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A young lesbian and her trans-masc gender queer best friend discover themselves as they solve the mystery of a missing friend they don't even remember they had. Along the way, they are faced with a supernatural mystery that haunts the local woods, along with the more banal and mundane horrors of discovering their queerness in the midst of a conservative, rural Pacific North-West town.

It's worth warning the reader that this book does grapple with issues such as parental abandonment, conversion therapy, and the constant low-grade anxiety that pervades most queer lives in spaces that are not controlled and curated specifically by our communities.

Excellent book.

Motheater is a modern fantasy set in the Appalachian mountains against the backdrop of a small coal-mining town. A white witch, born shortly after the Civil War (the Brother's War, she calls it) awakens in the modern day, having been found washing downstream by Benethea, a Black woman, who is investigating a series of disappearances in the local mine starting in the nineties. The two develop a tense friendship that nearly teeters into romance as they seek to reclaim Motheater's memories and address the issues with the mine, with the help of Bennie's ex-boyfriend, Zack Gresham, who works at the mine. The world-building is top notch (the way magic works is so fucking cool), and the pacing is mostly very good (it's slow at the start). The emotional tone is all over the place, from defiance in the face of overwhelming odds to sapphic yearning to grim resignation and determination.

My primary criticisms are that we never see any description of what Bennie looks like (literally everyone else is described, including extras in historical views), and I would have given it a different ending.