Queer families

Surrounded by Ghosts: October 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Spanish

El Celo by Sabina Urraca

The writing of this book is frenetic, visceral and full of detail that is sometimes luscious and other times absolutely disgusting. It took me a while to finish this book because its themes – societal misogyny, sexism, abuse. It follows a female character – ‘The Human’ – who finds a female dog in the streets of Madrid and becomes her owner almost against her will. Taking care of another creature becomes a mammoth task, but The Human, who can barely take of herself as it is, is willing. What she’s not prepared for is her dog in heat – which comes with its own set of complications and pressures for her to handle this wild side of her animal.

As the book advances – often mixing different timelines, The Human as a child growing up in Tenerife, and also as a young woman trying to make life work in Madrid – a few things are revealed. First, that The Human is addicted to anti-anxiety pills she takes to numb a traumatic experience. Her doctor recognises her as a someone who’s suffered from the abuse of an ex-partner so he sends her to group therapy where she meets other women that are nothing like her (they are much older, much younger, they come from complete different places and classes) but that can understand her experience of being hurt by someone they love. The Human bonds with one of the members of this group – Mecha (is interesting to see that other characters are given actual names) – who becomes a friend, a bad influence, and a saviour.

I really enjoyed this story and thought the writing (in Spanish) was really good. It was an uncomfortable, claustrophobic read – which makes sense, considering the narrator is constantly surrounded by many ghosts, the ghost of her grandmother, who she adored when she was a child, but who died of dementia, the ghost of her ex partner, still controlling and frightening her even though they are not together anymore, the ghost of a still birth in the family which was never discussed or acknowledged, the ghost of her grandfather, who dies during the book right after confessing an unsettling truth, the ghost of the career she’s left behind in marketing, the money and the stability, as she tries to become a writer and recover from trauma, the ghosts of all the abusive lovers of the women from her group therapy sessions… and so on.

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More queerness and manta rays: June 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Graphic Novels, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni

One of the things I enjoyed the most about this graphic novel is how it focused on queer characters in their thirties/forties. A lot of queer literature tends to have a focus on coming out stories, normally featuring younger characters – but I’m often eager to find more literature written about middle-aged queer people and old queer people too!

In this story, the four protagonists (Chris, Elise, Jo, and Alex) are struggling with many different things, from divorce to single parenting to dating in your thirties (when you may feel the extra pressure of having it all ‘figured out’) to looking for a job that feels meaningful and so on. One of the best moments in this story is when the characters decide to put all together a new club night for older queers (that they call ‘Grind’), so the club scene is not only dominated by the younger generation.

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Reading in transit: April 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Queer Literature, Spanish

Un Apartamento en Urano (An Apartment in Urano) by Paul B Preciado

Since last year, it seems that I’ve been on a self-imposed quest to read Preciado’s entire backlist, and what can I say? I’m loving the journey, and I can’t stop talking about how great he is as a writer and philosopher. This book is a special one, as it’s a collection of short articles that Preciado originally published in French in the newspaper Libération from 2013 to 2018. This is, coincidentally, the time when Preciado decided to transition and started using a male name and male pronouns, so many of these articles – which he refers to as ‘crónicas del cruce’ (‘chronics of a crossing’) – document it. But Preciado is not only experiencing a gender transition – as he writes, he goes through an important romantic break-up, he travels from France to Spain to Greece and many other countries in between. He reflects deeply on the idea of belonging to a place (and a gender).

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Provocateurs, agitators and change-makers: March 2025 Reading Long

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Overwork by Brigid Schulte

I found this book in the ‘highlights’ section of my local library, and it came at the right time. Since suffering from academic burnout (and depression and anxiety) during my PhD (while having six other part-time jobs to make a living, because my studentships weren’t really enough), I became interested in work and all the social and legal implications around it. I consider myself an artist first (a writer, primarily). Still, I’ve also had a series of jobs to make a living because the money I make from my writing is pitiful and doesn’t even remotely get close to minimum wage. I know this is the case for many of my writer friends (actually, all of them). I’m pretty fine with it. I mean, I know writing as a profession is extremely devalued, and I’d like to fight to change things in that regard. But I also enjoy having other occupations – I’m a social creature by nature and an extrovert. When I was working in retail, for example, I really thrived by serving other people and aiming to make their days better through our short interactions. It not only made me feel useful, but it also made me feel closer to my community. (For context, I worked as a bookseller for a few years.) Now, I despise some jobs I’ve done (ahem, marketing is pretty up on the list, it was too soul crushing) and loved others (being an academic, teaching and researching Creative Writing). But the constant of my job life has been marked by overwork, uncertainty, precariousness, and generally feeling dehumanised by the businesses I have been part of as an employee. Sometimes I’ve wondered if that’s my fault (am I too sensitive, like my grandmother used to say? Am I just weak? Am I just too much of an idealist?) But also, slowly but surely, I come to realise that a lot of systems we are part of are not designed to make us feel cherished, or to make us feel like our development matters or that we are important. On the contrary, we are treated as liabilities, as highly disposable parts.

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Futures, the spirit world and bodies: February 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

Any Human Power by Manda Scott

This is, probably, one of the books I enjoyed the most this year because I keep thinking about it even months after finishing it. This is a thrutopia, that is, it imagines ways in which we could navigate an uncertain future (considering how things are going right now in 2025, I think we all know what an ‘uncertain future’ feels like).

The start of the book is interesting: we get introduced to Lan, an old woman on her deathbed. Lan is a queer scientist and an English shaman (in that she uses dreams to travel to the ). As she says goodbye to her family, she promises her grandson that she’ll take care of him.

We move forward, and Lan is the Otherworld, enjoying her existence there but somehow unable to cross to the land of the dead as the promise she made to her grandson is somehow keeping her in a sort of limbo (which seems a chill place where she can enjoy wild nature and even the company of a mysterious dog, but still, she’s on her own). Suddenly, she gets pulled back into the world of the living (as a ghost) because her grandson, now a young man, is asking for her help. And from then on, Lan will need to do everything in her power (as a ghost, so she can’t even communicate with the living unless she uses the dreamworld) to save her family, who is about to undergo a perilous time.

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Queer medieval utopias, polyamory and complicated adulthoods: December 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

The Con Artists by Luke Healy

I loved How to Survive in the North and Americana by the same author. I found this one in the library and immediately picked it up. This is an interesting story in that it’s framed in such a way that you are never sure if it’s autobiographical (like Americana) or a complete work of fiction (like How to Survive in the North).

This is the story of Frank and Giorgio, two gay men living in London. Their friendship goes way back: they grew up in Ireland and their families know each other. But as adults, they’ve also grown apart and even though they live in the same city, they rarely see each other. Frank is far too busy, focusing on his goal of becoming a reputable comedian and struggling with an anxiety disorder. However, when Giorgio gets hit by a bus and ends up hospitalised, it’s Frank he callsin the first instance. Horrified seeing Giorgio doesn’t have anyone else (and that he refuses to tell his family what happened not to worry them) Frank agrees to move in temporarily with his friend as he recovers from his wounds and needs a bit of help to get around the house.

As soon as they start living together, Frank starts noticing a few strange things. Giorgio is unemployed and living on benefits, yet there are a few luxurious items lying around the house. On top of everything, Giorgio spends his day buying extremely expensive designer products online, such as bags and clothing. Where is all that money coming from?

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Seahorses, aliens and willows: September 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Horror, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

The Hollow Places by T Kingfisher

This is the third book I read by T Kingfisher and it’s possibly the one that I’ve found the spookiest. By now I know Kingfisher is an author I enjoy – I’ve literally devoured all her books. What I love the most is her fast-paced writing style and her characters.

In this story, we follow Kara, a thirty-something-year-old recently divorced who goes back to live with her uncle Earl in North Carolina. Now, Uncle Earl has quite a special job. He’s the owner and curator of a very particular museum: Natural Wonders, Curiosity and Taxidermy. You can imagine the deal: all sorts of quirky stuffed animals (including a Fiji siren) and strange artefacts. Kara, however, is anything but spooked. In fact, she has very good memories of growing up around the museum, so when her uncle offers her a job there helping him out she immediately accepts.

Things are going normal until one day, when she’s taking care of the museum while his uncle is in the hospital healingfrom back surgery, she discovers a strange hole in the wall. At the beginning she tries to patch it up but ends up realising that the hole is actually quite large – she gets inside (of course!) and discovers that she’s actually in a tunnel in a completely different dimension. That’s how she ends up accessing another world. Now, this new space she discovers is one of my favourite parts of the book. A strange alien, empty land filled only with water and willows.

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Thrutopias: May 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

None of the Above by Travis Alabanza

This year I’m doing a lot of reading around gender (starting with books I really liked, such as A Real Piece of Work by Erin Riley and Disphoria Mundi by Paul B. Preciado). I was very excited to find this book at the university library because it is written by a non-binary author, which is a perspective I haven’t encountered all that often.

This was an entertaining book I read very quickly, each chapter centring on a specific theme around Alabanza’s experience of transness, queerness and being non-binary. It was thought-provoking – for example, their experience of being harassed in the street because of the way they look was painfully shocking. It made me think of the many ways appearances are policed, specifically when it comes to how appearances fail to fit the idea of ‘womanness’ ingrained in our society. For example, Alabanza’s anguish of showing themselves as someone who is femme but also has hair in their legs or even facial hair reminded me of a similar anguish I feel as someone who is femme and has hair in all these places but is not supposed to show it when being out in public.

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