eheidenreich's profile picture

eheidenreich 's review for:

After Sappho: A Novel by Selby Wynn Schwartz
4.25
fast-paced

This book takes the concept from "The Chart" in the L Word and applies it to culturally influential  European women of late 1800s to the early 1900s. Each connection is a short story, imbued with these women's feelings, beliefs, and the art they created. Schwartz weaves together the connections between these women alongside the political atmosphere of Europe and literature of the past, namely Sappho, to shape their experiences beyond what we can read in a biography. 

This book is relatively dense, with somewhere around 40 women mentioned and varying degrees of relevancy to each other. I took notes while reading this book like I was studying for a test. With grandiloquent writing, this book mixes the genres of biography and speculative fiction. This is not just a narrative of these women's lives but paints them as part of a perpetual collective force towards feminism and queerness.