Random acts of readers' advisory

[daemonluna]

So I jumped in on a discussion on Tumblr where someone was looking for WLW books that aren't romance. And because Tumblr breaks my brain when it comes to actually keeping track of things, I thought I'd throw it up here (for all five of you who are still around *g*).

So. Things I have read in recent memory or in one case, want to read, with queer female characters.

The Unspoken Name by A.K. Larkwood for an orc priestess promised to a death god, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers for a love letter to early 2000's SF spacefaring TV (the rest of her Wayfarer series shifts in tone and I love it too, and there are multiple queer characters in pretty much all of her stuff), Alexis Hall's Kate Kane series for hardboiled lesbian detective with vampires, Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth is experimental horror (I had some issues with its character development but multiple queer female characters live at the end, so...)

I kind of love Black Water Sister by Zen Cho, about an (adult) lesbian character who's in the closet moving back to Malaysia with her parents, and discovering that her dead grandmother was a medium and very much still had things to say. Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto is like nothing I've read and is a graphic novel about a bisexual elderly Japanese Canadian woman who busts out of the assisted living facility her children have found her, sets up in a bachelor apartment on her own, but inadvertently has brought Death with her. I have not yet read Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw, ghost-story horror set in Japan, but if I'm remembering right, it's got a bi main character and a nonbinary author.

The original post referenced Sarah Waters too, who I love immensely, and when I read Tipping the Velvet in the early 2000's, I remember venturing into several bookstores and standing in front of the section labelled either "Gay and Lesbian" or "LGBT" at the time, faced with nothing but self-help books and Serious Realistic Literary Fiction in which, for the most part, everyone is miserable and unlikeable, the end.

The closest I've found to her style is some of Emma Donoghue's historicals. Frog Music, based on an unsolved murder in 1876 San Francisco, is one I'd recommend for a twisty complex mystery that doesn't shy away from the uglier, messier realities of the time period. (I am not ready to read her latest one, The Pull of the Stars, because because it's set in a maternity during the flu epidemic and.. I just can't right now.

So yeah, queer book suggestions available with very little provocation around here, just sayin'.