chocochipbiscuit | Pride 2023 - F/F and F/NB recs!!!! (Reply)

In honor of Pride, have some of my favorite F/F and F/NB reads!

Short stories (available online)

Radcliffe Hall by Miyuki Jane Pinckard - 40k word novella, with a Japanese student attending an American women's college in 1908. It's a Gothic novel with the characters encountering the supernatural, which is no less malevolent than systemic racism and homophobia.
The First Stop Is Always the Last by John Wiswell - Short and sweet time loop flirtation!
Scallop by J.L. Akagi - A woman begins growing eyes all over her body, and struggles to hide them. All the warnings for body horror, eye injury, and referenced sexual assault.
The World Ends in Salty Fingers and Sugared Lips by Jen Reese - Time loop story about the end of the world and the ways we try to deal with the crushing uncertainty of the inevitable.

Romance

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston - Subway time travel romance! August moves to New York and meets Jane, a butch punk from the 70s who’s trapped on the subway. It’s warm and sweet and funny, with all the feels and queer found family goodness.
Fatal Fidelity by Rien Gray - Dark romance/erotic suspense featuring a bi femme fatale and a nonbinary assassin! The series begins with Love Kills Twice, in which Justine hires an assassin to get rid of her abusive husband…unaware that Campbell was also hired to kill her. Absolutely delicious.
Feminine Pursuits series by Olivia Waite - While I’m listing it as a series, each novel is entirely stand-alone! These are a set of historical F/F novels featuring women in arts and science (and beekeeping!) making their way and falling in love with one another!
Mrs. Martin’s Incomparable Adventure by Courtney Milan - Historical romance as two older women (73 and 69 years old, respectively!) plot the downfall of an absolutely Terrible Nephew who deserves everything that happens to him. An absolutely delicious comedic romp.
The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz - An AI repair technician and an autonomous robot who runs a small tea shop, set in a retro-futuristic America. It’s warm and gentle and yearning in very good ways.

Horror/Suspense

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin - Gender apocalypse featuring trans women! A virus has turned anyone with over a certain level of testosterone into cannibal rape monsters, so we’re following our trans protagonists as they try to survive feral men, murderous TERFs, and a sociopathic bunker brat. This deserves a LOT of content warnings but it’s also been blurbed as a ‘bleeding love letter to trans women’ and it really is.
Blackwater Sister by Zen Cho - A Malaysian-American lesbian moves to Malaysia with her family, where she is haunted by her grandmother’s ghost. Her grandmother is out for supernatural revenge, involving our protagonist with gangsters and a terrifying goddess.
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters - Historical crime novel in which a thief poses as a lady’s maid for a con, and ends up developing feelings for the mark. Except the lady’s not as innocent as she seems, and it’s difficult to add more without spoiling the novel but it’s good!

Science fiction

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - Ambassador Mahit Dzmare travels to the capital of the interstellar Teixcalaanli Empire, discovers that her predecessor has died, and must find not only who murdered him, but why—while trying not to get murdered herself, and trying to maintain her small station’s independence from Teixcalaan’s ever-expanding empire. And there is a sequel but that has its own plot and requires you to read this one anyway!
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages - Set in San Francisco, built on artifice and delight as we follow a group of queer women both present and in the 1940s. Central story is a romance, two women trying to navigate both joy and the brutality of the worlds they inhabit.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - An epistolary love story across time and space, in far futures and alternative pasts as two rival agents—post-singularity Red and bio-consciousness Blue—foil and thwart one another.

Fantasy

The Burning Kingdoms by Tasha Suri - Indian-inspired fantasy trilogy (third book coming in 2024!) that follows a captive princess and a maidservant with forbidden magic who navigate the the tension between their different loyalties and the politics of empire. Just! So good!
The Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk - A fantasy trilogy (that’s actually complete!) set in a world where witches are persecuted and placed in asylums…while secretly, the witches of elite families use that power in service of the crown. The first book (Witchmark) starts with a murder mystery and a doctor with PTSD who follows that mystery to government secrets that force him to confront his estranged family. It’s also M/M, but the sequels (Stormsong and Soulstar) center around F/F and F/NB main pairings, respectively.
The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir - The first book starts with swordjock butches and lesbian necromancers in space going through (essentially) a haunted mansion together, and it just keeps going after that! It’s delightful, deranged, and full of fantastic characters I want to gnaw on!
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo - A beautiful frame story with a very fairytale feel, where the cleric Chih is telling the story of a tiger and her lover, a female scholar, to a trio of hungry tigers who threaten to eat them if Chih tells the story incorrectly!
A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark - Mystery and magic and suspense in a steampunk Cairo, set forty years after magic returned to the world! The first female agent for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is assigned to discover who murdered members of a secret cult. In addition to solving the case, she’s also assigned a rookie partner to train, and navigating the surprise return of her girlfriend, who has her own secrets! This is a really fun romp, full of joy and wonder. (And Fatma’s fabulous suits!)

Nonfiction

In the Dream House by Carmen Machado - A memoir about surviving domestic abuse, with each chapter using a different trope or genre convention to not only explore the way the relationship affected her sense of self, but also about trying (or failing) to find that representation in cultural history. It’s a rough read in places, but absolutely worth it if you’re in a space to handle that sort of content. (And in case it’s not obvious: her ex was another woman. Abuse isn’t limited by gender.)

Happy reading, and I’m happy to take recs too! ;)