A fascinating look at queer couples and how things like gender, sexuality, age, and even horniness can affect everything about a relationship. For a lot of queer people, especially those of us who experienced trauma in childhood, romance can feel like our best hope for love, stability, and safety.

It was certainly possible that under fluorescent bulbs, the green of Sasha’s fur would not have shimmered so.This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc. There’s a growing academic field, Femme Studies, that defines femmephobia as the devaluation and marginalization of any sort of alternative femininity. Davis’s characters slink off the page, bewitching, seducing, snuggling up in your lap to whisper stories of our tender, bungled humanity.

A modern day bourgeois comedy of manners, that follows three couples of brooklyn-dykes on a winter holiday on Long Island. genuinely so refreshing to read after so many one dimensional "sapphic" rom coms that quake in their boots at the thought of having to say the word lesbian or (god forbid) having a single butch character lmfao. In Jenny Fran Davis’s novel Dykette, protagonist Sasha guards her high-femme identity so jealously from her rival and frenemy Darcy, it feels for all the world as if a gender quota has been issued on the Hudson, New York weekend estate where they find themselves.Sasha doesn’t get what she wants, but through her, Davis gives us honest if sometimes jumbled insights into a queer domestic fantasy stuck in a version of the past that has never really existed. The Performative Aesthetics are a big part of that, which made this book almost constantly grating for me. I almost DNF because it was so bizarre and arbitrary but there was just enough curiosity in me that wanted to find out what the point of all of it was. Dykette stared directly into my soul, pinned me against a wall, and made me look inward, consider the sharp and ugly parts of myself. And Sasha always wore a bootleg green Chanel ribbon around her neck or in her hair, its tendrils curling around her shoulders or between her collarbones.