Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
Read as part of CBR17 Bingo: workplace. The vast majority of the book takes place at the Buffalo Queen saloon. I love reading. And I’m a voracious reader, as my Cannonball Read review catalog can attest to. Maybe I don’t get to it as much as I have in years past but I enjoy reading and documenting what I’ve read. However, because I devour so many books, I tend to have either read or tried most of the stuff I see on listicles. It’s to […]
Soft Core by Brittany Newell
Note that this is suggested for people curious about the world of Anora, not people who want to read something like the actual movie. This book is likely to frustrate some readers if they don’t know what to expect. My guess is many folks will come to this looking for a trippy missing person mystery featuring a sex-worker-turned-amateur-sleuth. That’s not what this is at all. Yeah there is a missing person aspect to it and that sort of draws the character down to a rabbit hole. […]
Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 1: Rebellion by Celeste Mogador, Kristen Hall-Geisler (translator)
Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 2: Spectacle by Celeste Mogador, Kristen Hall-Geisler (translator)
Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 1: Rebellion – 4 stars Before she was the famed courtesan Mogador, Céleste was a young girl with a troubled childhood running with her mother from an abusive stepfather. Sex workers were an integral part of Paris’s bohemian society in the 19th century, but one of the first of them to put her own story down for herself was Céleste Mogador. Having heard plenty on the subject in operas and Les Mis, I was interested in hearing one of […]
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
“There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors. It’s almost easier to believe I’m real than to understand what’s actually going on. […]
These Women by Ivy Pochoda
The thing I most admire about Ivy Pochoda’s These Women is how both feet are firmly in two worlds that she’s willing to write about. In making this a character-driven crime tale with a focus on the sex workers (maybe some of them victimized?), we get a clear picture about the unglamorous life of sex work, especially sex work in low income areas. The need for cash, the dehumanization, the stigma…and yet, these women just go about their business dealing with it all. There’s no glorification or […]
The Story of Yoru and Asa by Harada
The Story of Yoru and Asa: Encore by Harada
Happy of the End (Vol. 1) by Ogerestsu Tanaka
Happy of the End (Vol. 2) by Ogerestsu Tanaka
Kuma continues to publish challenging, thought-provoking work, and I’m glad they’re getting this material translated into the English-language market. Both of these series were a lot of fun to read and made me think about relationships, dysfunction, trauma, and various societal issues. The Song of Yoru and Asa and Yoru and Asa: Encore follows Asaichi, who is the vocalist for a rock band. Yoru joins as a bassist, even though he was a popular vocalist in his last band. Asaichi thinks he’s straight but ends […]
