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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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
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Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May

In the aftermath of the First World War, a young woman gets swept into a glittering world filled with illicit magic, romance, blood debts and murder in this lush and decadent debut novel.

On Crow Island, people whispered, real magic lurked just below the surface. But Annie Mason never expected her enigmatic new neighbour to be a witch.

When she witnesses a confrontation between her best friend Bea and the infamous Emmeline Delacroix at one of Emmeline's extravagantly illicit parties, Annie is drawn into a glittering, haunted world. A world where magic can buy what money cannot; a world where the consequence of a forbidden blood bargain might be death.

TITLE: Wild and Wicked Things
AUTHOR: Francesca May with Marisa Calin (Narrator), Gemma Dawson (Narrator), Ralph Lister (Narrator)
PUBLISHER: Hachette Audio UK
YEAR: 2022
LENGTH: 384 pages (14 hours 48 minutes)
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Historical
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Main Character(s).

DNF 23% in.

A bunch of little things were making me uncomfortable, but the way the blood magic was used is the big one that made me stop. If the book engages with the way the blood magic is being used as something partly like a drug and explicitly as self harm then I'm not ready right now to read that book. If it doesn't end up engaging with those early themes then it's not a story I want to read at all. Either way, I'm stopping.

I like the way it uses three narrators for the audiobook, I'd happily listen to more of their work (singly or together). 

CW for alcohol (explicit), drug use (magic), panic attacks (brief), blood (graphic), domestic abuse (brief), self harm (graphic), terminal illness (magic), animal death, parental death, death.

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