february 2025
Greetings, friends. I have been having a bad brain time, a result of which is that I have been spending my every waking hour tearing through queer cozy mysteries (and creating more waking hours by simply not sleeping). I am not going to highlight every single book I read this month (there were 14 of them), but feel free to follow me on Storygraph if you’re interested in more.
read: Lesbian Love Story: a Memoir in Archives by Amelia Possanza (2024). it took me a while to come around on this book, mainly due to that “memoir” bit in the title. While this book is ostensibly about a collection of queer women of the past, it is also very much about the author, and I couldn’t decide whether I cared about her, or whether her involving herself worked for me. Ultimately, I think it did, because the connections she drew between her subjects and herself served to illuminate them, and highlight the ways in which being alive and queer and a woman have changed, and the ways in which they haven’t. And everyone in this book was new to me, which was its own delight.
read: The Muse of Maiden Lane by Mimi Matthews (2024). Speaking of history, Mimi Matthews was a historian before she transitioned to romance, and it always shows. This book was a treat for me specifically, as the hero is both disabled and an artist, so the book spends a lot of time dealing with the realities of living with a disability in Victorian England, as well as the art scene at the time (REALLY fun for me).
film: Conclave (2024). I didn’t know much about this except that people I like really liked it, and I watched it on that. Really good. Tense, modern court intrigue plot with gorgeous visuals. Nothing was too small to be overlooked (I greatly enjoyed the variety of reading glasses on display).
read: The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso (2024). Really fun fantasy adventure set at a party that is slowing dropping through layers of reality. I loved the setting and deft world-building, as well as the main character, who is on maternity leave but ends up right back in the mix along with her rival/enemy/crush?? More here.
read: The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society by CM Waggoner (2024). Talk about a For Me book. Sherry is a librarian in a small town in upstate New York who solves murders. If that’s a summary that feels familiar to you, it’s familiar to Sherry too. But there’s more at work here than an episode of Murder, She Wrote. This is a kind of subversion of tropes that works really well because the author clearly knows AND loves what she’s dealing with. Great book.
film: The Talk of the Town (1942). Screwball comedy about a man accused of murder who decides to hide out in the attic of a house recently rented to a prominent law professor. It follows the relationship of the felon (Cary Grant), the professor (Ronald Colman) and the house’s landlady (Jean Arthur, firing on ALL cylinders). A classic of the genre and for good reason!
read: Seance on a Summer’s Night by Josh Lanyon (2018). I’ve read several Lanyons this month, and she’s great at what she does, but I’m highlighting this one because I love a haunting story where someone comes home. Artemus Bancroft returns to the manor where he was raised—his aunt’s house outside of San Francisco. There he finds the house in mourning for his aunt’s late husband and the household convinced that it’s being haunted by the man. Lovely, atmospheric book. Wish the house was real and I could visit.
pod: Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones. Full disclosure, this podcast is made by my friends. Also? It’s really good. The hosts, Rebecca Fraimow and Emily Tesh, have divided up DWJ’s works by decade, and are going through them book by book, discussing how each one reflects on the world and industry of the time, as well as peeling apart each book’s layers to get at the good analytical stuff inside. A delight regardless of whether you’ve read each book.
read: Fox of Fox Hall by R. Cooper (2024). This follows Fox, a court musician in an entirely fictional fantasty-esque world. The main difference between it and ours is the physical make-up of the people, which have pointed ears, long, pointed tails (think an old-timey devil tail), as well as some…other biological differences. Fox is living on borrowed time, only at court on the king’s sufferance, which is quickly running down now that Fox has been ejected from the king’s bed. There’s a good romance in this, but I really enjoyed the social details—such as the various tail poses used to obscure what a person is really thinking.
film: Paddington in Peru (2025). Was it as good as Paddington 2? No, of course not. Nothing is. But it felt like a warm echo of it all the same. I loved the extension of the more analog alternate universe that exists in these films to outside of England, and I loved Olivia Colman’s turn as a suspicious nun. It didn’t break the mold so much as fit itself perfectly inside of it.
read: Mystery on the Menu by Nicole Kimberling (2023). This collects three mystery novels set in the fictional Washington coastal town of Orca’s Slough. It follows Drew Anderson, and chef and unwitting amateur detective (like many a cozy mystery protagonist before him, he gets involved by simply being suspected of the crime). He has a lot on his plate: dead bartender, vanished business partner, nosy regular, and one very hot deputy. I really liked the romance that played out across the three novels, but more than that I loved Drew’s relationship with the elderly lesbian couple in town who adopt him as surely as he adopts them. A delightfully fully realized cast of characters for a cozy.
longread: From Antarctica with Love by Allegra Rosenberg (2025). Tragic tales from the Arctic and Antarctic age of exploration are not my bag (too sad!) but I really enjoyed this piece about two men who were part of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s journey to the South pole in 1910. Scott didn’t survive it, but Lt. Pennell and Dr. Atkinson did, and left behind a trove of diaries and letters. Rosenberg treats us to a look at some of the possibly-queer people who traveled on the Terra Nova.
dog:
cat:
