Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (2023) is a mystery that intrigued me for the unlikeliness of its primary amateur sleuth–Sister Holiday, guitar teacher at St. Sebastian’s School in New Orleans. Sister Holiday is the former Holiday Walsh, the queer (but not practicing), tattooed, former punk rocker and addict, who joined the Sisters of the SublimeContinue reading “Scorched Grace”
Category Archives: Anti-Fat Biased
Life on Other Planets
Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe by Aomawa Shields (2023) is an inspiring memoir — Shields is an astronomer, astrobiologist, actress, mother, and wife. She’s also an African-American woman with a PhD in a STEM field who was privileged to go to boarding school and M.I.T, but hasContinue reading “Life on Other Planets”
Baby Bank
Baby Bank (publication date 9/19/23) by Sarah Robinson is a cute queer sapphic romance that hit home for me–the main character, Mila Torres, is a lawyer, and she wants to become a mother despite the fact that she is still a single bisexual at 35. With her multiple live-in friends assisting her swiping through aContinue reading “Baby Bank”
Honor
Please consider reading the beautifully-written Honor to learn about what some women face around the world just because they’ve fallen in love with the “wrong” person.
Into the Mist
If you like apocalyptic fiction with a feminist style, with teacher-characters and supernatural elements, I would recommend this one, despite some anti-fat bias.
The Girl With the Louding Voice
Recommend with reservations because of anti-fatness. Otherwise compelling read from the perspective of a Nigerian child bride forced into an arranged marriage who goes from one bad situation to a worse one, when all she wants is to go to school.
The Bastard of Istanbul
I came across several used copies of The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) by Elif Shafak in quick succession, and, because her 2010 The Forty Rules of Love was one of my favorites when I read it in 2017, I knew that I had to read it and was really looking forward to the experience. ItContinue reading “The Bastard of Istanbul”
The Old Woman With the Knife
The Old Woman With the Knife (2013, audiobook released 2022) by Gu Byeong-mo, translated by Chi-Young Kim. The author is a popular South Korean writer, but this is the only book she’s written that has been translated into English, that I could find. Hornclaw has spent her career as a “disease control specialist,” the euphemisticContinue reading “The Old Woman With the Knife”
Rebecca
Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier is considered a classic of modern gothic fiction, and was voted Britain’s favorite book written since 1800, but I hadn’t read it until late 2022, having felt guilty that I had never picked it up. I should not have felt guilty, as I had a near-instant strong dislike ofContinue reading “Rebecca”
The Sweetness of Water
Listening to the critically-acclaimed The Sweetness of Water (2021) by Nathan Harris was like watching a disaster in slow motion. I knew some of the characters were going to be hurt, badly, but the journey was so beautifully written I had to keep listening. George Walker is an old man, a transplanted Northerner in aContinue reading “The Sweetness of Water”
Reading While Fat 