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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.

Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella—through visits both mundane and supernatural—tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.

TITLE: Riot Baby
AUTHOR: Tochi Onyebuchi
PUBLISHER: Tor.com
YEAR: 2020
LENGTH: 176 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

DNF 53%.

*I received a review copy as part of the 2021 Hugo voters packet. 

It’s told in chunks, creating at feeling of jagged edges and snippets of a story. I liked it at first and then got to the back-to-back descriptions of birth and a stillbirth/miscarriage, which is a hard no for me. Even if the rest of the book is fine I need to stop.

CW for cursing, racism, stillbirth (graphic), pregnancy/birth (graphic), blood (graphic), incarceration, panic attacks, seizures, medical content (graphic), medical trauma (graphic), gun violence, violence, police brutality, animal death, child death, death.

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A Black person's face, with the image composited like it's made from many faces.


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