Quill & Queer

Read This Week

Holloway: Sometimes you just gotta deal with your mental health by travelling back in time to 1940s France to join a commune. 4/5

Maiden: There's a dragon, but it's not about him. 4/5

Mere: Queer, sapphic and utterly bleak and beautiful, this had the descent into despair and madness I was looking for from The Starving Saints. 5/5

And Notre Dame Is Burning: This is like that one friend who says something absolutely hilarious right after dropping the worst trauma. It's me I'm that friend. 4/5

Read Last Week

A Harvest Of Hearts: If you see a man lounging bisexually on a throne while playing with his fidget toys and think, yep, that's my stupid man, this book is for you. 4/5

Son Of Nobody: Men will try anything but therapy is perhaps the most overused book trope in the history of stories. And yet, here we are again. 2/5

Solace House: The quatrain poetry was so, so clever but I felt a lot of the story and characters were sacrificed in favour of the big reveal at the end. 3/5

Read Last Week

The Nights Are Quiet In Tehran: Intergenerational stories have been a huge hit for me recently, but there was a disconnect in this that I struggled to understand. 3/5

Break Room: This was such a strange concept of the start of a book, that felt like the author immediately got bored of writing it. 2/5

Read This Week

The Wall: What if Jon Snow went to the wall in future Dystopian England instead? Seems to be the premise of this book, but for me, it failed to have a point. 3/5

Vanishing World: This book is so subtly clever, by the end turning what I thought was a mediocre "what if?" experiment into a full blown horror. 5/5

Decomposition Book: Finding a New Best Friend in the form of a corpse in the woods is great until you remember that they were a Real Person With Feelings 4/5

Taiwan Travelogue: Colonialism told through the story of Japanese woman's desire to consume Taiwan's culture through their food, this was a slow story to get through. 3/5

Read This Week

The Ending Writes Itself: As long as you're not expecting a murder mystery masterpiece, this story is a lot of fun and I had a great time reading it. 4/5

Aborescence: I truly went from oh! a quirky tree book! to sobbing my way through this entire story. (again) 5/5

The Weeds: They float, a ghost, above the Colosseum, wondering when the hell this book will offer up a satisfying conclusion. 2/5

Read This Week

Heap Earth Upon It: Chloe Michelle Howarth makes yearning feel exactly like it's supposed to - a sick, cloying, endless want, the characters drowning in their own emotions. 5/5

Wolf Worm: Kingfisher really took that blowfly girl creepypasta and decided to make a whole novel of it, and somehow I always knew we were leading up to this. 1/5

Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop: I know that if a cat is called Incense Box that I'm in for a great read, and tying the bookshop's customers with popular novels was such a fun concept. 4/5

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing: A harrowing, dark story of three generations of one family, as they grapple with the trauma carried on by the next generation, and try to heal.

The Leather Boys: Such an important story for the era it was released, but from a modern perspective this was bleak and unsatisfying to read. 3/5