Leave this world behind: Three queer sci-fi novels available in our library

Graphic by Audrey Hanan ’28

BY QUILL NISHI-LEONARD ’27

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

It’s midterm season, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve been desperately searching for an escape from the tragicomedy that is my life on this campus. While I’ve yet to find a proper excuse to avoid studying for my impending exams — I’m personally still holding out hope for an intergalactic quest of some sort — I have found respite in queer science fiction. Some novels, like Ryka Aoki’s “Light from Uncommon Stars” have helped me remember what hope feels like. Others, like Rivers Solomon’s “An Unkindness of Ghosts” have helped me find catharsis. 

If you’re in the same situation as me, don’t worry, just start reading! These are three of my favorite novels, so you too can briefly forget about your unfortunate present circumstances. All of these are also available via Mount Holyoke College’s Williston Library, so you can enjoy some great queer sci-fi without breaking the bank.

“Gideon the Ninth” by Tamsyn Muir

For fans of mysteries, the necromantic arts, swordfighting, sarcasm and/or lesbianism, I recommend “Gideon the Ninth.” I’m honestly not quite sure how to describe “Gideon the Ninth,” but I think it’s the kind of book people either love or hate.

The novel is narrated by teenaged swordfighter Gideon Nav, who imbues the text with equal parts humor, heart and immaturity. Gideon is summoned, alongside her childhood nemesis Harrowhark Nonagesimus, to another planet, where they undergo a series of trials for the alleged betterment of their empire. 

Gideon and Harrowhark’s relationship was one of my favorite parts of the story. I genuinely enjoyed watching their relationship with one another unfold over the course of the novel, which is rare; I typically don’t care for romance. To me, “Gideon the Ninth” is just as much a love story as it is a sci-fi mystery.

I know some readers didn’t enjoy Gideon’s narration, but I personally found her wit to be endearing and enjoyable. Gideon might be the indentured swordswoman of the Ninth House, but she’s also 18 years old. Muir doesn’t shy away from this in the same way that other writers sometimes do. 

I’m currently a little over halfway through the sequel, “Harrow the Ninth,” and while there is a change in both the narrator and tone — spoiler: “Harrow” is narrated by Harrowhark — the plot, characterization, worldbuilding and prose are just as enthralling as they were in “Gideon.”

A physical copy of “Gideon the Ninth” can be borrowed from the Mount Holyoke College library. Mount Holyoke students who read “Gideon the Ninth” and find themselves enjoying it enough to want more are also in luck; it’s the first book of the “Locked Tomb” series, and the two subsequent books — “Harrow the Ninth” and “Nona the Ninth” — are also carried by the College’s library. 

“An Unkindness of Ghosts” by Rivers Solomon

“An Unkindness of Ghosts” by Rivers Solomon is one of my favorite books, full-stop. This standalone novel takes place on the HSS Matilda, a generation ship all of the characters were born and raised on. Nobody is quite sure how long they’ve collectively been on the Matilda, and nobody is quite sure when they’ll be able to disembark. Most expect to spend their entire lives on it, and for many it is a wretched, unjust place.

The Matilda’s name was chosen intentionally by Solomon to reflect the real-life Clotilda, which was the last-known ship to set sail from Africa to the United States with African captives, trafficking 110 enslaved people to the shores of America. 

The novel’s setting is heavily spatially stratified; the uppermost decks are primarily inhabited by a white, or white-passing, upper class, while the lowermost decks are populated by Black and dark-skinned people who often do the most strenuous and dangerous work in the worst conditions. The ghosts of slavery, racism, and just about every other system of oppression have survived on board the Matilda, but so too have the ghosts of the ancestors who resisted.

Aster is a healer, a gardener, a resident of the lower decks and the protagonist of the novel. When she and her sister, Giselle, discover the writings of their dead mother, they are driven to search for answers and a way to create a better life for those who live on the Matilda’s lower decks.

Solomon’s writing style is intricate, intense and heart-wrenching. It wasn’t something I was able to devour in just one sitting. The narrative is permeated by descriptions of violence that can make it difficult to digest at the best of times. But Solomon doesn’t let that violence characterize the novel, or the characters within it; hope, love and resistance are at the forefront of the narrative, more often than not. 

The connections the characters have and cultivate between one another, between the past and the present, and between parts of themselves push them forward and enable them to continue fighting against a system of oppression that is quite literally baked into the architecture of their home. Every member of the main cast is a survivor of violence in one way or another, but Solomon’s deliberate and mindful prose maintains their agency and dignity. The violence was incredibly — and I cannot stress this enough — graphic, but it never felt gratuitous to me. 

Solomon also isn’t afraid to play with gender, sex, and sexuality: the characters’ identities are all informed by — and sometimes in spite of — the futuristic and dystopian environment of the Matilda, where being gender-diverse is common on the lower decks and heavily stigmatized on the upper decks. When Aster says “I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body,” she’s connecting with another character, but it felt in that moment as if she had stepped outside of the book to address me as well. 

I have never felt more seen, nor more frightened, while reading a novel. I genuinely cannot recommend “An Unkindness of Ghosts” enough. 

While the College doesn’t have a physical copy of “An Unkindness of Ghosts” available, it does have it on offer as an e-book! Students can search up “An Unkindness of Ghosts” on the LITS website, similarly to how you would search for an academic article or journal, click “Mount Holyoke: Link to resource” and access the book from ProQuest Ebook Central. For those who would prefer a physical copy, Amherst College has one that Mount Holyoke students can place a request to borrow, also by searching for it on LITS’ website.

“Light from Uncommon Stars” by Ryka Aoki

I went into “Light from Uncommon Stars” not knowing the premise of the story, and it took me about 50 pages to start piecing together what the novel was actually about. Despite the somewhat confusing start, it only took me the first few chapters to fall in love with the novel. I won’t spoil the plot too much here — I think similarly to “Gideon the Ninth,” the less you know, the better — so I’ll keep this review restricted to just the basics.

“Light from Uncommon Stars” is told from the perspective of many different characters, all from vastly different backgrounds, identities and outlooks on life. Katrina Nguyen, a transgender girl, begins the story journeying to the San Gabriel Valley in search of a better life, away from her abusive biological family. She is a talented young violinist, and she quickly garners the attention of Shizuka Satomi, a famous violin teacher who many know as the “Queen of Hell.” A donut shop run by Lan Tran — refugee mother, certified badass and my favorite character — also comes into play. All of them are united by their relative alienness, and their search for friendship, love and acceptance.

For me, the novel felt like a love story to the greater Los Angeles area and the immigrant, queer and queer immigrant families who have made it their home. Growing up outside of Los Angeles, “Light” was an incredibly nostalgic read. Aoki understands the area and has managed to capture it in a way that very few authors are able to. Nothing has made me yearn to be back in California as much as this book has.

While the book does sometimes delve into darker and more uncomfortable subject matter, it is nowhere near as graphic as “An Unkindness of Ghosts,” and is overall a pretty light and fun read. Immersing myself in the simultaneously fantastical and mundane world of “Light” after class was calming and rejuvenating. This book is the equivalent of a kind hug and a reminder that life is worth living. If you’re looking for a warm respite from the current state of affairs, “Light” might be what you’re looking for.

“Light from Uncommon Stars,” like “Gideon the Ninth,” is available at Mount Holyoke College’s library as a physical book. 

Karishma Ramkarran ’27, Leah Dutcher ’28, and Whitney White ’28 contributed fact-checking.

Queer joy, rage and creativity: An evening with Gabby Rivera

Graphic by Isabelle Peterson ’28

BY ISABELLE PETERSON ’28

HUMAN RESOURCES COORDINATOR

On Oct. 1, Mount Holyoke’s office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion held its seventh annual “Honoring the Ancestor: Gloria Anzaldúa” lecture series. Named after the self-described “chicana tejana feminist-dyke-patlache poet, fiction writer, and cultural theorist” Gloria Anzaldúa, the event series celebrates the intersection of Latine Heritage Month and LGBTQ+ History Month by highlighting the work of contemporary Latine artists, poets and activist scholars whose work incorporates queer themes. 

This year, students and faculty members gathered in Gamble Auditorium to meet with Gabby Rivera, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican novelist, comics writer and host of the “Joy Uprising” podcast. Because Rivera’s work spans across so many different mediums, there are a few different ways that one may  have encountered her name before. 

You may have spotted her witty debut young adult novel “Juliet Takes a Breath” on the shelves of the Odyssey Bookshop, or in the LITS “Banned Books Week” display. If you discovered N.D. Stevenson’s graphic novel series “Lumberjanes” at a formative age — and have been following the indie publishing company BOOM! Studios ever since — you may already be familiar with “b.b. free,” Rivera’s post-climate-change graphic novel, gorgeously illustrated by Royal Dunlap. 

Or, maybe you’re something of a superhero aficionado, in which case you may recognize Rivera as the boundary-pushing writer behind Marvel’s 2017-2018 “America Chavez” series, which stars the eponymous “portal-punching queer Latina powerhouse” as she navigates “pesky” cults from outer space, the interdimensional college experience, and the unexpected reappearance of an old childhood crush.

It’s safe to say that, in the many different realms of creative writing that she can be found in, Rivera is a force to be reckoned with. However, her career as an author wasn’t something that Rivera necessarily planned upon. “Juliet Takes a Breath,” which Rivera describes in her 2018 Ted Talk as being gathered from the “soft threads” of the “wild rambunctious tales” that she would hear while sitting around her grandmother’s dining table, was originally typed up in her mom’s basement and self-published by a small, Bronx-based press. 

In “Juliet Takes a Breath,” as with all Rivera’s other works, queer joy, particularly queer Puerto Rican joy, exists as a deeply important element of the story. She defines joy as something that “has tragedy … has violence … has pain … [and] has suffering,”  and serves as a form of resistance for communities repeatedly told that they have no right to exist. But joy, for Rivera, isn’t the final piece of the puzzle – especially not now that a Trump 2.0 is looming large in a world where “we’re in a never-ending cycle of absolute rage-inducing, stroke-stoking, AI-backed corruption, like literally the worst game of Monopoly you’ve ever played and no matter what, robots kill us all at the end.”

As absolutely and utterly necessary as joy is in this sort of world, what about rage? How, Rivera wonders, can we learn to harness all the rage we feel, in ways that could potentially make the world a better, kinder, more joyful place?  There are many, many places that we can put our rage and our joy: writing is only one of them. Yet, this doesn’t make writing any less essential, as Rivera’s stated, it is important “to write and to be together and to read what others have written about their struggles and triumphs. How they have fought against dictators and fascism and their parents and churches and themselves to find their truths.” 

So, if you haven’t already, I hope this piece will inspire you to check out “Juliet Takes a Breath” or “This Bridge Called My Back,” the wonderful feminist anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa that started it all. Or, maybe you’ll write something, something that you’ve really been wanting to write for a while. Now, I don’t work for Horoscopes, and can’t claim to have any actual authority over the matter, but if you’re looking for a sign to start writing, well, here it is.

Leah Dutcher ’28 and Whitney White ’28 contributed fact-checking.

‘Weird girl lit’ is condescending and not nearly weird enough

Photo by Bei Jia Viggiano ’28

LITS has much “weird girl” literature to check out, as well as the lesser-known “normal girl” lit.

Sarah Berger ’27

Arts & Entertainment Editor 

The term “Weird Girl Lit” has had a recent rise in popularity, roughly coinciding with the rise of #BookTok on social media and increased reliance on virality-based marketing of books. Some of the most popular books classified as “weird girl” include “Bunny” by Mona Awad, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” by Otessa Moshfegh, and “Boy Parts” by Eliza Clark. Going a bit further back, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Jackson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are sometimes referred to as earlier iterations of the genre. 

So, what exactly is a “weird girl” book in 2026? It seems like it’s an exercise in apathy and poor writing. Trust me, I’d know. Unfortunately, I fall victim to every blurb that describes a book as “original,” “jaw-dropping,” “exhilarating,” or any other combination of glowing adjectives. If I see a book on r/Weirdgirllit, there’s a high chance that I’ll try and get my hands on it. 

Off the top of my head, I’ve read “Just Watch Me,” “Agnes Lives!,” “Open Wide,” “Fruit Fly,” “She’s a Lamb!,” “The Obsessed,” “A Real Animal,” “Offseason,” “The Vivisectors” “A Good Person,” “The Silent Period,” “Superfan,” “Lost Lambs,” and “Idlewild” in the past year. Last year, I read “Worry,” “Woo Woo,” “Blob,” “Beta Vulgaris,” and “Sky Daddy.” 

I didn’t dislike all of them, and I enjoyed parts of almost all of them. However, I found the majority of them to be incredibly uniform. While each novel offers slight deviations on the theme, overall they’re all focused on white women in their mid to late twenties who don’t like their lives. Generally, this makes sense: Their lives suck and they don’t really have any interest in making them better. 

Despite being classified in the story as “poor,” these women mostly have the money to do what they want, and they typically have parents or a boyfriend who will send them large sums of money if they ask. This is convenient because it means that they don’t have to work and can wallow in their sadness. Disaffection generally only makes for a good story when there’s something else going on, and there rarely is. Sure, some of these books feature beat-centric mysteries, humanized blobs, creeping fauna and women literally crawling inside other people. Unfortunately, these genuinely interesting ideas are almost always relegated to the background by the main character’s droll opinions.  

Additionally, a lot of these books are simply not very good. It’s hard to see how they’ve been published in the first place, besides thirsty publishing houses looking to capitalize on the popularity of BookTok. “Lost Lambs,” written by Madeline Cash, was a highly anticipated “weird girl” book, yet turned out to be a mishmash of made up words and Islamaphobia. “Decomposition Book” by Sara Van Os, though highly recommended by most reviewers, was incomprehensible. It contains thoughtful lines like, “Instead I stare at her like Donald Trump stared at that solar eclipse: I blink twice, dry heave, turn ninety degrees to the left, and absolutely haul ass out of there.” It’s not just that the humor isn’t to my taste, it’s that this is a legitimately bad sentence; the sort of which abounds in these books. 

And don’t even get me started on the endings. At the end of the vast majority of these books, the weird girl suffers. She dies, she is humiliated, she gives herself fully over to her “weirdness” and ruins her life; the weirdness isn’t usually something cool, like quitting her job to study a niche species of bug, it’s more like letting her obsessive and depressive tendencies isolate her. Even when the endings tell us that the character is happy or empowered, they never really show it. 

Usually, she leaves a lot of blood and tears in her wake, and the audience doesn’t get a good idea of what’s going to happen next. The books end on a descriptive line that points vaguely toward the future, something like “I put down the bloody knife and looked up at the sky.” Of course, it’s difficult to do an ending when the story never really got started in the first place, and oftentimes these endings seem like the author realized the book had to end and rapidly accelerated the “plot.” 

Sometimes, I’m left wondering how boring the people calling these books weird think that most people are. If it’s “weird” to hate your shitty job, your pointless life and your borderline abusive boyfriend, what do you think normal people are doing? Are they just meandering around, wallowing in their perfection, not working all that hard or thinking all that hard? 

It’s been largely deemed weird to care, weird to have a girlfriend — and I don’t mean a woman that you kiss disaffectedly when your boyfriend ignores you — weird to be interested in peripheral things, weird to pursue your interests. There are a lot of ways to be truly weird, and I don’t think that most of these books understand that. Writing only about “girls” suspended in their adolescent apathy and depression does little service to generations of successful, emotional, passionate, smart, weird women everywhere. 

McKenzie Phelan '28 contributed fact-checking.

Students Turn To Childhood Favorites To Find Comfort in 2020

Pictured above: the cookbooks of Chloe MC ‘24

By Cat Barbour ’24
Staff Writer

Rereading a childhood favorite or otherwise beloved book creates a sense of comfort and enjoyment that only nostalgia can provide. Friends and familiar places wait within the pages, along with the memories of your life when you first read each page. As Cornelia Funke’s “Inkheart,” a young adult fantasy novel, puts it, “If you take a book with you on a journey, … an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories … Yes, books are like flypaper — memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.” 

With the arrival of the holiday season during a global pandemic, a tense political climate and finals around the corner, it’s no surprise students are reaching for their comfort books. The Mount Holyoke News spoke with current students to see which books they revisit during tough times

Overwhelmingly, students mentioned the “Harry Potter” series by J. K. Rowling, which chronicles boy wizard Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Darcy Coleman ’24 read the series in elementary and middle school. 

“I was obsessed with ‘Harry Potter,’” Coleman said. “[The books] help bring me back to happy times during my childhood. I struggle a lot with anxiety and books give me an escape, as well as a way for me to relate to the characters and feel motivated and hopeful about my own challenges.”

While Coleman reaches for “Harry Potter” for general comfort, Grace Lara ’24 seeks out “Fangirl” by Rainbow Rowell for a “reliable sick day read.” “Fangirl” follows the story of Cath, who, in a meta twist, is a huge fan of Rowell’s own “Simon Snow” series. Cath and her twin bonded over “Simon Snow,” but upon entering college, the books became more symbolic of their separation than their closeness. Now, out of her comfort zone and without her sister, Cath must navigate school by herself. 

This past spring, Phoebe Murtagh ’21 sought out a book to help deal with her sadness following the closing of Mount Holyoke’s campus, finding solace in “Tell the Wolves I’m Home” by Carol Rifka Brunt. The story follows June as she comes to terms with the death of her uncle, the only person who understood her and makes an unexpected new acquaintance at the funeral who might just be everything she needs to heal. Murtagh calls the book “well written and rich, centered around love and grief and heartbreak and life.”

When Chloe MC ’24 wants the satisfaction of finishing a novel in one sitting, she returns to Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The book tells the story of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect after Ford saves Arthur from being destroyed along with the Earth. The pair proceed to hitchhike the galaxy together, which happens to be Ford’s area of expertise. It is the first novel in the series. MC enjoys the “goofy little sci-fi series,” explaining, “The humor is what draws me in. [The characters] make everything [that sounds] so absurd [sound] perfectly normal.” 

MC also shared the story of her family’s cookbook. “Food is very important; basically every event or holiday is centered around food and the kitchen,” MC explained. “For my parents’ first Christmas [as a married couple], my grandma on my dad’s side typed up and photocopied a cookbook’s worth of recipes and put them in a binder. Most of them belonged to my great-grandmother Kitty Cat.” 

“We treat it as the holy grail,” she continued. “It’s where we go to first if we want a recipe for something. … It’s been around longer than I have. It’s comforting because it’s the go-to comfort food book. Some of the recipes are clearly dated (like soda salad) but some of it is gold.” 

While not everyone has access to something from their family’s history to find comfort in, bakers may have a part of MC’s family cookbook hiding in their kitchen. “Fun fact,” MC said, “it’s my great grandma’s recipe for pound cake on the back of the Swan’s Down flour box, the whipping cream pound cake.”

There’s a reason that many books bring nostalgia and contentment to those who read them. Research by a professor at the University of California found that people enjoy stories more when they know the ending. An example provided in the study reads, “If you’re driving up Highway 1 through Big Sur, and you know the road really well, you can now peek around and admire the view.” Rereading leads to a greater appreciation of the writing and gives readers a sense of comfort because they already know the plot. 

“The Secret History” makes strides in budding dark academia genre

BY BEATA GARRETT ’20

When the public discovered that Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” was greenlit for a film adaptation, critics were skeptical whether her book could transfer to the screen. The Guardian called the Pulitzerwinning novel her “most divisive book” and noted that Warner Brothers sought the rights to her debut novel, “The Secret History,” before gaining rights to “The Goldfinch.”

“The Secret History” received praise when released and remains popular with “dark academia” fans, who credit the book with creating the genre. Since the release of “The Secret History,” other novels similar to Tartt’s have begun to define the genre. While the definition of dark academia is still murky, the online community seeks to understand it.

Dark academia novels draw from the genres of satire and tragedy. They also often focus on the humanities and liberal arts, which motivate the passions of the main characters, who resort to violence. Dark academia focuses heavily on gothic aesthetics and its authors write in elaborate prose.

These elements differentiate it from the “campus novel,” which takes place at college, and the “campus murder mystery novel.” Because of these requirements, novels like V.E. Schwab’s “Vicious” and Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” series would not qualify as dark academia; “Vicious” is only briefly set in college and “The Magicians” lacks a focus on gothic aesthetics.

Study Breaks Magazine explores the allure of Dark Academia geared toward traditional collegeaged students, writing that, “[i]nstead of viewing college with the ... dread that college students usually do, they have delved into their studies with a renewed, finer appreciation for things as simple as the aesthetic of pens, notebook pages and cursive writing ... lying on their desks.”

Dark academia is full of narrative possibilities but has been criticized for being overwhelmingly white and male-centered. Books in the genre do feature gay romances, but there are few happy endings to go around.

“The genre has a problem with the way it treats its gay characters, the women, and the absence of people of color entirely,” Ju Eun Choi ’20 said. “Novels in Dark Academia also romanticize college life without criticizing the institutions and other students who make it so difficult for marginalized students struggling with things like mental health and racism.”

Dark academia is a relatively new genre, but has great potential to tap into the more taboo aspects of academia. To get started, fans typically recommend Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” and M.L. Rio’s “If We Were Villains,” a book about actors studying Shakespeare who must confront each other and themselves after one of them is killed.