Book Reviews

By Eric Page

Chloe O Davis The Queens’ English (£14.99, Square Peg).

This is very well researched guide to the LGBTQ+ community’s contributions to the English language - an intersectional, inclusive, illustrated glossary featuring more than 800 terms created by and for queer culture.

It’s a fun, engaging and comprehensive guide to modern gay slang, queer theory terms, and playful colloquialisms that define and celebrate. This modern dictionary provides an in-depth look at queer language, including terms influenced by poet Sappho, leather scenes, New York’s underground queer ball culture and up-to-date lexicography from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

It’s designed with a breath-taking collection of icon and colours that makes the book a real pleasure to use and includes historical insights into the construction and influences that shaped queer language, including the linguistic importance of pronouns, gender identity, Stonewall, and more.

Every time I opened the book I learned something new, enjoying turning the pages of this celebration of queer history, identity, and the limitless imagination of the LGBTQ+ community. Editor Chloe O Davis is to be commended for this stylish and informative addition to exploring modern queer languages, how they get used, and where they come from.

Miguel M Morales, Bruce Owens Grimm & Tiff Ferentini Fat and Queer (£14.99, Jessica Kingsley Publishers).

We’re here. We’re queer. We’re fat. This one-of-a-kind collection of prose and poetry radically explores the intersection of fat and queer identities, with a superb collection of new voices, and some established queer and trans writers.

The stories in the book are filled with passion and charm, avoiding cliché and embracing a Rubenesque radical revolution, not just marking out territory but building new spaces, not taking away with critique but giving with generous warm-hearted constructive and illuminating narratives which offer real opportunities to celebrate and love yourself. All of you.

With voluptuous voices as diverse as the big bodies celebrated in these stories we experience some seriously intimate stuff – not all of it easy to read, but each story written with a connective grace which puts the author firmly in control.

You read it and think, ‘I so understand what that feels like’. I enjoy a good anthology and one which highlights the experiences and adventures of anyone who has to navigate the body-shaming highways of modern life, before turning off to the sedate byways of homo queer fat folx is a treat to find.

The trio of editors have selected stories, poems, prose and a rather delightful stream of consciousness which say, loud and proud, hey I’m here, and fat, come love it with me.

Tom Rasmussen First Comes Love (£14.99, Bloomsbury Publishing).

This is a charming book, by turns funny, educational, historically illuminating, jawdropping and written with a warm and informative style which delighted me.

Author Rasmussen, who has quite the interesting life outside of writing, has spent rather a lot of time obsessing over and researching, interviewing, attending, examining, asking and wondering about marriage, and lays out some of their findings in this seriously funny look at the way we’ve changed our attitudes to this most ancient of institutions.

Although droll, Rasmussen is relentlessly respectful, allowing us to draw our own conclusion of some of the challenging ideas and people they come across in their adventures into matrimony, certainly pausing and letting us consider contradiction or confusion but always bringing it back to personal experience and real people, taking about their own lives and how they build relationships which works for them.

All the while offering up a side-line in personal observation which pushed this book a little further into ‘I love reading this’ territory. We are asked to consider marriage as an achievement, a compromise, a selling-out, a practical solution and given experiences of authentic lives of what marriage means to a range of people across the spectrum of sexuality and class, and what the future looks like for this most historic and universal of institutions.

Rasmussen holds up this glass bowl of performative social affirmation, turns it around in their careful hands, letting the light of a rather crystal-sharp and witty mind bounce off the deeply incised carved patterns, pointing out heritage and novelty, wear and provenance, and then settles it down again, with a glint in their eye and a ‘what now?’.

First Comes Love is a welcome, queer-centred examination of marriage and the people who choose to embrace it, and a few who never, ever, will.

Candas Jane Dorsey The Adventures of Isabel (£8.99, Pushkin Press).

Not to be confused with the Ogden Nash poem, although very much in the bonkers celebratory style of his prose and radically mind-popping daftness, this is a delightful entertaining book from (one guesses the first of) the Epitome Apartments Mysteries.

Author Dorsey adores words, pokes, tickles, makes them perform these incredibly funny feats of phraseology and all the while packs in the narrative tension. I adore a writer who’s both clever and interesting, and combines it with a hefty slap from the bizarre, and Dorsey does just this.

Positioning their queer female protagonist at the heart of this devilishly intricate story, we get to enjoy a particularly good murder mystery while examining some serious social issues from a queer perspective.

It’s like Thursday Next on mushrooms or Arthur Dent on poppers, wild, daft, silly, laugh-out-loud, phrase-stealingly wonderful, dripping in ironic posturing but with a core of hard, solid reality which anchors this most wild of tales firmly in reality. Loved it.