bisexualbookshelf's reviews
687 reviews

challenging dark mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I think this might've been a bad book? Very unclear. There are several fatphobic scenes and some weird ableism. The pandemic didn't get enough of a focus to fully understand what was going on with it. This was one of those dystopian books that tries to focus on reflecting on humanity but I think instead just got weird and problematic. You can probably skip this one.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

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adventurous emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I think maybe this was too high fantasy for me? It felt like it dragged on a bit, and I never got overly invested in the characters. It's not a bad book by any means, and I think there's a lot here that fans of Jemisin's The Fifth Season would enjoy. It just didn't resonate or stick with me the way it seems to have with a lot of other readers.

Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren

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informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.0

This was a powerful yet dense look at the anti-psychiatry movement and the abolition of carceral psychiatry. There's a lot to love here - anti-capitalism, decolonial view of madness, anti-imperial and abolitionist views of mental health care. Nonetheless, it is highly academic and theoretical, to the point I'm not sure how much of it I retained, writing this brief review almost 3 months after having read it. It's not a bad book - just a thick one! Big rec for Health Communism fans.

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis

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Did not finish book. Stopped at 20%.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on February 18th, 2025 by Haymarket Books.

Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis is a sharp, unflinching critique of the feminisms that claim to be liberatory but ultimately reinforce oppression. Lewis takes on TERF ideology, white feminism, and the insidious ways respectability politics and ideological purity stifle truly radical movements. She refuses to romanticize feminism’s history, instead demanding a more self-critical, accountable, and abolitionist approach. It’s an urgent call to embrace discomfort and let go of defensive posturing in the pursuit of real liberation.

Despite my appreciation for the book’s aims, I found myself struggling to stay engaged. Lewis’s writing is dense, academically rigorous, and often paradoxical—a style that, while intellectually rich, made it difficult for me to focus. Her sharp, sometimes flippant tone also didn’t quite land for me. After two chapters, I realized I wasn’t getting anything new from it and decided to DNF. It’s not a bad book by any means; it just wasn’t the right fit for me.

Yr Dead by Sam Sax

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challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

“All I want to do is leave a little more room for what good people are left to do their feral blooming.”

Sam Sax’s Yr Dead is a book that lingers, both in its haunting lyricism and in the devastating weight of its central character’s final moments. Told in fragmented, poetic prose, the novel unspools the memories of Ezra, a queer, Jewish wanderer who, between the moment they set themselves on fire and the moment they die, relives a lifetime of longing, loss, and political disillusionment. At its core, Yr Dead is an exploration of what it means to belong—to a place, to a person, to a history that is both inherited and self-defined. It is a blistering meditation on survival, grief, and the tenuous hope that something, somewhere, might feel like home.

Sax’s writing is incandescent, shifting between moments of raw vulnerability and sharp, sardonic humor. The prose is deeply lyrical, sometimes so fragmented it feels like grasping at wisps of thought before they disappear. Ezra’s memories flicker through time, painting a portrait of a life shaped as much by absence as by presence. Their relationships are transient, often destructive—there’s Edwin, a high school bully turned lover, Christian, a man whose home they share while betraying him, and Arnold, an older, controlling figure who locks Ezra away for days. Their family, too, is defined by loss: a mother who left, a father more devoted to his students than his own child. And through it all, Ezra walks with ghosts, asking, “How many people have visited my body and never left?”

The novel is profoundly political, interrogating protest as both an act of resistance and an act of despair. Ezra moves through the world with the weight of history pressing down on them, attending demonstrations but never quite feeling present, caught in the space between engagement and isolation. The book is deeply attuned to the ways queer and Jewish identities intersect with political struggle, how survival can feel like both an act of defiance and an unbearable burden. The question at the heart of Yr Dead is unrelenting: when language fails, when the world offers no clear answers, what do we do?

If there is a criticism to be made, it’s that the novel’s fragmented nature can, at times, feel disorienting. It demands patience, a willingness to sit with its ambiguity. But for those willing to engage, Yr Dead is profoundly moving, a book that refuses easy conclusions and lingers long after the final page. Ezra is a character who aches to belong, yet fears the intimacy such belonging requires. Their story is one of fire—sometimes a guiding light, sometimes pure destruction. And in Sax’s hands, their voice burns bright, refusing to be extinguished.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, fragmented storytelling and introspective narratives; those interested in queer and Jewish identity, political resistance, and the search for belonging; fans of Ocean Vuong, Carmen Maria Machado, and Akwaeke Emezi.

🔑 Key Themes: Longing and Alienation, Queerness and Jewish Identity, Protest and Political Grief, Memory and the Body, The Haunting Presence of Loss.

Content Warnings

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

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challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is a harrowing and haunting reimagining of her uncle’s childhood, set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the brutal realities of reform school life. Blending historical horror with supernatural elements, Due crafts a deeply affecting novel that exposes the inescapable violence of white supremacy and the resilience of Black children caught in its grip.

After their mother’s death and their father’s forced flight from Florida, siblings Robbie and Gloria find themselves navigating the dangers of their racially segregated world. When Robbie is sent to Gracetown School for Boys—the Reformatory—after an altercation with a white boy, he is thrust into a nightmare of forced labor, abuse, and the eerie presence of haints: the ghosts of boys who never made it out of the school alive. Meanwhile, Gloria fights against systemic indifference, seeking allies where she can, even as white “benevolence” proves to have its limits. As Robbie struggles to survive within the Reformatory’s walls, Gloria’s determination to free him underscores the novel’s central theme: the power of love and community in the face of relentless oppression.

Due’s writing is both poetic and visceral, weaving stark realism with haunting imagery. The supernatural elements never overshadow the historical horrors; rather, they amplify them, reinforcing how the past refuses to rest, especially when injustice remains unacknowledged. Robbie’s ability to see haints serves as both a curse and a source of knowledge, connecting him to the boys who came before him and revealing the sinister history of the Reformatory, including the warden’s complicity in a deadly fire decades earlier.

The novel does not shy away from depicting the brutal realities of white supremacy—how Black children are criminalized, how white women’s complicity in racial violence is often overlooked, and how systemic racism is upheld through both active cruelty and passive indifference. Gloria’s encounters with the white women Miss Anne and Channing highlight this dynamic; they are willing to help—to a point—but ultimately prioritize their own safety over true justice. Conversely, Miz Lottie and the NAACP lawyer exemplify the power of Black resistance, even when the odds are stacked against them.

Despite its powerful themes and masterful storytelling, The Reformatory was a difficult read, not just because of its heavy subject matter but because its narrative voice occasionally felt geared toward a white audience. The framing of racism as something to be explained and understood, rather than simply confronted, made certain moments feel more didactic than immersive. Additionally, Robbie and Gloria’s young perspectives sometimes lent the novel a YA feel, which isn’t my personal preference. That said, Due has crafted an undeniably compelling and important story, one that demands remembrance and recognition of historical injustices. The Reformatory is a chilling, necessary read—one that I won’t soon forget.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of historical speculative fiction, gothic horror with social justice themes, and narratives that confront systemic racism; readers interested in the haunting legacies of racial violence and resistance; fans of Victor LaValle.

🔑 Key Themes: Racial Terror and Resistance, Historical Memory and Haunting, Family and Survival, The Injustice of the Carceral System.

Content Warnings

Pieces You'll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.25

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be released in the US on March 4th, 2025 from Catapult.

Some books demand to be read slowly, their sentences savored like incantations. Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali is one such book—lyrical, haunting, and deeply introspective. In the wake of a harrowing medical crisis, Ali stitches together a self that was shattered, using memory, faith, and writing as both tools and battlegrounds. Her story is not just one of survival but of reclamation, of choosing how to piece herself back together after nearly being lost forever.

Ali’s memoir begins with the traumatic birth of her son, a moment that should have been sacred but instead becomes a site of violence and neglect at the hands of white doctors who refuse to see her, speak to her, or listen to her warnings. Their failure to recognize a rare form of preeclampsia, one that originated in her liver rather than presenting as typical hypertension, leads to HELLP syndrome—an often-fatal condition that leaves her brain swollen, scattered, and broken by strokes. When she awakens from a coma, she has only the most rudimentary functions, speaking in her first language, Urdu, but unable to grasp the reality of her own motherhood. The journey that follows is one of painful reconstruction, of filling in the gaps left by memory loss and medical trauma, of navigating an American medical system that failed her while also reckoning with the patriarchal traditions of her Muslim upbringing.

What makes Pieces You’ll Never Get Back so compelling is Ali’s refusal to accept easy narratives. She was dubbed the “Miracle Girl” by her doctors, yet she questions what kind of mercy strips a mother of her ability to recognize her own child. She reexamines Islamic theology, looking at conceptions of the afterlife, the sacred origins of the Qur’an, and the faith’s reverence for the written word—all through the lens of a woman whose mind has betrayed her but whose survival depended on language. As she struggles with aphasia and cognitive impairment, writing becomes the very thing that allows her to heal.

Ali’s prose is as fractured and luminous as the memories she tries to reconstruct. Her writing is steeped in sensory detail, moving with rhythmic intensity between the past and the present, between what is known and what is lost. The memoir’s strongest moments lie in its exploration of identity—not just the binaries of American and Indian, Muslim and secular, pre-stroke and post-stroke—but the fluid, shifting reality of selfhood when one’s own body becomes unfamiliar.

If there is any shortcoming in Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, it’s that the ending feels slightly rushed. After so much meticulous excavation of memory, the final chapters don’t linger long enough in the aftermath of Ali’s recovery. And yet, perhaps that is fitting—survival is not a neat conclusion, but an ongoing act.

This is a book that does not flinch from pain, nor does it romanticize resilience. Instead, it honors the messiness of recovery, the grief of what is lost, and the grace found in rebuilding. Ali’s memoir is a testament to the power of writing, of reclaiming one’s narrative when the world tries to silence it. An essential read for anyone who has ever had to fight to be heard, to be seen, to survive.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical and introspective memoirs, narratives of medical trauma and recovery, and explorations of cultural identity; those interested in the intersections of faith, memory, and storytelling.

🔑 Key Themes: Trauma and Healing, Memory and Identity, Cultural Heritage and Faith, The Power of Writing as Survival.

Content Warnings

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

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challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty is a hypnotic descent into the grotesque allure of the wellness industry, where the pursuit of perfection veers into horror. Suspenseful and slow-burning at first, the novel builds an unsettling tension as its narrator, a former piano prodigy, finds herself drawn into Holistik—a high-end wellness brand that promises transformation but demands something far more sinister in return. With sharp, lyrical prose and an incisive critique of beauty, capitalism, and assimilation, Natural Beauty is as intoxicating as it is unsettling.

When the narrator abandons her promising career in music after her parents are in a car accident, she takes a job at Holistik, recruited by the enigmatic Saje, who recognizes her from her conservatory days. Holistik is a temple to curated perfection, offering customized treatments and supplements that promise an almost divine level of beauty enhancement. As part of her onboarding, the narrator is required to undergo biometric testing and consume mandatory supplements—dispensed from a remote-monitored necklace—gradually molding her into an indistinguishable replica of her colleagues. The novel’s prose shimmers with eerie beauty, as the narrator initially revels in her newfound social capital: “There is no longer any way to deny it. I am becoming my best self.” But as she looks in the mirror and sees her ethnicity, her individuality, and even her autonomy slipping away, the cost of this transformation becomes horrifyingly clear.

Huang deftly critiques the commodification of beauty, exposing how capitalism preys on insecurity while enforcing homogeneity. Holistik’s ethos of “natural beauty” is anything but—it is curated, manufactured, and consumed, reinforcing the unsettling truth that in this world, even ethnicity is malleable if it serves the aesthetic ideal. The novel also delves into the pressures of assimilation, tracing the narrator’s struggle to navigate expectations, first as a prodigious musician and later as a willing participant in the elite beauty industry. Her gradual loss of identity is as much a reflection of societal pressures as it is of Holistik’s sinister machinations.

As the novel builds to its climax, its speculative horror elements fully emerge, culminating in revelations about the grotesque origins of Holistik’s products and the chilling experiments conducted under the watchful eye of its young, tech-visionary CEO, Victor Carroll. The novel’s pacing shifts dramatically in its final act, a rapid unraveling that some readers may find jarring. Yet, the underlying themes remain potent—who profits from beauty standards, and who is consumed by them?

One critique I had was the novel’s ambiguous handling of implied childhood sexual abuse, pedophilia, and incest. These themes, while unsettling, were never directly addressed or resolved, which felt unnecessary and potentially triggering, given their lack of impact on the overall plot. Despite this, Natural Beauty remains a compelling, thought-provoking read that lingers long after the final page. Huang’s ability to weave haunting, poetic imagery with biting social commentary makes this a standout debut. I was so enthralled by her writing that I immediately requested an eARC of her follow-up on NetGalley—if Natural Beauty is any indication, her next work will be just as mesmerizing.

📖 Recommended For: Fans of lyrical speculative fiction, social horror, and incisive critiques of beauty culture; readers interested in the intersections of capitalism, race, and bodily autonomy; Mona Awad, Sayaka Murata, and Ling Ma enthusiasts.

🔑 Key Themes: The Commodification of Beauty, Assimilation and Identity, Power and Exploitation, The Allure and Cost of Transformation.

Content Warnings

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva

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adventurous mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on February 4th, 2025 by Astra House.

Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy is an unflinching fever dream of a novel, a body horror-laced dystopia where climate collapse and capitalism have fused into something grotesque, irreversible, and deeply personal. In Nieva’s reimagined Patagonia—now a tropical coastline after the Antarctic ice caps have vanished—Dengue Boy, a mutant mosquito-human hybrid, comes of age in a world that was never meant to hold him. A product of reckless bioengineering, born from corporate greed masquerading as progress, he is rejected by his mother, tormented by his peers, and alienated from his own body. But Dengue Boy is not a story of assimilation—it is a story of monstrous reclamation.

As the novel unfolds, Dengue Boy’s identity fractures and reforms in the shape of vengeance. A brutal moment of self-discovery reveals that she is, in fact, Dengue Girl—only female mosquitoes bite. With that knowledge comes a new hunger, one that cannot be contained. She kills her tormentor, El Dulce, and embarks on a killing spree targeting the ultra-wealthy, those who have thrived while the rest of the world drowns in the consequences of their excess. The novel pivots between Dengue Girl’s transformation into the revolutionary Mother Dengue and the machinations of the elite, who have turned climate catastrophe into an economic engine, profiting off engineered pandemics. It is a world where financial speculation is indistinguishable from ecological devastation, where time itself has lost its borders, collapsing into a prelife of telepathic stones and viral mutations.

Nieva’s prose is as visceral as the world he conjures—dense, all-consuming, and steeped in satire. His sentences sprawl and coil, layering scientific jargon with surrealist horror, corporate doublespeak with fevered hallucination. The effect is hypnotic, a slow descent into a world where the grotesque has become commonplace, where revenge is both deeply personal and disturbingly systemic. Dengue Boy operates on multiple levels at once: a body horror Bildungsroman, a decolonial fable, a critique of techno-capitalism’s unchecked greed. It is a novel unafraid to ask what happens when the world turns so deeply against you that the only reasonable response is to burn it all down.

To read Dengue Boy is to confront the reality that the dystopia Nieva imagines is already seeping into our own. It is a novel that festers, lingers, demands to be reckoned with. And in the end, it leaves one question hanging in the thick, humid air: what happens when the monsters bite back?

📖 Recommended For: Readers who enjoy absurdist and dystopian speculative fiction, critiques of hyper-capitalism, and body horror with a philosophical edge; those interested in the intersections of technology, climate collapse, and resistance.

🔑 Key Themes: Bodily Autonomy and Transformation, Climate Catastrophe and Capitalism, Revenge and Resistance, The Commodification of Life.

Content Warnings

The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza

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challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on April 22, 2025 by Catapult.

“I am no longer bewildered by my collapse but by all we have survived.”

Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is an unpeeling, a revealing, a rebirth. It is an excavation of hunger—not just for food, but for identity, for history, for wholeness. Aziza writes with an unflinching gaze, dissecting the line between living and dying, exploring how each can masquerade as the other. At its core, this memoir is about anorexia, but it is just as much about intergenerational trauma, exile, and the weight of assimilation.

Aziza’s illness peaks during the first year of her marriage, a time when she obsessively curates her image online while her husband monitors her pulse as she sleeps. At 5’10” and 82 pounds, she is given an ultimatum: treatment or death. Yet, within the sterile walls of the eating disorder ward, Aziza finds herself suffocated by the behavioral modification techniques that reduce recovery to numbers—calories, pounds, intake forms. She exposes the rigid surveillance and loss of autonomy inherent in mainstream eating disorder treatment, questioning the assumption that such illnesses belong only to rich, white women.

But the roots of her disorder run deeper. In the hollow spaces where hunger festers, Aziza unearths the buried history of her father’s Palestinian identity—an identity he tried to suppress in an effort to sell her the American dream. The ghost of her Sittoo, her grandmother, lingers throughout the book, whispering of Gaza, of refugee camps, of a homeland lost but never forgotten. Through her father’s retold stories, Aziza comes to understand her disorder as a form of self-erasure—of her race, her queerness, her very being. The weight of exile and assimilation presses against her ribs, manifests in her refusal to take up space.

The memoir is a study of language, too—of the words spoken and unspoken, of Arabic phrases that carry histories, of the silences that shape identity. Aziza investigates her childhood with a forensic tenderness, tracing her first moments of bodily discomfort to the judgmental gaze of white childhood friends who ridiculed her Sittoo’s eating habits. That shame, that quiet rejection of inheritance, becomes a fracture that deepens over time. In searching for Sittoo’s past, Aziza begins to reclaim herself.

Her prose moves like water, shifting between stark, clear-eyed realism and lush, melancholic lyricism. Time bends, memory unfurls, and the narrative pulses with both urgency and restraint. There is an ache in every sentence, a longing woven into every reflection. The result is hypnotic, a memoir that feels less like a telling and more like a haunting.

Ultimately, The Hollow Half is about survival—not just of the body, but of the self. It is about reclaiming a stolen birthright, about refusing disappearance. In the end, Aziza does not find healing within the confines of carceral psychiatry. She finds it in her father’s stories, in the land of her ancestors, in the act of remembering. This memoir is a testament to the power of recognition—to see oneself, in all one’s fullness, and to finally say: I exist.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, introspective memoirs that explore identity, diaspora, and survival; those interested in eating disorder narratives beyond the white, Western lens; fans of Hala Alyan, Emmeline Clein, and Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Intergenerational Trauma and Diaspora, Body and Self-Erasure, Cultural Inheritance and Belonging, The Power of Language and Storytelling.

Content Warnings

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bisexualbookshelf's reviews 687 reviews

bisexualbookshelf's reviews
687 reviews