User Profile

Jaelyn

jaelyn@bookwyrm.social

Joined 15 hours ago

Mainly reading queer and trans literature. Also a bit of SFF. Find me elsewhere: linkstack.lgbt/@jaelyn

Importing my reviews from Storygraph to here was hell, so I'm sorry if some of my reviews ended up on blatantly the wrong book. I'm still trying to find everything that Bookwyrm put in the wrong place.

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Jaelyn's books

Jeanette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Paperback, 1990, Vintage) 4 stars

This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one …

Review of 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit ' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

A beautiful but often traumatic navigation of coming out as queer in a fiercely Pentecostal family in Lancashire. Jeanette is brought up to be a missionary but when she falls for a girl the religious fervour of her family come own in the form of exorcisms and exile.

I’d also recommend ‘Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?’, which is Winterson’s autobiographical account of the time Oranges was based on.

F. T. Lukens: Otherworldly (2024, McElderry Books, Margaret K.) 4 stars

Seventeen-year-old Ellery is a non-believer in a region where people swear the supernatural is real. …

Review of 'Otherworldly' from 'Storygraph'

4 stars

A small region is stuck in a perpetual winter. Offerings from locals to the goddess to bring spring have gone unanswered. Ellery, no longer believing in the gods, leaves his family's frozen farm to work in a city diner to help support his family trying to scrape by with greenhouses to grow crops.

When Ellery meets Knox, a runaway familiar from the Other World, his understanding of the world and the perpetual winter is thrown upside down. Ellery helps protects Knox from the shades who seek to drag him back in exchange for finding out the truth about the winter. But as Ellery helps Knox experience more of human life, they both begin to feel more than they bargained for.

This is a very cute YA romance with an enby protagonist, an adorably OTT sapphic couple and contemporary magic with goddesses and underworlds to boot. The characters are lovely even …

Lucy Holland: Sistersong 5 stars

In the ancient kingdom of Dumnonia, there is old magic to be found in the …

Review of 'Sistersong' from 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Set in ancient Briton as the Saxons advanced across the island, the kingdom of Dumnonia has begun to abandon the old gods and their magic to favour a Christian missionary and the promise of alliances and trade deals which would follow. As the king's ties to the land's magic fade, so do the kingdom's prospects and defences.

The king's three daughters possess some latent magic still, as forbidden as it is to acknowledge it. But enter Myrdhin, a magician/witch who works to restore the kingdom's connection to it's magic through the children before the Saxon's overrun them. As well as reconnecting the children to the land, they help the eldest daughter, Keyne, be see as he truly is: as the king's son and heir.

The story twists between the perspectives of the king's three children as the kingdom teeters on the edge of invasion, and the rifts that emerge between …

Courtney Kae: In the Event of Love (2022, Kensington Publishing Corporation) 4 stars

With her career as a Los Angeles event planner imploding after a tabloid blowup, Morgan …

Review of 'In the Event of Love ' from 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Morgan Ross is that high-flying career lady character who is a big-time event planner only to have a little career snafu when she accidentally kisses her client's fiance. Oops, now that 'New York Promotion™' is on the line and your clients are deserting you.

Hey, why not take up that job in your hometown you were derisive about a few seconds ago? Some small easy win and you're back in the game. I mean, the town is only full of heartbreak and regret, right? Totally solid plan. Though maybe it isn't the best entrance to crash your car into your former girlfriend's sign at the entrance to her tree farm. That's right, she's a hot, toned plaid-clad lumberjack called Nicole Coenen. No wait, my imagination got away with me there. She's called Rachel Reed and it turns out she's actually the client! Sort of.(But go on, insert Nicole in there …

Marie Cardno: How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster) (2022, Rare Design Ltd.) 4 stars

Life is tough when you're an eldritch abomination.

Trillin isn't technically a person. She's a …

Review of 'How to Get a Girlfriend (When You're a Terrifying Monster)' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Short little cosy fantasy novellas (100 pages each) about a witch who falls in love with a fragment of the Endless Void. Trillin may be unable to control where her tentacles and extra eyes appear, and Sian's witchy colleagues may want to burn Trillin out of their plane of existence, but it's a match made in extradimensional terror between these two girls who just want some quiet time together. It may not be groundbreaking or epic but it's a cute, easy read for anyone who thinks Lovecraft needed more sapphic romance and what I can only describe as a demonic tribble companion.

Jewelle Gomez: The Gilda Stories (1991, Firebrand Books) 5 stars

A very unusual vampire story. A young Black woman escapes being enslaved and ends up …

Review of 'The Gilda Stories' from 'Storygraph'

5 stars

In 1850 a runaway slave seeks refuge at a brothel run by a vampire who gives her eternal life. The book proceeds in a series of vignettes over 200 years as she travels around the US, taking what blood she leaves and only killing when necessary. She also tries to leave something in the minds of those she drinks, in return for her “share” of the blood.

The stories follow her tenuous connections to humanity, fellow vampires and her existence as a black lesbian in America throughout its history. I certainly enjoyed the fresh take on the vampire trope by applying a feminist, queer and racial lens to her experiences while the vignettes give a little slice-of-life vibe to her experiences at different points in history.

Rachel Dawson: Neon Roses (2023, Hodder & Stoughton) 5 stars

Review of 'Neon Roses' from 'Storygraph'

5 stars

Sapphic love during the 80s miner's strike as rural Welsh valley girl Eluned falls for June, a punky dyke visiting with the LGSM. Eluned leaves the valleys behind for her lesbian awakening between the underworlds of Cardiff, Camden and Manchester. Meanwhile, her sister (much to her family's horror) marries an abusive policeman. If you love some period sapphic erotic romance, ACAB Thatcher bashing and punky 80s nightclubs then this is a good choice.

Jeffrey Eugenides, Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex (Paperback, 2003, Bloomsbury) 4 stars

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day …

Review of 'Middlesex' from 'Storygraph'

3 stars

Telling the life Cal Stephanides, an intersex person from Detroit, starting with their family history as Greek expats who fled the Turkish expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor to America. The story follows two generations before reaching Cal, describing major historical events on the way such as the Detroit race rot in 1967.

It felt to me like two great but disjointed books. One being the story of Greek emigrants and the other being the life of Cal, growing up without understanding they're intersex until a chance discovery as a teenager and an attempt to force surgery upon them. The way they're tied together feels unsatisfactory, leaving the family story without a meaningful ending and Cal's story underdeveloped (though perhaps that is inevitable either way from a cis writer?).

It is nevertheless an interesting read both as a multigenerational family tale covering period events, and as the tale of a …

Grace Curtis: Frontier (Paperback, en-Latn language, 2023, Hodderscape) 3 stars

Love. Loss. Laser guns.

In the distant future, climate change has reduced Earth to a …

Review of 'Frontier' from Storygraph

3 stars

Earth was mostly abandoned after the climate catastrophe. Those who remained, creating a religion of isolation, life is now a wild west society of sheriffs and gunslinging. But one day a ship crashes on Earth and one visitor (the first in hundreds of years) begins her desperate search for the rest of her crew (though mainly, the woman she loves).

The structure of the book follows the visitor through the experiences of different people she encounters as she makes her way across this new west (and the protagonist’s moniker changes through each of their perspectives). This kept things fresh but I felt many of them deserved far more attention and I wish we could have spent more time with them and fleshed them out. But it certainly helped to broaden the world as you pass through it.

It’s been referenced to be as being similar to Becky Chambers and there …

reviewed Meru by S. B. Divya (The Alloy Era, #1)

S. B. Divya: Meru (2023, Amazon Publishing) 4 stars

One woman and her pilot are about to change the future of the species in …

Review of 'Meru' from 'Storygraph'

4 stars

So humans fucked up Earth, and then fucked up Mars with piss-poor terraforming, then fucked up with genetics. Sensing a pattern? Well so did their genetic offspring. Their augmented descendants, the Alloys, alter themselves to an environment, not the environment to them, and largely life in space flying around the galaxy? The humans? At best, troublesome children. At worst, a danger to everything else in the cosmos that deserves existence. At least that’s the narrative for the past centuries as humans remain Earth-bound while the Alloys clean up their mess.


But Jayanthi dreams of more, not being stuck on Earth but being able to travel the galaxy and have the rights to contribute to the collected knowledge of their society. Born with sickle cell, Jayanthi figures she and others with the condition would be uniquely suited to surviving on a newly discovered planet, Meru, with elevated oxygen which would be …

Nyri A. Bakkalian: Grey Dawn (Paperback, 2020, Balance of Seven) 5 stars

I had a moment’s indecision—a stab of worry. “Trust me,” she said. And so, I …

Review of 'Grey Dawn' from 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Chloë Parker Stanton leaves her love, Leigh Andrea Hunter, behind to fight in the US Civil War by posing as a man in the Union Army. At the Battle of Gettysburg, she is lost.

Appearing in 2020, Chloë finds herself at the Joint Temporal Integrity Commission which helps reintegrate temporally displaced people into 21st-century society. The person assigned to her is a former sergeant and trans woman by the name of Leigh Andrea Hunter.

Leigh's life in the past echoes to her future self without her fully understanding what is happening, while Chloë grows closer to what feels like the reincarnation of her lover who promised she’d wait for her. But casting a shadow over it is the secret behind the Temporal Integrity Commission's work.

It's a fairly short and light romance focusing on the time-displaced bond of the lovers rather than anything focused on the sci-fi element itself, which …

Andrew Joseph White: Hell Followed with Us (2022, Peachtree Publishing Company Inc., Peachtree Teen) 4 stars

Benji, un chico trans de dieciséis años, huye de la secta que lo crio, una …

Review of 'Hell Followed With Us' from Storygraph

5 stars

A religious cult unleashed a pandemic known as The Flood on the world, killing nearly the entire population of the world. The cult continues to hunt down the few survivors in the name of god with flood-infected creatures called Graces.

Two years later: Benji, a 16-year-old trans boy, flees the cult after they murder his father and finds refuge in a group that is the remains of the local LGBTQ+ centre and begins to fall for Nick who leads the group. But Benji harbours a secret, he has been infected with a form of the flood that will slowly destroy him but give him the ability to control the Graces and turn them against the cult, or wipe out the few remnants of humanity.

This has been on my list for soooooo long! It is a dystopian YA novel with a lot of body horror, religious abuse, transphobia and violence …