ALMOST LIFE, the ghostly sound of unrung bells in unlived lives

ALMOST LIFE
KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Two young women meet in Paris in this decades-spanning tour de force about the enduring power of young love and the poignant heartbreak of missed chances—perfect for fans of One Day and Normal People.

Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable, but their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make…

Erica and Laure’s love story spans decades, marriage, children, secret trysts, and the agonizing changes—both personal and political—that might mean they can be together, after all. But when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?

Beautifully capturing young love and all its complexities, Almost Life is a story of longing for the paths not taken, and the almost lives we live.

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My Review: Messy lives are so much more interesting than tidy, orderly ones. Messy for the right reasons...like being in love with two people for the usual complex, complicated reasons we humans fall in love...make for even better, more involving reading. Then there's the ultimate messiness of not being able to decide what to do about any of it. That is the most relatable thing of them all.

Of course, the emotional cost of being in two equally important relationships...well, grief and guilt and anger are spread around pretty thickly, pretty widely, and really heavily. Erica and Laure are connected but in ways that are demanding, requiring choices to be made. Erica is the one with A Plan (children, career as a novelist), so she chooses her Plan over the loose, freeing love of Laure (that will never get her one step closer to fulfilling her Plan).

Laure. Her plan for life is to love, to make love, to build around her loving chosen family of outsider misfit gay folk a nexus of happiness and support. As this story begins in 1978, I needn't tell older readers what was about to ram into the walls of the world...suffice, for those who were not there, to say that COVID was not the first deadly plague that came out of nowhere your elders faced. Laure being in the gay world of Paris feels it, bears it, as it scythes through her circle of loved ones. Erica, insulated in marriage and children, feels it less, but she feels love for Laure and the deeply conflicted happy delights and miserable lows of being a human in a family.

Author Hargrave is not going to trudge through the lives of Laure and Erica, taking us into bedrooms and kitchens and school meetings; we hop and bounce and move through their worlds, seldom seeing them together, but always connecting, and always dreaming of what might have been if....

It's a technique whose use means that a reader wanting a saga, a densely woven tapestry of emotional connections explored and explained, is not going to be satisfied. This story explores how the truly, intensely important loves in our lives crystallize us. Shaping the futire is not all that often a deliberate act, despite the mountains of books and stories that tell us we can take charge, we can direct our own life-movie. Erica meeting Laure awoke to her bisexuality, and I am here on this Earth to tell you that sexual awakening is not under the awakened's conscious control and is seldom a force for good until lots of painful lessons about emotions and plans gone awry are learned. Erica and Laure set in motion changes and processes of healing and cycles of misery and destruction in their lives. Lives lived, of course, but more interestingly roads not taken. These are the strands of Author Hargrave's story that sang and shimmered in my mind's eye.

I must say that this technique militates against deeper explorations of the women's relationship to each other. There is an inevitable sense of unsettledness, of being in motion without being headed in any particular direction, as a price exacted for seeing into the "almost lives" that pepper every person's experience—without most of us being aware of them, aware of their ghosts anyway.

I'm sure this story would ignite terrific book club discussions. It's tailor-made for the present moment of multiple inflection points converging on unknowable futures that preclude each other. Well worth your time and treasure.

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, first in a fictional series called The Autobiographical Trilogy

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR (The Autobiographical Trilogy #1)
PIRKKO SAISIO (tr. Mia Spangenberg)
Two Lines Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Eileen Myles and Patti Smith, Lowest Common Denominator is an ecstatic coming-of-age novel by the Finlandia-prize-winning author of The Red Book of Farewells

Writing in the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel (translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg) transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Saisio keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. Writing with her trademark wit and style, each formative experience—with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ “who has a beard like a man but a skirt and long hair like a woman”—drives her further and further from her family and others.

Struggling to understand her place in the world around her, it’s in language that she discovers a refuge and a way to be seen at last.

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My Review: I have to believe Author Pirkko (as distinct from Narrator Pirkko, her stand-in) when she says this is autobiographical fiction, not a memoir; but honestly it reads like a memoir. It's that immediate, it's that intimate, it takes on the core issue of queer life...identity...so fully and so bravely. I suppose the reason for novelizing something that otherwise would get criticized for being invented but passed off as factual. Instead, write it as a novel and tell the truth that way.

I looked triumphantly at Father, who was in his shirtsleeves drinking black coffee and reading the Työkansan Sanomat newspaper.

Mother stood by the entryway mirror spreading a touch of rouge from her lips to her cheeks as has hummed "Harbor Nights."

Neither of them noticed that I had become she, the one always under observation.

I was drawn in, as I'm confident all my queer siblings would be, to the story of knowing you're different, Other, thus feeling like you're a disappointment. Or, more terribly, being told you're a disappointment. Like Author Pirkko I had the experience of viewing myself and my world from the outside as a child. In my case it was my utter certainty there was no god at all and religion was a deliberate lie. My gayness, known to myself from about the same time, was nebulous until adolescence brought the specifics into focus. So my relationship to the central fact of this story was immediate and powerful.

It's a trauma to be required by your sense of yourself to see the Otherness, to experience the selfhoods of your family at too early an age occasioned by that explosion of the idea of community. The family never looks the same, never feels safe and welcoming, when you see yourself as unequivocally an outsider to it. That realization should come in adolescence with more life under one's belt. Author Pirkko stunned me by explaining this fundamental truth of my life to me in terms of her (or her stand-in's) own life; she did it both matter-of-factly and with the greatest emotional honesty.

The story takes us around and about in time, revealing generational traumas that all families carry. In a novel format the time-hopping can logically come at key moments not from an organizing principle like non-fiction imposes. We're never far from another point of change in her family's history that resonates with her Otherness. It wove a net that caught both the reality of solitary experiences of reality being all we have and the often obscure fact that families are made of communities of Otherness. Closeness is hard when the Otherness is pathologized as queerness is...as political unorthodoxy does...by most outside cultural forces.

Author Pirkko writing as she does from personal resonance with this reality makes this read a deeply satisfying one for me. I suspect many, if not most, will find many points of fellow feeling for this story. It's a shame she was only inspired to write it by her father's death.

What opportunities for healing were squandered. Very saddening to me.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAID first in the Harriet Morrow Investigates lesbian-led series

THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAID (Harriet Morrow Investigates #1)
ROB OSLER
Kensington Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The acclaimed author of the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity, and Lefty Award-nominated Devil’s Chew Toy delights with the first in a new historical mystery series set in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago, as America is entering its Progressive Era and Harriet Morrow, a bike-riding, trousers-wearing lesbian, has just begun her new job as the first female detective at the Windy City's Prescott Agency...

Chicago, 1898. Rough-around-the-edges Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. Just twenty-one with a younger brother to support, she seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires her as its first woman operative. The move sparks controversy—with skeptical male colleagues, a high-strung office secretary, and her boss, Mr. Theodore Prescott, all waiting for her to unravel under the pressure . . .

Only an hour into the job, Harriet has an assignment: Discover the whereabouts of a missing maid from one of the most extravagant mansions on Prairie Avenue. Owner Pearl Bartlett has a reputation for sending operatives on wild goose chases around her grand estate, but Harriet believes the stunningly beautiful Agnes Wozniak has indeed vanished under mysterious circumstances—possibly a victim of kidnapping, possibly a victim of something worse . . .

With Mr. Prescott pushing a hard deadline, Harriet’s burgeoning career depends on working through a labyrinth of eccentric characters and murky motives in a race to discover who made Agnes disappear. When her search leads to Chicago’s Polish community and a new friendship in Agnes’s charming older sister, Barbara, clues scattered across the city slowly reveal just how much depends on Harriet’s inexperienced investigation for answers . . . and the deep danger that awaits once she learns the truth.

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My Review: In her very first appearance in this (hopefully) ongoing series, Harriet Morrow receives her new name, "Harry," from her first client. The slightly dotty Mrs. Bartlett insist Agnes, her maid, has disappeared without so much as a by-your-leave. Highly unusual behavior for a servant, still less for Agnes, a most responsible girl according to Mrs. Bartlett.

As mentioned, her dottiness leads Mr. Prescott to assign this tyro woman to the likely useless search for a missing maid and to assign her a "mentor" who "investigated" earlier disappearances of stuff in that house, but they turned out to be an old woman's forgetfulness misplacing the items.

This setup pays off right away in the mentor/mentee relationship setting the tone for misogyny in her new world. She does find an ally in McCabe, another very junior agent, at least in part because she's so roughly dismissed by the senior agents...and the secretaries. While Harry looks into Agnes's disappearance with the diligence one hopes to find in an investigator, she also comes across a world she did not know existed in a gay bar that Barbara (Agnes's sister) introduces her to. Not only is she doing the job for dotty Mrs. Bartlett and proving her right about Agnes, she's discovering why "Harry" felt so fight and fitting as a name for herself.

The mystery itself isn't stunningly complex or stupid-easy. I think if you like Maisie Dobbs, you'll like the mystery and its tone. It's a solidly grounded setting, one that Author Osler is at pains to show you he's researched. It's a slightly over-explained setting for my taste but it's not a huge drag on the pace of the read. The stakes are set early and tension mounts as Harry finds this simple case is the tip of a much more worrying set of crimes. You already know Harry resolves the disappearance because this is a series mystery and ma'at must be upheld.

Choosing to revolve a series opener around a lesbian awakening for your sleuth is bold for a male author. I'm not a lesbian so I don't know what Author Osler might have got wrong. Nothing stood out to me, so at least it's sure he made no catastrophic mistakes. (I hope.) I always prefer to read genre fiction that centers my QUILTBAG siblings. I'll be looking for the next entry in the series with pleasure and anticipation.

EVERYTHING IS FINE HERE, debut novel of coming-of-age and coming out in queer-hostile Uganda

EVERYTHING IS FINE HERE
IRYN TUSHABE
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A tender coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.

Eighteen-year-old Aine Kamara has been anticipating a reunion with her older sister, Mbabazi, for months. But when Mbabazi shows up with an unexpected guest, Aine must confront an old her beloved sister is gay in a country with tight anti-homosexuality laws.

Over a weekend at Aine’s all girls’ boarding school, sisterly bonds strengthen, and a new friendship emerges between Aine and her sister’s partner, Achen. Later, a sudden death in the family brings Achen to Mbabazi’s and Aine’s home village, resulting in tensions that put Mrs. Kamara’s Christian beliefs to the test. She issues an ultimatum, forcing Mbabazi to make a difficult choice, but Aine must too. Unable to convince Mama to reconsider, Aine runs away to Mbabazi’s and Achen’s home in Kampala. There she reconnects with Elia, the sophomore at Makerere University she’s had a crush on for a while.

Acclaimed writer Iryn Tushabe’s dazzling debut novel, Everything Is Fine Here, explores the choice Aine must make, and its inevitable and harrowing results.

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My Review: How any parent, let alone one who has actually given birth, could reject their child to obey a bizarre (and demonstrably untrue) imaginary bully in the sky's idiotic rules is utterly beyond my ability to comprehend.It made this story one I could never fully commit to. In setting this dynamic at the center of several characters' awakenings, societal and personal, the author's veracious presentation of Mrs. Kamara's conflict between her religion and her love for her children left me out.

It isn't simply that I don't *like* it, this reality, the truth of many many families...some I've known quite well...is so alien to what I know of parenting and the love of a parent for a child that I quit believing the story's heart of truth. It *is* truth, I'm fully aware. I simply can't get over that utterly insane and viciously cruel behavior attributed to "moral" people, so I end up outside looking in.

That's why this powerful, beautifully written novel only gets 4 stars.

The love and the hope and the genuine human interlinking that is a family takes place among the people rejected by this vengeful god. I think if that as a powerful indictment of the belief system. The young women all seem to accept the reality of god while declining to accept the rules they're told are ordained by him. That resistance is delightful to me, and is expressed as a firm rejection of patriarchy: "...she'd read enough novels to suspect when patriarchy was disguising itself as romance," as I practically weep with jubilation.

A note to my more vocal women negative commenters: Logic and evidence dictate that honest men oppose patriarchy solely for its demonstrable and unconscionable wastefulness; self-preservation demands that gay men...I am one...oppose its procrustean dualistic insistence on a gender binary. That I benefit from it does not mean I must be blind to its evils and insensitive to its costs. Please stop DMing me about it. (This same attitude is applicable to my old white man's opposition to racism.)

The most fun I had reading this Uganda-set novel was its evocations of the life lived there, the backdrop of the natural world...not paraded in some weird tourist-trap way, rather that Aine (our PoV character) notices what is natural for her to notice. It's a solidly built world. It feels to me like I could get off a bus there and not feel culture shock because the rhythms and the ethos aren't completely unfamiliar after reading this story. That is some excellent writing, Author Tushabe.

A truly honest, very emotionally centered, coming-of-age and coming out story. One that is set in a world very hostile to women and to queer people. This is a gift to US readers from a place and at a time when understanding the costs and injustices of repression could not possibly be more important. Reading is, always, an act of resistance. Resist ignorance of what misogyny and homophobia deprive their human victims of.

THE SAFEKEEP, debut novel of lesbian awakening and compulsive, possessive desires

THE SAFEKEEP
YAEL VAN DER WOUDEN
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

WINNER OF THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction!

WINNER OF THE 2025 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION! Read about it, and the author's heartfelr thank-you speech, at The Guardian (no paywall; please support them.)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.

A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.

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My Review: Opposites attract. Hard to argue with that for most grown folks; but it's also hard to see what these women see in each other. Their oppositeness is deep-rooted, identity-forming stuff. That level and degree of oppositeness is hard to overcome; one partner's ordinary life is an existential rejection of the other.

Isabel takes the idea of the houseproud Dutch woman very much to an extreme. Eva presages women's liberation's rejection of housewife as an identiry; she's free-spirited and unmaterialistic. That comes across to Isabel as outrageous disrespect to herself and her poor, abused house.

What caused these radically ill-suited women to fall for each other? Forced proximity? I don't rightly know. They manage to have sex. I won't call it making love; and honestly how did pissy, controlling Isabel ever let herself get involved in something as inherently dirty, messy, and collaborative as sex in the first place?

I have questions about this. None are answered.

I read most of the book thinking I'd be stretching to three stars. The events at the end of the book...the way their romance does what Love really does to the Lover and the Beloved...got me a fractional hair over the four-star line. It's a first novel and there are some ways events are presented that do not help the reader invest in the plot. It's a strain to do some of the emotional heavy lifting because Isabel and Eva are so weirdly assorted as partners for more than a one-night fling that I kept needing to remind myself to tamp my eyebrows back down out of my hairline.

But Isabel says a line that shoved me there, one I can't repeat because the Spoiler Stasi has its truncheons and tasers ever at the ready...grow the fuck up, y'all...but its delicate evocation of the awareness od the inportance of the persona in intimacy that explained a lot of the book to me.

It's a big risk to leave something so important so late. I'm glad I didn't bail before I got there. I hope Author van der Wouden does something new soon.

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN, do not read if you're hungry and have no food available...that way madness lies

THE HUNGER OF WOMEN
MAROSIA CASTALDI (tr. Jamie Richards)
And Other Stories
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

Winner of the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose!

The Publisher Says: Rosa, midway through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself—by opening a restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa’s observations, reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with her own embattled mother’s age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter’s inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Helene Cixous, The Hunger of Women is nothing less than a literary feast.

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My Review: A chest-pokey second-person punctuationless stream-of-consciousness narrative of a woman's awakening to the body's hungers? Where she addresses me directly as "Reader" throughout?! Four stars?!

I have not been kidnapped, am not being threatened with grievous bodily harm, and have not lost (more of) my mind. This is a work that, like Ducks, Newburyport and Milkman, uses what could feel like a gimmick in less talented hands to drag you willy-nilly into the head of a woman who, in middle life, determines she is not living, but existing, so sets out to use her woman-ness to its fullest capacity. She's Neapolitan, living in Milan, the mother of an adult daughter whose life has (as they must) diverged from her mother's despite their living together. Her marriage ended when her husband was killed in a car accident...very believable for anyone who's driven in Italy...so there's a huge space in her life as yet unfilled.

So you know, US readers: Neapolitans are the Southern Black folk of Italy, and Milan is the mothership of Italian racism and fascism. AND Rosa's a woman in a misogynist society. These are facts that color the way one sees the narrator that might not be obvious.

Rosa addressing us as "Reader" is my least-favorite thing in this largely plotless inner journey of an adult into the selfhood denied for so long simply by doing the rote, expected things. Rosa decides to open a restaurant...she knows about food, so it makes sense...and thus opens the floodgates of her body's hunger for womanly touch. This is pretty much it as to plot.

A lot of the prose, then, is dedicated to telling us the story of a woman's world as circumscribed by her agreement to be repressed. As that agreement wanes, and as she regales us with...recipes is not the word, with ingredients and techniques for making them sing together, much as one does when talking to a friend who shares one's experience level and cultural referents. These are poetic prose evocations of the cuisine of Naples in all its seafoody glory.

I wanted it all. All the time I read the book I was FAMISHED for the flavors she so intensely evokes in her passages of passata and disfruitings of frutti di mare (seaborne creatures). Then to trudge upstairs to gob a blob of kosher "food"...well, it was its own special torture.

I think I might've withheld a fifth star simply out of enraged anguish....

Is this a read for everyone...well, honestly not. The narrative has no drive for the plot-driven reader. The story is richer with some background that many simply won't care to acquire. The narrator's food-driven hunger is not going to do good things to dieters' willpower. People experiencing sexual deprivation or skin-hunger are not going to feel soothed. I don't imagine the eww-ick homophobes will have too much to shudder over unless they're insanely sensitive to sensuality shared by others. Those sorts aren't likely to be reading my stuff, fortunately.

So I'll clutch my fifth star to my deprived-of-cuisine chest but urge most of y'all to get the beautiful, poetic, seamless translation of a vibrant, intense woman's coming alive for your pre-Thanksgiving (US) or pre-Yule pleasure.

The feast before the feast, let's call it.