Hello!! I hope you're doing well! Do you have any recs for books about twisted/problematic relationships but with woc? Obviously there's our queen octavia butler but unfortunately for me i've finished reading all her books so i'm desperately craving for books that scratch this itch. Thank you for this blog btw i really love reading all your thoughts & reviews ♥️
goddd okay this list is not going to be nearly as long as I wish it was but it is extreeeeemely varied, so at least we have that going for us lmao. and hopefully you find something interesting in here:
right out of the gate if you're chasing that Octavia high, Rivers Solomon's novel Sorrowland feels very very in that vein. it starts with a teenage girl escaping from a Black separatist fundie cult while heavily pregnant with the cult leader's twins, deciding to give birth to the babies in the woods and raise them there. and boy, does it get crazier from there! there are some eventual transformative body horror sci-fi elements that I shan't spoil, but it's a time. the relationships are pretty secondary and genuinely not the most fucked up thing here, but our main girlie Vern is very much into girls and trying to figure that out on top of all the other horrors.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in a fantasy trilogy by specfic queen NK Jemisin, and the first book in particular is really like. problematic relationship city. the protagonist is called to be an heir to a dying emperor and IMMEDIATELY gets embroiled in a love triangle with two of the gods that her family enslaves for power??? crazy shit.
I just kicked off this year reading a book called Darknesses by Lachelle Seville, which ALSO features a young Black woman fresh out of a cult (this one loves self harm and anorexia). and then she meets another Black girl who casually drops that she's Dracula, and oh boy do things get weirder from there. this book is like kind of Not Good but it is very entertaining; at a certain point you just have to turn off your brain and go with the vibes. it's sweeter than a lot of examples but listen, obsession and bloodlust are obsession and bloodust no matter how much your gf Dracula respects consent. there's a lot of murder!
this one doesn't have any supernatural bullshit afoot and is instead just regular degular #problematic, but Raven Leilani's Luster was one of my favorite books last year and follows an absolute shitshow of a young Black woman's extremely loaded and weird relationship with her older white boyfriend and his insane wife, as well as their adopted Black daughter.
anther no magic entry: I really love Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, The Serial Killer, which is about exactly what you think it's about! the narrator is a put-upon Nigerian woman whose beautiful, beloved sister has murdered her last several boyfriends and has come crying to her dutiful sister to help her clean it up each time; the plot kicks in when the murdery sister sets her sights on the narrator's boss, a doctor to whom the narrator is also attracted. I know it's a sibling relationship instead of a romantic one but you didn't specify so! I am counting it!
this one is like very very very niceys compared to everything else I'm going to put on this list but it's also pretty hot so I have to mention it: Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej is about a young, bisexual Asian-American woman struggling to get a writing career off the ground falling in love with a Notably Older and wealthier white man and figuring out how to navigate the subsequent problems both within their own interpersonal dynamic and in how their relationship is received by others.
honorary mentions: books about fucked up white women that are written by women of color who Know!!
Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng is a Victorian alternate history in which the English discovered the fairy realm and promptly did what the English did, ie, sending missionaries to teach the fairies about Jesus. the novel follows a woman traveling to the fairy kingdom to look for her missing missionary brother and promptly going insane as fairies gaslight gatekeep girlboss from all sides, complete with a side of everyone's favorite gothic horror trope: repressed sibling incest!
My Nemesis by Charmaine Craig is another very lowkey and grounded example, comparatively, but I thought it was neat and worth a mention! it's told from the POV of truly insufferable white woman writer whose emotional affair with a philosopher gets thrown for a fucking loop by the philosopher's wife, an enigmatic Chinese woman whose motivation the MC cannot guess literally at all. it's not the most exciting read in the world but the reveals hit hard and the reveals at the end made me YELL.
also for short story collections by WOC that can bring the #yikes factor in big ways I heartily endorse Roxane Gay's Difficult Women and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties.
I wish I had more to throw you here; please if anyone has something to add to this list I am LISTENING
