Reviews with content warning for Drug use - The Gilda Stories

Breaking out of my reading slump to read last month's pick in Maven of the Eventide's (aka Elisa Hansen's) Vampire Book Club proved to be no easy feat. Unfortunately, my library did not carry the audiobook, and it turned out I had other obligations the night of the meeting. Luckily I found a copy of the audio online, and, as always, the book club meetings are saved for posterity, so while I wasn't there for the live discussion, I was able to participate in some ways (unlike the previous month's when my library didn't even carry a text copy for The Silver Kiss). And though I'd never heard of this book before the club picked it out, the premise seemed especially intriguing and I was eager to experience it. Let me just say, wow.

Read my full review at The Wolf's Den

Overall, this book will undoubtedly sit with me for quite sometime. From the characters, to the settings, to the long and tumultuous journey of self-discovery, I was wholly invested. The exploration of life, and what it means to live and love from the perspective of an outsider, along with powerful depictions of struggling to choose what's best for yourself and for those around you, even if that means starting over, were what impacted me the most. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in historical fiction, books featuring BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+ main characters, empowering women, Afrofuturism, or just a fresh, new take on vampires—even hailing from 30 years ago!

Content Warnings

ceallaighsbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

“My dream was to see the world, over time. The real dream is to make a world—to see the people and still want to make a world.”

TITLE—The Gilda Stories

AUTHOR—Jewelle Gomez

PUBLISHED—1995

GENRE—queer vampire story; literary fiction; historical fiction

SETTING—various places across the US including Mississippi, Louisiana, San Francisco, Missouri, Boston, NYC, New Hampshire, the SW (from 1850 - 2050)

MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—vampires, queerness, Blackness, found family

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—the writing style just felt a bit slow and bumpy; it was beautiful just not as fluid as I like it to be...

CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️—this book is not about plot but I felt there was just the slightest of disconnects between chapters that felt a little distracting and also repetitive at times...

BONUS ELEMENT/S—[spoiler, lol] Bird went to New Zealand to participate in the Maori landrights movement!; also the found family trope was really well-developed in this story—one of my favorite things about vampire lit <3

PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book was like “vampire story but make it a literary memoir” and yeah—I am here for it. <3 It has a lot of the tropes surrounding vampire stories such as sex and body horror, found family, discussion of the ethics of immortality etc. I think it is inarguably the best demonstration of the importance of both queerness and Blackness in the vampire mythology as well. It was a *very* slow read for me for some reason though, although I kept on with it because I was interested in the story (and it was a bookclub pick 😂) but at times I was feeling a *little* bit like I was slogging through it.

“…as neoliberalism encourages privileged families to shape their lesbian and gay households in the image of hetero-patriarchy, Gilda’s example of chosen family and queer reproduction is instructive.”

I also particularly love the above quote from Alexis Gumbs’s afterword to the 25th Anniversary edition. It demonstrates why this book is *such* an important part of the queer literary tradition and what Gomez was really trying to accomplish thematically with Gilda and her story.

“My life is wherever I am.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Further Reading—

the Tao Te Ching
Fledgling, by Octavia Butler
maybe one of the Interview with a Vampire series, by Anne Rice?

Content Warnings

booksthatburn's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

THE GILDA STORIES spans two centuries in the life of a Black lesbian vampire, following her as she finds family, friends, and connections tethering her to life in the first stages of her journey as an immortal.

The pace is slow, but purposeful. Every section lingers just as long as it needs to convey its piece of this story that spans two centuries. The book is undeniably queer but a lot of the queerness in the early sections is understated or implied because it’s taking place in years and times where it’s not safe to be a woman, to be Black, to be queer. By having the MC be a vampire it takes some of the danger away, transforming it. It’s not gone, not really, it’s not magically safer for her to exist in this world that hates people like her, but it does help as a reader, to know she has something to keep her safe. It’s explicitly about abuse and power and violence and vulnerability, figuring out how to be a creature who could easily survive through violence but not if she wants to keep her humanity, her love for life. The final section flips this and changes which facet of her identity puts her in danger.

The secondary characters come in and out of the MC‘s life, sometimes being gone for long sections before returning again, and sometimes leaving forever, or being left by the MC. But even those she leaves behind in time and by distance often stay in her thoughts. Her fellow vampires have a consistent presence throughout the book, whether just in her recollections of them, her summaries of what’s happened with them most recently, or a few moments in person where the narrative lens aligns with their visits. It conveys this tension between loneliness and community which is integral to the story as the MC figures out how to stay interested in life as the years stretch ever onward.

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