Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

Queer Square Mile by Kristi Bohata, Huw Osborne, Mihangel Morgan

1 review

laurareads87's review

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medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

 Queer Square Mile: Queer Short Stories from Wales is an extraordinarily diverse collection of short stories, spanning 1837 to 2021 and including a wide array of genres, themes, and styles. The book is organized into several sections – ‘Love, Loss, and the Art of Failure,’ ‘Disorderly Women,’ ‘Transformations,’ ‘Hauntings and other Queer Fancies,’ ‘Queer Children,’ and ‘Internationalisms’ – each of which is detailed in the editors’ excellent introduction. The introduction effectively conveys the editors’ approach to this collection, which I believe is highly effective: they note that the stories are arranged thematically rather than chronologically or by identity groupings in order to avoid implying historical trajectories or essentialized experiences; a list of the stories in chronological order is provided at the back of the book. They also note, importantly, that the stories were selected “on the basis of the content rather than the sexual identities of the authors” given both the complications of ascribing contemporary identity terms to historical figures (which is frequently speculative at best) and the desire to avoid “misleadingly [creating] an artificial pantheon of historically representative figures” of LGBTQ+ communities. The editors also discuss the use of the word ‘queer’ specifically in Welsh context, which for me as a non-Welsh reader was informative. Inevitably, with a collection as wide-ranging as this, any reader is bound to find stories they love as well as stories they don’t care for, and my individual star ratings for stories ranged from 2 to 5 – overall, though, I enjoyed the collection and am thrilled to have found several new authors I look forward to reading more from. 
Thank you to Parthian Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.
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