No word, just books

Hi Word Suitcase readers,

I haven't had as much childcare as usual for the past couple of weeks, and life has been extra busy, so I'm skipping the word for this time. The good news is there are 5 Sundays in June, so I'll have words to tell you about on the 15th and the 29th.

Since it's the first day of Pride month, I did want to tell you about some delightfully queer small-r romance:

In the Roses of Pieria (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary, fantasy) by Anna Burke. This one’s for the classics majors. What if you were a suffering adjunct professor and then you got hired by a mysterious benefactor to translate and digitize her private collection of artifacts from the city-state you study? And you got to live in a cute cottage and get a real salary and grow closer with the beautiful, prim ice queen who manages the estate? And there was a trove of ancient correspondence that seemed to reveal a secret, epic lesbian love story? I gotta be real, I too would vehemently ignore all the warning signs. This is pleasingly tense and twisty and sexy, and I love how sci-fi the take on vampires was. Small press published, library ebook.

Priest-Queen (bi m/bi m/? f, all cis, fantasy) by Juniper Butterworth. This is just so wonderful—it’s got yearning, it’s got intrigue, it’s got the best talking horse and cows you’ve ever seen—and if you like T. Kingfisher, you will like Juniper Butterworth. Elsyn, a priest of the bovine Two-Bodied God, has unexpectedly become queen after the death of the evil fae who stole her changeling sister’s place, and she can’t trust anyone in her court. A delegation from the goblin kingdom is there to help her keep the peace, and she agrees to marry one of them—an extremely charming one named Kandar, and I always love a character who falls in love and into bed at the drop of a hat—if he can bring back her long-lost childhood friend Ben, a task she believes is impossible. But Kandar not only finds Ben, he also falls in love along the way. Then they have to persuade Elsyn to trust them after her long isolation, and it’s very satisfying when they finally do. Indie published, purchased from Amazon in a previous year, but since I am trying to get away from that, I will mention that you can buy it from the author’s store—or, of course, request it from a library.

In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy, a young adult fantasy novel with a trans girl protagonist. Lorel dreams of being a witch, but only women can be witches—so on the day the witches come to town, she disguises herself and switches places with her best friend who’s promised to them. Now she has to navigate learning magic, making friends, not getting outed, and saving the world from an evil magic blight. This feels like reading a Tamora Pierce novel, albeit with more body horror than I remember in Pierce’s books, and a very different view of monarchy. (There isn’t a lot of body horror in The Sapling Cage. It’s just that if you even hint that a bad thing might happen to an eyeball, you will find me cowering in a corner in the next room.) This was a great time. I bought it in print from The Feminist Press and passed it along to a trans teen in my life.

That's all for this time! I'll be back in your inbox with a word and more queer romances on June 15.