mlafave's reviews
351 reviews

While winter might be in the title of Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s latest poetry collection, this series of poems evokes for me, rather, the long days at the end of summer. The poems in Winter of Worship move from climate change, to loss, to rural living, to queer identity seamlessly, musing on memory, and what it means to remember and be remembered. Candrilli’s poems are filled with well-loved detritus, every memory and item brimming with meaning and potential. 

I too relate to Mina because I ice skated as a kid, didn’t feel like the sparkles fit me, had a weird ice skating related injury, became a goth, got my first crush on a girl, and now everyone keeps trying to recruit me to their roller derby team.

Come join the Blood City Rollers - the most fang-tastic roller derby team in Romania. Mina has been chasing her mother’s dream for her of becoming an Olympic ice skater when she is injured at a competition and swiftly kidnapped by undead, vampire roller gals as their mandatory human jammer. Through her time with the Blood City Rollers, Mina begins to trust herself and her choices as she reassesses her priorities, crushes  on the dreamy team captain (Val), and learns the rules of both roller derby and the supernatural. Filled with teamwork and self-discovery, and of course, vampires and derby, this graphic novel is sure to delight.

The Lightning Bottles is author Marissa Stapley’s answer to the vilification of so many women in rock throughout the 90s, as she charts the meteoric rise, fall, and afterlife of the life of Jane Pyre - Stapley’s own “most hated women in rock and roll.” Told in two interconnected storylines, we see the relationship between Jane Pyre and the other half of rock duo The Lightning Bottles, Elijah Hart, grow and fall, and the cross-country scavenger hunt to find Elijah. If that feels like an awful lot for one book, you would be right. These, plus an intellectual property lawsuit, alcoholism and addiction, and a teenage sidekick for the 1999 storyline make for an over-full story. While the band references were fun at first, they unfortunately became a distraction.

Cult classic doesn’t even begin to cover it for Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Full of the twisty corridors and dark corners of gothic romance, the great and terrible beauty of vampires, and sapphic yearning, Carmilla draws you into its moonlit, isolated web as the lonely and isolated teenage Laura becomes entranced by a sudden guest - Carmilla - but also finds herself tormented by nightmares of beasts at the foot of her bed and sharp pains in her neck. As a lifelong fan of vampires, I couldn’t help but be entranced by this haunting book and gorgeous edition.

Orlando is a novel that reminds me of how playful and entertaining the canon can be, and especially how nearly 100 years later, the journey and story of Orlando still speaks to us. At the core, Orlando revels in the accumulation of the selves we have been, and the selves we found ourselves becoming, and the process of honoring them all. This new edition has a gorgeous, brief introduction by Carmen Maria Machado - which is well worth reading!

Saltmarsh’s  poems - ranging in form from lyrical to prose, and topic from personal to archival - catalog the ways women have had “hysterical” lobbed at them like a threat, from the Early Modern period to now. Borne from research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, these poems coalesce early cures and recipes from Early Modern women’s writing, with the “Sad Girl” coterie of Plath, Dickinson, Woolf, Millay, and so many others, with personal experiences of motherhood and womanhood to find action, love, and purpose in the so-called, pseudo-diagnosed “hysterical” woman. As she writes in the opening poem to this collection, “Some of us have work to do. / Places we have to, all the while dreaming, be.”

Lispector’s final work is a ghostly spiral into the heart of urban Rio through the lens of a hollow, haunted narrator and the oddly complacent subject of his fascination and observation. His subject Macabéa has every reason to be unhappy, yet continues on, resolutely ignoring her circumstances. The Hour of the Star charts these two stories as they both burn out, asking her reader to face their own notion of happiness in the face of adverse circumstances. Best read in one sitting, perhaps while also people watching.

The characters that populate Yoko Tawada’s Suggested in the Stars are out of step with one another, but cross paths, time, and space all with what can only be described through Hamlet’s words, words, words. Tawada returns to the characters from Scattered all over the Earth and their search for Hiruko’s homeland, Susanoo’s language, and the connection between them born of globalization and  climate change. Full of light climate dystopia, this book turns your brain around through Tawada’s (and her translator Margaret Mitsutani’s) deft use of language. I am already greatly anticipating the third installment in this trilogy in 2025. I need more of this weird little series, but also don’t want it to end!

Kate McKinnon’s debut middle grade novel - poised to become a rollicking series of daring escapades, dangerous escapes, and lots and lots of very mad science - is perfect for those kids who identify with the strange and unusual. When the Porch sisters are expelled from their etiquette academy, they find themselves invited into the mad world of infamous mad scientist, Millicent Quibb and quickly tasked with saving their city. With shades of classic science fiction, plenty of footnotes, and a delightful frame narrative  this adventure will delight both kids and their adults. Seriously - I found myself realizing that I myself might be a Millicent Quibb halfway through this read. 

Misrecognition reads like the mixture of summer heat rising and cigarette smoke, as Elsa mourns her recent polyamorous breakup through first, disassociation, and second, growing obsession with a famous actor in town for her hometown’s theater festival and - more importantly - the magnetic, androgynous Sam that is part of his close-knit group. Madison Newbound captures the languid, bittersweet period of self-discovery (of  lightly reckless relationships, parasocial obsessions, and misplaced self-identity) of queer young adulthood.