invited to SarahCon, an interdimensional convention for Sarah Pinskers from various timelines, she gets involved in a murder mystery when one of the Sarahs is murdered. Did I mention that SarahCon is held on a tiny island off Canada, and due to a storm no one can get on or off?

On the far side of the room, four folding tables covered with velveteen tablecloths. A printed sign hung on the wall behind them: Sarah Pinsker Hall of Fame.

If the list of occupations had made me feel like an underachiever, this display reinforced it. A Grammy for Best Folk Album 2013, a framed photo of a Sarah in the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, a stack of novels, a Nebula Award for science fiction writing, an issue of Quantology Today containing an article with a seventy word title that I guessed amounted to “Other Realities! I Found Them!”

Even apart from the cleverest title in the multiverse, this is a great story. A lot of times a story has a good concept but fails to live up to it, or goes off on some tangent that has nothing to do with the concept. “And Then There Were (N-One)” did everything I wanted with the premise and more, exploring variations on choice and identity, delving into the bittersweetness of chances taken and lost, and wrapping it all up in a very solid murder mystery that is completely relevant to the concept. I also really loved the ending, which in retrospect was the only possible one.

I don’t want to give too much away, but since I’m putting this in FF Friday I will note that many of the Sarahs are married to or dating a woman named Mabel, and their relationship, or rather many iterations of relationships or lack thereof, are relevant to the story.

(I wonder what it says about you depending on whether you think attending a convention for iterations of yourself would be fascinating or horrifying, and whether you'd go. I'd go in a shot. Guaranteed, the food would be great.)

“And Then There Were (N-One)” was nominated for a Nebula for Best Novella (also for a Hugo, same category) but lost to Martha Wells’ All Systems Red. That was a very solid ballot, with Ellen Klages’ Passing Strange also a contender.

Read for free at Uncanny Magazine.

A novellette set after Second Nature, focused on a different set of characters but involving some of the repercussions of the events of that novel. Humans who find out about the existence of the shapeshifting Wrasa are no longer automatically assassinated, but it’s a fragile peace and they still might be assassinated. Therefore, interspecies dating is still forbidden. Which makes it difficult when ER psychiatrist and coyote shifter Shelby falls for her human co-worker, ER nurse Nyla.

Shelby’s a flawed Wrasa, with the metabolism and enhanced senses but unable to shift at will, but still bound by the rules of the community. Still, given her lowly status, maybe no one will notice if she just goes on out on one date... (One incredibly awkward date, as Wrasa normally bring gifts of meat rather than flowers, Nyla’s chihuahua senses Shelby’s Wrasa nature and doesn’t like it one bit, Wrasa can’t see projected movies very well owing to their non-human vision, and they run into a pair of very suspicious fox shifters at the theatre.)

If Shelby tells Nyla her secret, she’ll be putting Nyla at risk and making herself look like a lunatic, as she can’t shift to prove it. But if she doesn’t, how can they ever have a real relationship?

Another nicely detailed and solidly enjoyable lesbian shifter story from Jae. Shelby’s enhanced senses and the Wrasa culture details make for a very fun story, and the central dilemma is convincing and not easily dealt with. I’m guessing Shelby and Nyla will turn up again or at least be heard from in the next book in the series, True Nature, as while this novelette resolved their romance, the larger obstacles are still at play by the end.

Manhattan Moon

"Falling for Summer" is a contemporary romance novella in which Amanda, who has blamed herself for 20 years for her kid sister Tiffany's tragic drowning in the lake where they grew up, returns to the lake to come to terms with her guilt. There she meets the sexy Summer, a swimmer who rents out cottages by the lake, who turns out to be Tiffany's best friend.

I like trauma and healing narratives, and with one exception there wasn't really anything wrong with this novella, but though reasonably well-written, with some very appealing descriptions of Summer's wet hair and swimmer's muscles, it left me with an overall meh feeling. I think I wanted it to either be more iddy or less by-the-numbers. I also really disliked the ending.

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On a different topic, if you recall my entry for last week, I am now partway into Jae's FF shifter novel Second Nature, in which Griffin, a liger soldier/assassin dedicated to making sure the human world never finds out about shifters is assigned to investigate a paranormal romance novelist, Jorie, whose in-progress FF shifter novel bears suspicious resemblance to the truth about actual shifters, and really enjoying it. It's more like 80s urban fantasy than current paranormal romance - the romance is the main story, but it's slow burn, there's tons of intricate worldbuilding, and a lot of non-romance relationships.

At the part I'm at now, Griffin (posing as a big cat biologist helping Jorie with her research) has been inveigled into being the buffer between Jorie and her visiting mom, they accidentally got along so well that Griffin and Jorie's mom had a solo lunch the next day so they could pump each other for info on the secretive Jorie, only Jorie's mom is allergic to cats and also to Griffin, so Griffin is sneaking antihistamines into her food while she's in the bathroom so she won't suspect. The book is overall much more serious than comic, but there are some scenes like that which are comedy gold.

Set the Stage is an adorable fluffy romance between Emilie, an aspiring actress who just got cast at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and Arden, a gardener working at the Ashland park. It's full of very accurate details about theatre (and seems very accurate about OSF in particular, at least as far as the layout of their theatres is concerned) and plants, and has a hilarious running joke about how every business in town attempts to get in on the theatre tourist business by slapping on random Shakespeare references. (Shockingly, no one ever makes a joke about "the Garden of Arden.")

In fact, this novel distinctly resembles a sort of FF Zoe Chant, minus the shifters. But it has lots of loving details of a setting, cozy togetherness, good food, shared activities, instant attraction, constant sexual awareness/tension between the characters, and a general air of comfort reading. It also has a lot of quirky details and problems that one encounters in real life but rarely in fiction, like the genuinely sweet boss at Emilie's crappy fast-food job, a geocaching date, and the horrible dilemma of what to say to your crush when you go see the play she's in and she's just not very good in the role.

It's a very charming book and I am now seriously considering a visit to the OSF. I was last there in high school and it was very formative. They have a super fun-looking play up this year about Shakespeare's buddies trying to reconstruct Hamlet from memory after his death. (i.e., the First Folio.)