Amanda

[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.]

There are books that don't just enter the bloodstream—they become it. Not text but tide: a push and pull, dense with undertow. Postcolonial Love Poem is one of those. Natalie Diaz writes in a tongue heavy with sediment and blood, syllables formed by muscle and scraped from memory. The rhythms here are heartbeat, floodplain, oxygen, and drift. Water-strong and water-strange, these poems sweep readers into depths beyond the limits of language.

I read with breath caught beneath my ribs, snagged in the space between reach and retreat. What mutters in the marrow? What had I lost before I could give it a name? Not absence as an idea but absence as an anatomical fact: the hollow where a tooth was pulled, the socket still raw. Diaz's landscapes aren't metaphor—they're anatomy. Sacred cartographies stitched into tendons, breath drawn from basins and ranges, each word a stone burnished by mouths that would not forget.

Diaz writes the body the way a flash flood writes a canyon—with sudden force, patient aftermath, and sediment settling into curves. It's erosion made evident and passion worn down to a shine. Her poems render desire not as ornament but architecture. Desire constructs its own scaffolding. Touch refuses erasure. Each line spills past its margins, ignoring the usual fences. Her syntax sprawls like an arroyo after a storm—necessary, alive. Every poem carries tension at its seam: beauty snagged on brutality, taking braided with being taken, grace howling under resistance like wind through canyon walls.

Reading, I felt myself on the bank of a river I've never seen, yet somehow recognise—something stirring under the skin, salt in the throat, mud between toes. The distance here isn't only geographical. It's blood-deep—generations of forgetting can taste like copper pennies, can sound like static where stories should be. Still, recognition rang in my chest like the particular thrum a struck bell makes underwater. Diaz's water doesn't cleanse—it presses in and leaves behind sediment and salt. It's water that remembers the shape of every mouth that tried to swallow it.

What stunned me most was how Diaz treats contradiction like a live wire—only she doesn't insulate it, doesn't ground it; she just lets it spark across the page. Love is both a wound and a weapon. The colonised body contains both divinity and desecration. It's the specific friction between being witnessed and being spared, between being held and being handled. In "American Arithmetic", flesh transforms into fraction, protest, and ghost—sometimes all at once. "The First Water Is the Body" isn't a metaphor—it's an assertion, an equation, and an invocation. Every sentence costs something. Every line demands breath, blood, presence.

I reached the book's end feeling both hollowed out and heavier. Something passed close in the current—close enough to feel, too far to catch. These poems didn't offer inheritance, but they offered rhythm—footfall, heartbeat, the click of prayer beads between fingers. Perhaps I don't remember the river. But maybe the river remembers something no one taught me the shape of, and maybe that's enough. Or maybe it isn't. Diaz doesn't offer closure—only space. She lets longing settle like silt, unresolved and unashamed.

Her work isn't merely poetry. It's a pressure system. It is akin to a body of water, possessing its own unique gravitational pull. It transforms from grit to grief and then back to grace. It's a map marked by salt. I'll return to it—not for clarity but for contact. To press again against what I cannot name. To listen for that thin, familiar note—the one that travels through bedrock, through silence, through marrow.

Some silences are so profound that they become part of the landscape, not just heard but inhabited. Amma knows that terrain—how silence gets passed down not just through forgetting but through a caring that has been cornered. In this debut novel from Saraid de Silva, the unspoken doesn’t just haunt the margins of the characters’ lives; it forms their foundation.

The narrative follows three women—Josephina, Sithara, and Annie—across time and place, not to establish clear boundaries between them, but to illustrate how lineage frequently repeats, refracts, and shifts form, but not weight. The structure of the book itself mirrors the nature of our memory, resisting chronology and instead moving in an unfixed, unsteady manner, full of involuntary returns. These women are connected not only by their blood, but also by the fragments of their lives that kept them afloat.

De Silva’s language is clean-edged and rhythmically deliberate, reflecting the novel’s themes by giving breath to the unsayable without trying to resolve it. Her prose never strains for beauty, which it achieves nonetheless; that makes its moments of lyricism land all the harder. The way she renders places isn’t decorative—it’s diagnostic. Invercargill “thinks it is a city” but feels more like a closed door. Hamilton carries “the air of a party that just finished,” with all the aftertaste and stale expectation. Dislocation doesn’t stand out in these places; rather, it gradually becomes ingrained.

Amma approaches trauma in a way that seems especially exact: not only what happened but also what came next. The process of forced forgetting and the ensuing silence evolved into a ritual. It reads, at times, like seeing an echo of something I know—not exactly, but close enough to leave a mark on me. It reminded me of the truth that certain stories can vanish from our lives without erasing them. In some families, silence can become an unspoken mother tongue.

Queerness quietly weaves itself into the story like a natural pattern in this work. The youngest, Annie, is queer in a way that seems well-known and lived in—not always by others, but by herself. Her sexuality is part of the air around her, in the texture of touch and the tone of apprehension. And yet, she is not alone in it. Queerness ripples backward through the generations—not named, not always kind, but undeniably present. You can perceive it in those who shy away from it and in those who make it unmentionable.

While some timeline shifts are abrupt and a few characters remain a little underdeveloped, the novel’s emotional architecture remains strong and cohesive. This book encourages the reader to recognise incomplete elements, such as gestures rather than explicit explanations and a sense of closeness that exists alongside erasure.

And the ending doesn’t merely resolve; it reverberates. It hovers on the boundary of language, not seeking comprehension, but seeking to be heard. Amma isn’t about reclaiming what was lost; it’s about recognising the space it left behind. The void that occasionally persists within us remains. It was the absence that taught us how to listen.

[originally written for lesbrary.com]

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

Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly agrees. Eva arrives there with a laid-back sense of belonging that perturbs Isabel from the beginning.

There is not an instantaneous connection here. There is instead conflict—social, emotional, territorial. Gradually, their relationship evolves. Their tense cohabitation gains an edge of intimacy, one that stays murky as the story progresses. What starts out as apprehension gradually becomes fascination, then something even more charged and more devastating. Their dynamic is never entirely mutual, never safe, and never free of the past.

Van der Wouden writes tension with elegant precision—sexual, definitely, but also psychological and historical. The past exerts a real pressure here, acting as more than just a backdrop. The book takes place in a nation that is still writing its postwar history, conveniently forgetting collaboration but remembering gallantry. The Safekeep questions what people choose to live with in the aftermath.

With a consistent smouldering tone, the language is restrained and lyrical. Van der Wouden does not over-explain. Isabel keeps her cards close to her chest, and some readers may find her emotional opacity difficult at first: she’s not particularly likeable, but she feels real and understandable. This book calls on its readers to sit with discomfort and observe what isn’t said aloud. This narrative is one about silence as a means of survival—and complicity.

Though Isabel and Eva reject any neat categories, their relationship is crucial. Their closeness is spun with unresolved anguish, cold secrets, and a distinct disparity in power. It is not a conventional romance, but it does explore the intersection of fear and desire. Van der Wouden lets ambiguity handle the heavy work; nothing is simple and nobody is innocent.

Late in the book, there is a revelation of the sort that I treasure. It corrodes, rather than explodes. It clarifies the characters and their decisions, thereby enhancing the enormity of what the book has been developing all along. Van der Wouden seems far more fascinated with consequences than in drama for its own sake.

Readers sensitive to issues of complicity, betrayal, or the silent violences we sometimes inherit—emotional, familial, or historical—may want to proceed carefully. This book explores how long the plainly visible can remain unseen, as well as how often comfort can be preserved only at someone else’s expense.

The Safekeep‘s lack of tidy resolution is one of its most remarkable aspects. It asks a lot: tolerance of uncertainty, patience, and attention. It honours those things with a narrative that sticks with you. It’s about memory, power, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with what we can’t face.

This will probably appeal if you want something slow, suspenseful, psychologically personal, and morally complicated. If you want lovable characters or closure, this may not be the best option. The Safekeep offers fiction that dares to challenge.

Originally written for The Lesbrary: https://lesbrary.com/the-safekeep-by-yael-van-der-wouden-review/

History murmurs beneath waves,

slow waters shaping silently,

a quiet riot of ambition,

rhythms rewriting stone and soil,

kingdoms softly spun, undone

in echoes louder than their rise,

cycles swift as shifting tides.

Characters tread shadowed roads,

footsteps fading, heavy with desire,

edges sharp yet known, familiar,

mirrors revealing clearer truths—

fragments reflecting regret,

shadows stretching, breaking,

guiding gently by the hand

toward understanding.

Parker-Chan’s prose flows softly,

slipping smoothly through defenses,

subtle tensions shimmering

beneath careful sentences,

meanings gleaming quietly,

revelations whispering,

waiting beneath certainties.

At the core, queer authenticity

pulses fiercely, love fractured

yet resilient, radiant with scars,

betrayal’s blade cuts cleanly,

bonds mend stronger,

marked by wounds and wonder.

Ultimately, you’ll sink willingly,

trusting these waters,

drifting deeper, breathing clearer,

surfacing transformed—

world remade, reshaped,

reborn from quiet depths.

C.L. Clark's Unbroken is what happens when colonial revolt, powerful women with muscular arms, and Sapphic yearning crash together in a fiery fantasy epic. Set against an elegantly elaborate, North African-inspired landscape, the story turns around Touraine, a soldier suffering under split loyalties, and Luca, a princess passionately pursuing her promised throne (and occasionally her sense). 

Clark's composition is sharp-edged, swift, and gorgeously ruthless. Her characters, often caught stumbling through dubious decisions, come alive with genuine, often distressing, humanity. After all, to err is human! Clear your calendar (and maybe your voice) if you delight in shouting affectionate rebukes at fictional figures who firmly ignore you. 

Political intrigues simmer, rebellions fester, and morally murky waters always hide whatever is just beneath the surface, but the real gem? Touraine and Luca's yearning, fiercely oblivious and always simmering. Their slow-burning relationship doesn't just smolder before catching flame; it inches achingly along, making you pine with every missed sign. If you're anything like me, you'll beg aloud for signals to be picked up on, stars to align, and for hearts to meet and then stay together for at least three hundred pages. 

Prepare yourself for a story whose title resonates through the tale itself in ways you won't soon forget, at least if your fantasy inclination is toward clever plots, tangled uprisings against colonialism, and romances rife with slow burns.