Amanda

Maggie Millner's Couplets is a novel-in-verse that explores the fierce intensity of falling in love and how it affects one's expression, especially when the initial excitement begins to falter and fail. This debut reads like a challenge to form itself: can desire, betrayal, and queer longing be woven into the rigid dance of couplets without dulling their edge or dimming their jagged shine? Miraculously, musically, the answer is yes.

Here, an unnamed narrator—anchored by habit to a boyfriend both familiar and fading—plunges headlong into an affair with a magnetic older woman, drawn by the raw gravity of new desire. What begins as a bright rupture soon grows knotted and rough: shame, self-questioning, the anxious rewriting of the self in search of a truer script. Millner captures the exhilarating rise of infatuation with a poet's sharpened precision. She also portrays the gradual erosion of certainty with a storyteller's hunger for ache and truth.

The couplets themselves are never ornamental. They reflect the novel's deeper tensions: two lines yoked by attraction, expectation, sound, and sense. Their rhymes are at turns tender or jagged, slipping loose or locking tight. When rhyme feels effortless, it becomes dangerous and deceptive; it creates a sonic echo of alluring surfaces, revealing how ease can shimmer at the lip of threat. When rhyme strains or snaps—under friction, under force—it carries the sting of consequence: the pattern buckling under the weight of real life. Millner, skilled as a composer, knows exactly when to tune the music, when to fracture it, and when to let the seams unravel.

Millner blurs the boundary between poetry and prose, paralleling how her narrator navigates the blurred lines between intention and impulse. Some passages slip into almost conversational clarity; others flare into dizzying lyricism. Even the book’s most musical moments feel like strategic self-constructions, as the narrator tries—and sometimes fails—to shape a story clean enough to believe in. The tightness of the couplets becomes its own quiet confession: that the narrator’s language, like her love, can sometimes be untrustworthy.

There’s breathtaking intimacy in how Couplets renders queerness—not just the fevered dream of first queer love but the slow heartbreak of remapping oneself around that love. In Millner’s hands, queerness is less a revelation than a destabilization— not a fixed arrival point, but an open wound, a reordering still in progress. The narrator's shifting relationship to her own language—how she confesses, conceals, and reconceives—proves as tense and as tender as her relationships with others. And when the rhymes begin to fracture, it feels less like a literary experiment and more like a human heart stuttering, an identity unspooling with uneven breath and a terrible, breathless honesty.

If you’re looking for a triumphant coming-out story, Couplets may challenge your expectations, but it does so with exquisite beauty. It reveals what survives after reinvention's shimmering promise gives way to the messier music of real life: loneliness, contradiction, and the half-songs of longing we hum. This is a book about falling apart and the fragile, ferocious labour of becoming again.

Millner leaves the ending tender, unfinished, and true to the story's belief that becoming is never a clean victory, only an endless, vulnerable act of persistence. She has written this tale for anyone who loved badly but dreamed defiantly, for anyone whose story was too wild, too intimate, too unfinished to ever fully master its telling. She offers us harmony and fracture, resonance and rawness, and in the process she creates something so clear and searingly honest that it aches.

The Archer moves with the methodical, recurring, and emotionally controlled intensity of mastered movement. In this debut novel, Shruti Swamy resists spectacle in favour of scrutiny—of the body, of memory, and of the hidden labour of becoming someone you were assured you couldn't be.

Set in mid-century Bombay, The Archer follows Vidya, a girl drawn to kathak dancing by yearnings she cannot name—not only for performance but also for isolation, self-mastery, and liberation. The limiting choreography of daughterhood shapes her life, while her aspiration alters every space she moves through. The elegant minimalism of Swamy's work—short, precise lines that never strain for impact—is remarkable. The book develops not through sudden revelation, but through the precise and calculated repetition of choices that are returned, refused, and ultimately made once again.

Although kathak is not in my cultural background, the book carefully and curiously drew me towards it. Arriving unversed as I did, aware of my distance, made me appreciate Swamy not over-explaining. She respects the tradition rather than making an exhibit of it. Here, kathak is form and philosophy rather than merely metaphor. Its rhythms resound in the pace of the book: stillness, repetition, variation, and breath. The process left me with a growing curiosity about how the dance lives in the history it embodies.

Oftentimes, the emotional and narrative framework of The Archer is an extension of that form. This book doesn't have a linear plot in the conventional sense, but there is no doubt that there's an important story here. The narrative circles back on itself, stressing internal transformations before outside events. This framework fosters immersion but also runs the risk of stasis; some sections serve as echoes of past ones without clearly expanding on them, and some emotional beats seem to land the same way more than once. Readers seeking a strong narrative force could find themselves adrift.

In particular, the restraint of the book might calcify into detachment for some readers. Swamy's approach is all about control: about what is left unsaid and what is all but unseen. This powerful aesthetic choice also sometimes leaves Vidya feeling artistically remote, with her inner existence more mapped out than embodied. We're sometimes shown what she does with beautiful precision, often with the reason why, but at times it's hard to echo her feelings in the moment. Some key scenes felt detached, as if we were watching from behind glass.

A similar flattening effect also applies to secondary characters, meaning figures like Manorama, Vidya's mentor and the most emotionally charged presence in the novel, can feel more like symbols than fully formed people. The roles they play are clear and crucial—teacher, foil, or obstacle—but their texture can get lost in the exacting form of the prose. Focussing solely on Vidya's viewpoint is practical and serves as an effective storytelling technique, yet it diminishes the emotional depth of her relationships.

Despite any criticism around its austerity and distance, The Archer thrums with composed tension, especially around the idea of desire. Though it never states it clearly, the book is deeply queer in this regard. Vidya's relationship with Manorama is filled with both reverence and longing, and her decision to forego marriage and motherhood appears to be more an active act of refusal than one of hesitation. Here, the queerness is subtextual, even spectral, but manifestly present in how attention flows between the women and how their intimacy alters their sense of self. It may not be clearly romantic or even completely aware of its existence, but it is absolutely there.

Swamy writes with the exactitude of a dancer; no unnecessary effort or strain. Though they are sparse, her sentences are effective. She depends on the stillness within them and puts her trust in the reader's efforts to listen closely. By means of those efforts it gives something rarer than the emotional catharsis it often calculatedly withholds: the sensation that the book was carefully constructed, not merely written.

The ending does not so much resolve everything as it brings about a shift in Vidya's life. The decisions she makes seem neither sad nor triumphant, just important. We are left with a sense of movement—direction without destination and a life starting on it own terms.

The Archer is not an overly generous book, nor a kind one. Still, it is exacting, and its exactness has a special sort of appeal. For readers with a predisposition toward interiority, self-discipline, and the complexity of queer self-invention, it provides something even more lasting: not a revelation, but a resonance

[Note: I received a free copy of the audiobook for review purposes, with no conditions attached.]

To read _Quill & Still_ by Aaron Sofaer (she/her) is to discover a revolution fought not with swords or spells, but with intake forms and breakfast routines—a village where every stone house stands by mutual agreement (and where the enchanted toilets probably have union representation). Whatever Sophie expected, what she gets is smaller and stranger: lessons in which spoon goes where, forms to fill out in triplicate, and the slow realization that utopia might actually require reading the manual. The text pours like morning coffee into mismatched mugs: strong, necessary (for some of us), and communal. Yet Sofaer refuses easy comfort: refectory seating charts bristle with social calculus, First Friends must balance instruction against indoctrination, and even kindness can be complicated by paperwork.

At the core of _Quill & Still_ sits a society that makes care work into infrastructure, not afterthought: First Friends clock in with pension plans and sick days, grumble through System Experience metrics, forget to file proper forms—all while taking real pride in guiding newcomers through what would otherwise be an impenetrable civic maze. This isn't utopia as decoration—it's decency built into blueprints. Sofaer transforms bureaucracy from burden to liturgy, makes filing forms an act of faith. Here, paperwork becomes prayer, administration becomes devotion, and even questionnaires carry the weight of covenant. Somehow, this is complimentary?

Sofaer crafts sentences like someone carefully setting a table—she places each word precisely, and each clause considers what came before while making space for what follows. Her characters speak in conversations that double back, question themselves, reach for better words when first attempts fall short. Even the municipal becomes musical—inventory numbers click against ledger notes, footfalls along corridors keeping quiet time. When Sophie's body changes through healing magic, there's no grand revelation scene—just the quiet recognition of rightness, the freedom of physical comfort suddenly possible. That's this book's most subversive move: to make what should be ordinary feel radical. To remind us how rarely our world makes room for our bodies to simply exist without struggle.

These measured delights might frustrate readers whose pulses race for plot twists and dramatic battles, whose eyes hunt for magic diagrams and epic confrontations. For every reader who savours the queer kinship that's built cup by shared cup, another might restlessly fidget through detailed discussions of bowl placement and coin customs. Sofaer trusts you to find meaning in both silences and explanations. It's a risky gambit that's both revolutionary and potentially alienating, and what saves it is her concrete precision. Each ritual matters because someone needs it. Each custom earns its page through lived consequence.

Here's the book's most artful move: it withholds explanation until necessity makes its absence felt. No ritual gets justified until someone asks "why do we do this?" No system gets mapped until navigation becomes necessary. Understanding comes only to those who join the daily practice—who listen for what's left unsaid between spoonfuls of stew, who notice how shoes brush against freshly swept thresholds. When Sophie mentions parental estrangement or her complicated relationship with her body, she meets neither diagnostic questions nor therapeutic platitudes—just practical solidarity. A seat at the table comes before biography. A bed before backstory. Trust grows through gesture, not confession; belonging develops through presence, not performance. The village doesn't demand Sophie's trauma as entry fee.

Who might thrive here? Readers of Becky Chambers seeking sharper social grain, fans of Addison trading court intrigue for queue-line kinship, those who find poetry in logistics. Who should pause? Anyone needing plot over process, crisis over care—readers who expect dramatic tension rather than documentary patience.

I close _Quill & Still_ wondering what this says about us—the readers who need our utopias explained in triplicate. Sofaer shows us a world that runs on radical transparency, but we live in one where every answer costs us something. Is that why Sophie's careful education feels both foreign and necessary? Because we've forgotten what it means to have systems it's safe to trust? Because it feels impossible to believe that paperwork could possibly serve people rather than power?

There's a melancholy in imagining a world where kindness requires no explanations—and knowing how far we stand from it. Sofaer offers something better than easy answers: a map of what decency looks like when it's designed, not just dreamed of.

[A note on the audiobook: Avalon Penrose brings a warmth to this text that complements Sofaer's measured prose. Her pacing lets listeners absorb the book's quieter moments, while her energetic character work subtly distinguishes voices without overplaying differences—exactly the kind of careful attention the story itself celebrates.]