What queer book have you chosen to share with our readers today?

Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant was the first book featuring queer women by a male writer that did not make me want to scratch my eyes out in frustration. It is also an intricate, detailed, historically accurate while being ahistorical, fantasy dissection of the powers of empire, colonialism, oppression and, most of all, assimilation. Baru is a young savant from the latest colony of the Masquerade, who decides to rise through the ranks and destroy the empire from within. Of course, at every step of her silent revolution, there are temptations (the women who work with, for, or against her tend to be most of them, especially Tain Hu, her field general) and limitations to what her imperial power can do, and Dickinson makes sure to wring every ounce of gut-churning tears and screams of frustration up to the very last page. It’s brutal, it’s visceral, it’s like nothing I had ever read before, and I will never forgive him for the ending.

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