Books like Crush

Lawlor’s novel gave me the best gift a book can offer: it changed my mind halfway through.

I had been so intrigued by the premise of a shapeshifting character who can change their gender at will, that I forced myself to read on even though I wasn’t enjoying the emphasis on sex, especially as conquest, and I was sorely disappointed the story didn’t seem to go deeper.

But as I continued, I was happy to be proven wrong. By the end of the novel, I was checking my own biases and prejudices and empathizing deeply with Paul and his/her/their struggles. Reading this novel was an emotional experience unlike any I’ve had with a book.

This is a book about many things—guilt, artmaking, and love among them—but when I think of it, I think of a novel that depicts the complexities of making and sustaining a life more deftly than anything else I’ve read. How things like cruelty and beauty, innocence and evil, truth and lies all coexist. How we move forward despite this uneasy balance.

The novel follows Fee, a boy who grows up in Maine and sings in an all-boys choir. The choir director turns out to be an abuser, and his actions haunt Fee and the other boys in the choir into adulthood.

On a prose level alone, Chee’s writing is unparalleled, his sentences sharp enough to cut glass. I don’t see how anyone could read this book and come away unchanged. 

This story of individuation shines as a beacon. The juxtaposition of identity, ancestral stories, and creativity told distinctly in an artist’s voice cracked open for me a world that is at once relatable and completely, necessarily idiosyncratic.

I felt the world of the book color my everyday experiences as this story weaves together life and art, as well as extends the honest relationship an artist must have with the material world into the most intimate of material relationships: the one we have with our own body. These most mundane relationships are shown as inseparable from our humanity as creative beings. This book inspired me to look at my relationships as a mirror for self-discovery. 

Art Is Everything is a book about obsession, about love, about artistry, about the limits of aesthetics within an industry in which the marketplace is an unspoken but all-powerful factor. When I began reading it, I was amazed and exhilarated by how clearly it is in conversation with the preoccupations of my own novel, although from a different standpoint. Also: this book is hilarious. The humor is sharp, wry, sometimes skewering, but never inhumane. I laughed so hard reading it – and this was in 2020, so I wasn’t doing much laughing otherwise. I would walk up and down the floors of my apartment and read entire sections out loud to my partner. I do believe in the bold declaration of its title, and by the time I finished reading, I felt sure the author did too. 

What’s distinctive about this gorgeous poetry anthology is not only that each poem has a specific tree or flower as its subject but that they are grouped according to plant family.

The editor Sarah Maguire was a gardener as well as a poet and translator. In what was clearly a labour of love she brought together poems from all over the world, spanning eight centuries of writing. Her fascinating introduction considers many aspects of nature poetry, including gender and colonialism.

As a gardener and poet I have loved finding poems by Medbh McGuckian, Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence grouped together in the Gentian family or poems by Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Robert Herrick, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur thriving next to each other in the Mint family. 

I’ve never been one to read a writer because of their accomplishments. But there are confessional voices (with stellar accolades), I can’t avoid. Louise Glück’s poetic voice evaluates experiences in ways that remind me that we’re all a bit messed up, but beauty sometimes lingers under rocks if you’re willing to dig. And dig I must to improve my work.

My poetry sometimes hides behind soft language, while my word-wolf remains hidden. Poems like Ms. Glück’s “Purple Bathing Suit” force me to evaluate if I’m artfully deceiving or striving to rise to her level of genuine gut-wrenching prose.

“I like watching you garden / with your back to me in your purple bathing suit: your back is my favorite part of you, the part furthest away from your mouth”

The Witch’s Daughter is the third book in the Amendyr quartet, but can be read on its own. It’s a sapphic fantasy romance told from the point of view of Mother Gothel’s witchy daughter, Ailynn, who falls in love with Rapunzel.

It’s my favorite book of the quartet, possibly because Ailynn has a somewhat complicated relationship with Rapunzel, further harmed by an instance of betrayal (content warnings apply, although they’re also spoilers—seek them out before reading if it concerns you). The Witch’s Daughter is a tale of two damaged girls trying to grow beyond their trauma bond, with found family and major parental issues.

If ever there was a book that felt like it had been written just for me, this is it. Set in a fictional European country in the early nineteenth century, it has swashbuckling, nights at the opera, complicated family history, politics, magic, and lesbians. The way that Christianity is integrated into the fantastic element won’t be for everybody, but I was won over by Margerit’s earnest insistence on claiming her identity as a queer woman of faith and power. I’d wholeheartedly recommend the rest of the series, too.

I’m a huge fan of queer re-tellings (as you can probably sense from this list) as well as lush, detailed historical fiction, and C.B. Lee delivers both in this vivid, adrenaline-spiking adventure. My favorite thing about this story is how Lee takes the bones of Treasure Island and reanimates them, bringing a new perspective to a classic by shifting the focus from traditional Western pirate narratives. Riding the waves with Xiang as she discovers her own identity and family history is an absolute delight, and seeing her relationship with Anh grow is a beautiful thrill. 

Ezra was just such a sweet, introverted grump (and those are my weaknesses). I adored this book so much! The magic of this world snuck up on me when I started it.

Everything is very grounded in the real world, with Ezra struggling to get by until suddenly, we’re tossed into the deep end of vampires, werewolves, witches (sort of?), and other demonic elements. I really liked how this one seemed sort of rambly with the fantasy building until it all tied together in this creepy, intricate web.