NO NAMES, a #PrideMonth debut novel from a poet via Minneapolis's estimable Coffee House Press

NO NAMES
GREG HEWETT
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by the iconic punk scene of the late '70s, No Names blurs the lines of affection and sexuality in a haunting tale of desire, hope, and loss.

Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from.

Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection.

As their stories collide, mistakes breed consequences that echo through the decades like the furious reverberations of a power chord.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Two-thirds of an excellent novel...after the twist, it's not excellent anymore. It's good, and as a contrast to almost two hundred pages of really outstanding build-up, I felt really let down by the ending. It was a messy trailing-off of several conversations, between characters and us, as well as each other. Multiple PoV novels are always...baggy...but this one's excitement and intensity came from the sense I had in the first part of the book that each person was picking up the thread of a narrative, was the response part in a call-and-response composition.

Much of that energy came from the way the voices wove around each other as they spoke of the times and events that the narrator before had no way of knowing. By the two-thirds mark, they were not telling the same story. They were following their own strands into a future not shared; it's like life, you meet, connect, intertwine for a time, then the time is over. The problem I had with that in this context is that it takes me from one kind of book...close harmony call-and-response...into another, the oratorio going chapter-and-verse through the wind-up of the stories I'd previously experienced directly.

What started as a five-star read ended at three and three-quarters because the narrative drive leaked right out, becoming severe with Mike's relating with the reader how Isaac fits in with the story. I began to nit-pick characters' word choices, their manner of addressing the facts they presented. That is never a good sign. I was disinvesting before the book ended.

But my goddesses, that first bit! A true joy of reading time spent well, and in the presence of a talented voice in storytelling. So not-quite four stars to celebrate the first novel of a writer whose next novel I want to read as soon as he writes it.

BELLIES, Author Nicola Dinan's Polari-Prize winning first novel

BELLIES
NICOLA DINAN
Hanover Square Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

WINNER of the 2024 Polari First Book Prize

The Publisher Says: I wore a dress on the night I first met Ming.

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom’s awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming’s orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he’s already mapped out their future together. But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.

From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face tectonic shifts in their relationship and friend circle in the wake of Ming’s transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises—some personal, some professional, some life-altering—Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential question: Is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?

Buoyed by a voice as tender, effervescent and wryly funny as the cast of characters it centers, Bellies is an unforgettable story of youth, intimacy, hunger and heartbreak, at once boldly original yet fiercely familiar, which unabashedly holds a mirror up to our most vulnerable selves and desires.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The depth of my youthful ignorance was forcefully recalled to me as I read this novel. I knew a transfem lady in my youth. I was utterly rejecting and actively unpleasant to her, a thing that recalling in my elderqueer years I view with horror at my cruelty.

If she is still alive (not a given for QUILTBAG people my age), I hope it is a life accompanied by a circle of people knowing her, giving her the fullest experience of being loved, accepted, and celebrated for being herself. It shames me what I thought, felt, and—mortifyingly—said to her when she came out to me. Living well is the best revenge. I hope she has had her revenge on me in spades these past five decades. My own trans family and friends have reason to thank her for bringing my unreasoning prejudice to the forefront to be confronted.

I came to this story, then, predisposed to find in it a measure of redemption. Not mine, but Ming's as she comes to realize transitioning is her only path forward to a fulfilling life..."I feel like I’ve been drawing an outline of myself using negative space"...while knowing it means literally never going back to her birth family; and Tom's, as he comes into contact with an entirely new spectrum of identities just as being gay is really settling in as his honest identity. His gayness, kindness (edging into codependence), and almost desperate desire to help are deeply familiar to me. "I have a bad habit of going along with things that aren't right for me, and I'm just trying to do the things a person would do if they loved themselves as much as they loved other people." So relatable!

Much as in Disappoint Me (q.v.), the heaviest desriptive lifting is being done in service of food. Like that book, it's always true that food descriptions are in a heightened register. Do not read this book while hungry. If you're wise, only do so after your favorite stick-to-your-ribs meal is on board and you have something dessertable on hand.

Like any story about being a young adult, still less one who is transitioning and one who is in love with someone making the transition, there are a lot of operatically heightened emotions flowing around. The friend group Ming and Tom create all have drama, upsets, ideas and opinions of Ming of Tom of Life...you remember. It's a messy, intense time. It's the meatiest chunk of a life well-lived, and these young folk are living it! I confess to feeling worn out by the intensity of it: "I'd spent years feeling happy to be nourished by Ming's light, so much so that I'd never asked what I could be for myself, only what I could be for her. I'd long suspected that Ming shone brighter than me, the same way I'd suspected Sarah {the girl he left for Ming} did, too". I suspect I supplied the intensity as Author Dinan reserves her descriptive riches more for food.

A beautiful, passionate evocation of one's early adulthood, replete with relatable drama, unimaginably brave and accepting people bound tighter than they ever will be again, and the most wonderful thing of all: Discovering Love.

A MURDER IN ZION: A National Park Mystery, one of mystery-publishing monadnock Oceanview's better discoveries

A MURDER IN ZION: A National Park Mystery #1
NICOLE MAGGI
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Beautiful views, deadly encounters

Grief-stricken over her mother's death and bruised by her failure on her most recent case, Special Agent Emmeline Helliwell with the National Park Service returns to her Utah hometown to heal and regroup. She's determined to turn in her badge and take over her mother's bakery for a much quieter life . . . until the body of a childhood friend turns up in The Narrows of Zion National Park.

The case is too personal for Emme to turn down, but the seemingly simple investigation turns treacherous as clues that connect to her previous case grow too glaring to ignore. When bodies start to pile up, Emme must track down the killer before they take more lives, venturing deep into Zion National Park to uncover the sordid secrets hiding beneath its stunning beauty.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you've ever been to Zion National Park, this story will transport you there. Evoking its austere beauty in the kind of prose that feels the way the air of the park feels...clean, spare, slightly sage-scented...it will seep through your defenses to bring you right back: "The hard-packed rust-colored dirt crunched a bit beneath their feet, tall scrub brush and ponderosa pines reaching up toward the blue sky on either side of the trail. The red-rock cliffs rose alongside them, towering over the land below like a queen on a throne high above her subjects."

Now we move to the mystery bit: There's a lot of dark goins-on in Zion and environs featuring "...the Warriors for Armageddon, religious fanatics with multiple wives and too many guns," and if you're not now all set to dive in, I dunno what else to tell ya.

How about journalist Finn, working with FBI agent Claire to get the goods on the Armageddon cult looneys who everyone thinks murdered Emme's buddy Max? How about the archaeologist sister working in Tasmania, whose physical presence is required to settle their late mother's estate? Is Emme going to get to retire from being a Park Service cop and become a baker like her late mom? I haven't read her other series, "Twin Willows," but if she's on form there like she is here, I'll go get all the Nicole Maggi I can find.

The wonderful quality of a mystery series is its ability to help you feel Ma'at is restored, the guilty will answer for their crimes, and there's a community built around the crime-solver(s). I am glad to say this read did not drop even one of these balls in its execution.

I would offer more stars were it not for a somewhat thin veneer of villainy over the looney cultists...their looniness is their sole affect. I was also surprised that Emme was so unpleasant to her younger sister. It felt jarring for a woman who delayed/rescinded her law-enforcement retirement to solve her high-school friend's murder to be so angry...though doodness knows families breed anger at the best of times. It was not, clearly, a deal-breaker! I recommend the read.

THE GARGOYLES OF NOTRE DAME, the French Revolution...with sentient gargoyles!

THE GARGOYLES OF NOTRE DAME
GREG WALTERS (tr. Justin Beckham)
Free on Kindle Unlimited! (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 to purchase, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: History meets Fantasy in Revolutionary France!

Paris, 1789. The soaring spires of Notre Dame conceal more than prayer and piety. Within the cathedral lies the secret of the gargoyles, mystical creatures bound by ancient magic to the aristocracy. For centuries, these stone sentinels have ensured the power of the nobility and kept the oppressed powerless.

When Henri, a 22-year-old stonemason apprentice, accidentally forges a sacred bond with one of these creatures, he shatters a tradition meant to protect only the upper class. Betrayed by the gargoyles and hunted as a traitor, Henri flees into a city teetering on the edge of revolution.

As word of his forbidden connection spreads, hope ignites among the oppressed. To the people, Henri becomes more than a fugitive. He is a symbol, proof that the chains of oppression can be broken. With cries of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” rising in the streets, Henri faces an impossible choice.

Will he hide from the chaos or risk everything to lead a rebellion that could reshape France forever?

Perfect for fans of The Gilded Wolves and The Night Circus, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame is an exhilarating tale of magic, rebellion, and the courage to defy destiny.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The French Revolution plus sentient gargoyles. Sign me up.

Now, don't go gettin' all logical; this is a fantasy. It assumes that, for some reason never even lightly touched on, the French Revolution takes place as it did in our time despite aristos and royalty all having actual, sentient gargoyles in their service (Louis XVI has six of 'em!). Not as some odd innovation; not as a revolution in itself; but as an established way of marking them out as having rank.

Nothing about this makes one whit of sense, but it's cool, so run with it. Be prepared to stop, though, after a gangbusters start we begin to meander a bit. The "romance" between an adult man and a teenaged girl is squicky. Yes, that's my twenty-first century acculturation speaking. I live now, so I use now's ideas to judge things made now, and you may be sure that very much shows in the character voices. If this was a survivor of 1825 or even 1925, written about their past, that somehow reached me for the first time now, I'd be of a different opinion. It is not that. I'm squicked.

I found the gargoyles speaking in poetry a whole lot less irritating than I expected to. I screamed with rage only once! Who knows, maybe I'm finally old enough to "get" poetry. (I'm not.)

The entire exercise is, I believe, meant to be New Adult reading. I think the pacing is off for that reading segment; starting with action at full speed leads to an expectation of it staying there in less-experienced readers. It's too bad; this could easily be a good series if some detail tweaks were done.

Me, I'll stop at one. Not a bad one, so why risk leaving with a poorer opinion than my present overall positive one?

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature offers a bracing dose of Reality to "gender essentialists"

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
PATRICIA ONONIWU KAISHIAN
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending October 20, 2026

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.

Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Honestly, our very much elder siblings the fungi, part of a family we do not share but the most distant connection with, have more to teach us about Life than I expected. Author Kaishian is a very well qualified guide into their world, having several degrees in mycological subjects and being the New York State museum's curator of mycology. An unimpeachable fount of expert knowledge, then.

I've never really thought about the gender realities of fungi before now. I knew they were ubiquitous...the wood-wide web...and enormous (that several-square-mile honey fungus in Oregon), for two memorable examples...but how they got it on was hazy, limited to fruiting bodies producing spores in my infobase. I am of greatly expanded consciousness now.

Fungus is just the beginning of queerness, of "gender non-conformity" that culture-specific ungeneralizable concept, in Nature. The examples are weird...eels? what the hell my dudes?...slugs *shudder* doing unspeakable things to each other after sex...and the list isn't even fairly begun. Vertebrates, our fellow spine-havers, get themselves up to some wild shenanigans, like the fish harems where the physically largest female becomes male when the old one dies. How do they know? Who thought this was a good idea?

But, overall, the thing I loved about this read was not the fount of factfulness but the fountain of meditative, calm reflection that Author Patty (she refers to herself as such on her website so I'm presuming to do so too) uses to soothe away the hurts being queer in a hostile world has wrought. Her Irish-Armenian heritages, her neurodivergent presentation of self, her life experiences, all give her the invaluable, painful gift of Otherhood. It is a thing I've been grateful for in my older years of life. It takes Otherhood to see the absurdity of the prejudices most people use in place of learning, thinking, meditating. Author Patty gets this on such a core level that as she lets us in on her uncoverings it feels organic (!) instead of calculated as is so often the case. Even her coinage of "eco-spirituality" to describe this manner of being in the world feels uncondescending. It could easily have read brummagem and insulting. Instead it's all of a piece with her shared factual information as viewed through her lens of personal reflection. Like this:

I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation. And it’s because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity. The species that have brought me the most companionship, assurance, and inspiration are those furthest banished from human society, those least associated with the “desirable” traits of being human—upright and logical, two-legged and binary-sexed. My personal connections to these organisms have brought me a sense of queer belonging and comfort in the heaviest of times. In exchange, I hope to do my small part by sharing their stories. And I hope that in sharing these stories, you too will feel the closeness of the earth, the lack of space between our cells, and the memory of each other.

I think the last word has been had. I'm just that hair away from five stars because I still find slugs utterly repugnant and with a gardener's eye of loathing.

QUEER (IN)JUSTICE, dated, but very very trenchant examination of queer social inequality

QUEER (IN)JUSTICE
JOEY MOGUL·ANDREA RITCHIE·KAY WHITLOCK
Beacon Press
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.

Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease spreaders” and “deceptive gender benders”—to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities.

An eye-opening study of LGBTQ rights and equality, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: Back in the innocent days of 2020, when I received it, this was a mind-blowing read. In 2025, a mere five years later, its infelicities are brought into sharp relief by the spotlight the current US regime is shining on issues of social justice by trampling on, trying to bury, and (where possible) expunge progress made.

I have trans friends and family members. I'm guessing that was either not the case for the authors, or they simply did not delve deeply into those folks' experience. Importantly, though it might seem trivial to some, referring to trans women as "trans" and cisgender women as "women" just perpetuates their othering. The terms "gender non-conforming" and "genderqueer" are not synonyms for "transgender." "Genderqueer" is a different thing, its own category of queerness. I grant you that, when I first saw it codified in the 1990s, it did not have the sense of meaning it does now. "Gender non-conforming" includes anyone, cisgender or even heterosexual, whose manner of self-presentation falls on the edges or outside of a specific culture'e gender norms.

It is a case of the times being unkind to a solidly researched and competently argued (and footnoted!) work of scholarship.

That lacuna, addressable if Beacon Press brings out a second edition of this thirteen-year-old work, aside, I have the greatest respect for this genuinely informative scholarly examination of why decriminalization of same-sex sexual acts is only one small step for humankind. It is a project worth examining in the current horrifying recrudescence of the intolerant ignorance of our never-distant past. When frightened by change, humans routinely find scapegoats and the cynical, power-hungry would-be tyrants feed that base, appallingly cruel need in our ape-brained characters.

An admirable facet of this treatment of the legal system's weaponization of power is that it never isolates the causes of victimization. Race, biological sex however expressed, and socioeconomic class are all very explicitly brought into the conversation. The extent of violence against transfem and gender non-conforming queer men around the world...I'm specifically thinking of the violence committed on the US-Mexico border, though it is by no means the only place this occurs...is often exacerbated by socioeconomic pressures leading these vulnerable people into prostitution. No such threats of violence appertain to their clients. Why would that be, if it is the act of having sex with another man that is being scapegoated here?

I'll leave that thought to marinate with y'all.

In many ways it is the abolitionist movement's intersection with queer-rights groups that powerfully reinforce each other's main thrust: Reform. The system is, as the looneys on the political right constantly complain, rigged. They do not see that it's been rigged for a purpose, and that purpose is also served by impoverishing and immiserating them. Reform for selectively applied to benefit some and exclude others is the antithesis of fairness, justice, equitable distribution...all those things everyone likes until the language they're couched in gets politicized.

DISAPPOINT ME, easily the title most easily misunderstood for #PrideMonth

DISAPPOINT ME
NICOLA DINAN
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is it possible to love someone after you know their worst moments? Is it possible to love someone when you don't know their worst moments?

That's an existential question, applying to each and all of us. It's one to ask yourself when thinking about any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Max is doing a lot of thinking about relationships to self, and to Truth, and to facts...and Vincent. She's been blindsided in her complex developing relationship to him. Add to this a quite conservative Chinese family (pretty much a trope heading into stereotype-dom at this point) that's honestly struggling (I mean struggling, and being honest about it) with her transfem identity, and to the past actions Vincent undertook that form a separate narrative strand.

When Max decides she is going to pursue a heteronormative identity, it came after a crisis in her life. This makes it feel a bit forced. If this had been something Max was mulling over, I'd've found its narrative suddenness a bit less jarring. That said, I'm actually kind of relieved not to have the narrative focus on Max's transition...it's happened, it's done, what's next? Vincent being okay with her transness was, dare I say it, a bit less startling than I was perhaps expected to find it. Until, that is, we move into a timeline of Vincent's past and discover what Max now learns; this event is going to change everything in the present as it did in the past.

What matters in all these deftly plucked strands of Author Dinan's story-web is the essential unknowability of one's emotional life once given into the hands of another. What we feel for the other, what is felt by the other, how all that will intertwine to make the web that couplehood sticks us to, what new information—truth, fact, realty—means in that web is where we're meant to focus. At times the quotidian world intrudes and distracts, or is allowed to intrude and distract. The attentive reader will notice register shifts in Author Dinan's prose from pleasantly descriptive to nearly florid at those moments. I'm assuming food is a comfort drug to Max and her found family....

Where do we end up in this web? In it. I read the book assuming I'd reach a conclusion to some of those issues raised above. I do not think quite a few people will find the openness of the ending, the real lack of closure for Max and, to a lesser degree of investment, Vincent, to be satisfying. I took a star off because I was not given a sense that, by the end, Max had any kind or sort of response, still less plan, to all she's learned. We simply...leave the story, trailing web-strands of it behind us.


Not a perfect read, then, but one I very much enjoyed. More from you soon, please, Author Dinan!