Amanda

Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. Louis disturbs her meticulous isolation when he asks her to host Eva, his lover, for the summer while he is away. Isabel grudgingly agrees. Eva arrives there with a laid-back sense of belonging that perturbs Isabel from the beginning.

There is not an instantaneous connection here. There is instead conflict—social, emotional, territorial. Gradually, their relationship evolves. Their tense cohabitation gains an edge of intimacy, one that stays murky as the story progresses. What starts out as apprehension gradually becomes fascination, then something even more charged and more devastating. Their dynamic is never entirely mutual, never safe, and never free of the past.

Van der Wouden writes tension with elegant precision—sexual, definitely, but also psychological and historical. The past exerts a real pressure here, acting as more than just a backdrop. The book takes place in a nation that is still writing its postwar history, conveniently forgetting collaboration but remembering gallantry. The Safekeep questions what people choose to live with in the aftermath.

With a consistent smouldering tone, the language is restrained and lyrical. Van der Wouden does not over-explain. Isabel keeps her cards close to her chest, and some readers may find her emotional opacity difficult at first: she’s not particularly likeable, but she feels real and understandable. This book calls on its readers to sit with discomfort and observe what isn’t said aloud. This narrative is one about silence as a means of survival—and complicity.

Though Isabel and Eva reject any neat categories, their relationship is crucial. Their closeness is spun with unresolved anguish, cold secrets, and a distinct disparity in power. It is not a conventional romance, but it does explore the intersection of fear and desire. Van der Wouden lets ambiguity handle the heavy work; nothing is simple and nobody is innocent.

Late in the book, there is a revelation of the sort that I treasure. It corrodes, rather than explodes. It clarifies the characters and their decisions, thereby enhancing the enormity of what the book has been developing all along. Van der Wouden seems far more fascinated with consequences than in drama for its own sake.

Readers sensitive to issues of complicity, betrayal, or the silent violences we sometimes inherit—emotional, familial, or historical—may want to proceed carefully. This book explores how long the plainly visible can remain unseen, as well as how often comfort can be preserved only at someone else’s expense.

The Safekeep‘s lack of tidy resolution is one of its most remarkable aspects. It asks a lot: tolerance of uncertainty, patience, and attention. It honours those things with a narrative that sticks with you. It’s about memory, power, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to cope with what we can’t face.

This will probably appeal if you want something slow, suspenseful, psychologically personal, and morally complicated. If you want lovable characters or closure, this may not be the best option. The Safekeep offers fiction that dares to challenge.

Originally written for The Lesbrary: https://lesbrary.com/the-safekeep-by-yael-van-der-wouden-review/

First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his most ambitious—a 448-page historical horror novel that uses the vampire as a lens to examine genocide, survival, and the question of who gets to tell Indigenous stories.

It's a stunningly effective horror novel. The kind where you read a scene, close the book, stare at the wall for five minutes processing what just happened, then pick it back up because you're compelled to know what happens next. Jones understands that true horror so often lives in the spaces between what's said and what's implied, and he plays that gap like a virtuoso. The nested narrative structure could've been a gimmick; instead it's a ratchet, tightening with every perspective shift. If you stop reading here, you know enough—five stars, buy it, read it, be devastated.

But what struck me most, what I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished it, is how the book is an act of archival sovereignty—both within its narrative structure and as a work itself.

Before I say anything else, I need to be clear about where I'm coming from. I have Stockbridge-Munsee ancestry, but I was raised entirely disconnected from that culture. I'm not an enrolled tribal member. I'm doing my best to learn and connect, but I'm speaking from the outside looking in—someone who desperately wants to understand her people but knows she's setting off on a journey, not arriving at a destination. If I get something wrong here, I welcome correction and discussion. This review is, in part, my continued examination and re-evaluation of my own perspectives—I'm speaking as a student and not a teacher.

Earlier this year, I read Rose Miron's Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, which documents the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Historical Committee's decades-long fight to recover and reframe Mohican history. Since 1968, this group—mostly Mohican women—has been collecting and reorganising historical materials to shift who controls how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and preserved. They founded the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum, which now houses the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world. For centuries, non-Native actors collected, stole, sequestered, and profited from Native stories and documents. The Historical Committee's work reclaims that authority. They are making themselves the source.

What Jones does in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in many respects, works in parallel ways, and reading these two works in the same year completely shifted how I understand the relationship between fiction and archival activism.

I'm citing Rose Miron's work on Mohican archival activism here because that's what I've read, and thus what's shaped new pathways in my thinking this year. I haven't yet engaged with Blackfeet historians like Rosalyn LaPier or William E. Farr, whose work directly addresses Blackfeet history and the contexts Jones is writing from—but reading this book has made that gap in my knowledge impossible to ignore. I've added to my list, and I welcome suggestions.

The novel is structured as nested archives: in 2012, a professor named Etsy Beaucarne discovers her great-great-great-grandfather's diary hidden in a wall. Arthur Beaucarne was a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana, and his diary contains both his own observations and the confessions of a Pikuni man named Good Stab—a being who can't die, who has survived since before the buffalo vanished, who hunts the buffalo hunters to exact a reckoning for a genocide.

The structure itself asks questions about whose stories survive and how. Arthur's diary survives because it was preserved in a wall—a white pastor's documentation of Indigenous experience, mediated through colonial institutions, missionary frameworks, and the English language. It's the kind of archive that has always existed and dominated: Indigenous voices filtered through white recorders, being shaped by their assumptions, their translations, and their comforts.

But Jones doesn't let that be the only story. Good Stab's voice breaks through. His sections are Blackfeet-dialected English, peppered with Pikuni terminology and left untranslated. There are no glossaries, no footnotes explaining what words mean or providing cultural context for non-Indigenous readers. Jones has said he writes for Blackfeet readers first, and this is what that looks like on the page—linguistic sovereignty practiced through craft. It's the same principle the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee seems to operate from: Indigenous people control how their stories are told, how they're accessed, and what gets explained. If you don't understand, that's not the storyteller's problem. If you want to understand, you can make the effort to learn.

I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language twice as an adult, had to learn by immersion and context, so this didn't bother me personally. I picked up what I could, managed with what I couldn't, and trusted the narrative to carry me. I know some readers struggle with this; that's understandable, and I think it's also the point. Jones isn't writing for their comfort. He's creating a Blackfeet-centered archive within the genre of literary horror, and centering Blackfeet people means some readers will be on the outside. That's also what it feels like when your stories are held in institutions that don't serve you, in languages that aren't yours, with context you're not given access to. The discomfort is pedagogical.

The vampire mythology Jones builds is both familiar and unlike anything I've encountered previously. Good Stab must feed on human blood to maintain his form—if he feeds on other animals, his body begins to transform into theirs. This isn't metaphor, it's literal: consume what you hunt or lose yourself. It's the logic of forced assimilation made flesh. "Kill the Indian, save the man" becomes "consume whiteness or cease to exist as Pikuni." Good Stab finds a way to refuse both options.

There's a colonial trope here that could be ugly—Native-on-Native violence that absolves settlers of responsibility. Jones handles this possibility by making the violence a direct result of forced assimilation. Good Stab isn't violent against his own people because he's Indigenous; he's violent because colonialism has engineered a scenario where survival requires feeding on his own people. His violence isn't inherent; it's imposed. He survives by feeding on his own people when necessary, which breeds its own horror—to remain Pikuni, he must consume Pikuni lives. It's an abhorrent choice, and Jones doesn't offer Good Stab easy outs. Good Stab is not noble or tragic in sanitised ways. He's hungry, vicious, and brutal. He also has his agency. He chooses survival, and sometimes survival is grotesque.

The buffalo are everywhere in this book, and if you view them as kin—not as resources, not as symbol, but as revered family—the horror of their extermination lands very differently. The systematic slaughter of the buffalo wasn't just ecological destruction, it was kin-murder on a genocidal scale. It was callously engineered to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. I know many readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were devastated by what happens to Weasel Plume—I've seen the Goodreads reviews and Discord discussions, and I know of people who struggled to finish through their tears.

That grief, with its singular source and focus? That's one buffalo. Multiply it by the millions slaughtered for little reason but to starve Blackfeet people, and the awful scale of what was done comes into focus. Good Stab hunts the buffalo hunters because they're killing his family. The supernatural horror is a secondary one. The real horror is that the U.S. government sanctioned the near-extinction of an entire species of animals as a weapon of genocide, and we have receipts. The Marias Massacre (January 1870) is the historical anchor—nearly 200 Blackfeet people, mostly women, children, and elders, murdered by the U.S. Army. Jones doesn't use this as window dressing, obviously. It's the engine of the narrative, the wound Good Stab carries. It's the reason he exists. The book refuses to let us look away from that.

What also struck me is how Jones balances horror with humour. Arthur Beaucarne, despite being the white Lutheran pastor, carries most of the book's lighter moments—from his affected prose and his earnest attempts to understand Good Stab, to his very human flaws. The humour doesn't undercut the horror; it helps to metabolise it. This is something I recognise from other Indigenous writers like Tommy Orange and Cherie Dimaline: humour as a survival mechanism, not an escape. You laugh because otherwise you drown. Arthur's sections often provide tonal reprieve without ever letting the reader forget what's at stake.

The epistolary format exposes the seams in all of it. The transitions between Arthur's journal and Good Stab's confessions jar at times—intentionally. Indigenous history is almost always mediated, fragmented, and reconstructed from incomplete records put down by people who didn't understand what they were documenting and who would often simply change or omit things if it didn't fit their world view. The novel's structure performs a similar fragmentation while simultaneously offering Good Stab's voice as a counter-archive—a record that survives despite the colonial frameworks trying to contain it, like all the stories and histories passed down within Native communities.

And here's where fiction and archival activism converge: Jones isn't just writing about a Blackfeet vampire surviving across centuries. He's practising Indigenous narrative survival through the act of publishing this book. By centering the Marias Massacre in a literary horror novel, he places it in the canon where it can't be as easily ignored. By refusing to translate Pikuni language, he asserts linguistic sovereignty. By giving Good Stab complexity, agency, and hunger, he refuses the "vanished Indian" narrative that still haunts public memory. The book itself becomes another element in the archive—a Blackfeet-centred, Blackfeet-authored intervention in how Indigenous stories are preserved, accessed, and controlled, but also how new ones are created. I know that publication isn't protection, and that this book can still be co-opted, decontextualised, and taught badly, but it exists in the first place on Jones's terms, in his language, and that matters.

This is what the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has been doing for fifty years, in many ways. They're reclaiming physical documents, reorganising archives, and ultimately making the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum and the Mohican people the authoritative source for Mohican history. Jones is doing it through fiction—creating new narratives that centre Indigenous perspectives, languages, and survival, writing those stories into perpetuity within the literary landscape. Both are acts of sovereignty. Refusals of erasure. Insistence that Indigenous people control how their stories are told.

Reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter after Indigenous Archival Activism made me reconsider what I'm doing with my own writing. I write poetry, I write reviews, I'm working on a novel, and now I've been thinking about how those forms function as archives. What am I preserving? Whose language am I centering? When I write about books by Indigenous authors, am I translating for non-Indigenous readers' comfort, or am I speaking to Indigenous readers first? With what authority am I speaking, and what lack thereof? What would it mean to approach my own work as archival activism—not just recording my experiences with cancer, displacement, and learning to connect with my heritage, but actively shaping what survives, who has access, and what gets explained?

Jones has given me a model for how fiction, great fiction, can do the work of reclamation. You don't have to write nonfiction or history to engage in archival activism. You can create new stories that center your people, refuse translation when translation means dilution, and trust your primary audience to understand. You can ask people on the outside to do their own work to engage if they want to, just like you've had to do in a cultural landscape filled with narratives that don't center those like you. You can use genre fiction—horror, in this case—as a vehicle for historical reckoning. You can make your readers uncomfortable when discomfort is the pedagogical point. And you can do all of this while writing a genuinely gripping, terrifying, occasionally funny vampire novel that works on every level.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterpiece. Horror. Historical fiction. A meditation on survival and accountability and the question of what gets preserved. It's also proof that new works of fiction can function as necessary and important archival records in a people's ongoing story—evidence that storytelling is sovereignty, and that Indigenous writers are creating the records future generations will inherit. On their own terms, in their own languages, with their own people at the center.

I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out what it means to write as someone disconnected from her culture but trying to reconnect. Jones has shown me what's possible when you refuse to let colonial archives have the final word. Good Stab survives because he refuses to die. The Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee thrives because they refused to let others define them. And Stephen Graham Jones is writing books that ensure Blackfeet stories endure in forms that can't be stolen, sequestered, or mistranslated. That's more than horror. That's resistance. That's hope. That's archival activism in both ink and blood, and it's one of the most important books I'll read this year.

This book came to me as a metaphorically dog-eared suggestion from my friend Eliot, and I’m so glad they suggested it; it’s just the sort of book I love. In The Last Hour Between Worlds, the latest release from Melissa Caruso, the author builds up catastrophes like a clockmaker who’s bent on breaking time. She coaxes loose each cog until the whole contraption convulses, collapses, and casts loose pieces to ping across the floor—okay, that metaphor got away from me.

Even in moments when Kembral, our protagonist, is staring down impossible choices, the book won’t hand us heroes wrapped in moral certainty. And she’s not even supposed to be working; she’s on leave! Instead, we watch people scrabble for meaning when every path leads through wreckage, their words worn thin by the particular—and too familiar—fatigue that comes from having no good options left. What cuts even deeper than this philosophical weight is how Caruso lets her characters speak with brutal honesty instead of pretty lies. Maybe I’m hearing echoes of my own bone-tiredness in Kembral’s voice, but heck—I know many of you are just as exhausted as I am with impossible choices, these days.

The fantasy elements in the story work like emotional architecture—and yes, I realise I just called magic “architecture”, but bear with me here. Caruso makes reality itself intentionally wobbly. Each “echo” carries extra freight. When the world goes “blurry, like someone erased it and wrote over it,” trauma gets literalised through magical realism that keeps metaphysical concepts tethered to recognisable human hurt. Think of how a teacup’s hairline crack creeps along, almost invisible, until one morning it splits clean through in your grip. It’s much like that, though the metaphor is too gentle for what Caruso serves up. It reminded me of reading The Fifth Season for the first time—that same feeling of the world literally breaking apart, except Caruso’s happen faster and with less warning. Her world-building moves without mercy, fractures fast, as new terminology piles up during crisis scenes like debris in the clean-up after an explosion.

There are moments when dialogue digs up character traits like an archaeologist, where voices and personality traits get the dirt brushed off of them, and suddenly you’re seeing the messy bits people usually keep buried. Kembral’s “respectfully, this isn’t the moment for dramatic gestures” made me physically wince—it’s deflection dressed up in desperate, sarcastic politeness. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to reach through the page and shake her or hide under a blanket because my own conflict-avoidance was being called out so hard. The Midwesterner in me totally gets using manners as armour when things fall apart—I once said “excuse me” to a door that hit me in the face. Caruso weaponises that kind of courtesy like she knows it as well as I do. That’s a precision which can, sometimes, read more like authorial commentary than authentic human response, but here? I think it works.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Caruso’s treatment of consent under coercion felt less like abstract philosophy and more like lived experience. There are moments I desperately want to spoil—seriously, the restraint is killing me—where Caruso won’t let sacrifice be pretty or easy. She makes you engage with the awful necessity of it, and the text earns these story beats through an accumulation of scenes brimming with impossible choices. There are no easy outs.

But here’s what surprised me: Caruso trusts us to sit with discomfort. We don’t get an answer to every question. She doesn’t show us a justification for every choice. Kembral just has to live with the wreckage she’s made, sometimes, just like we so often do. You know what? I’m okay with that. It’s actually refreshing in a genre where most problems get solved by either stabbing something or having a heartfelt conversation—preferably both.

All in all, I adored this book. If you’re on the lookout for a morally murky fantasy-mystery without clean heroes, then you’ll find rich material here. If you’re hunting for traditional heroic journeys or clear ethical answers, you’ll probably chafe against ambiguity that spurns such comfortable categories. To anyone who’s sensitive to themes of mass death or unstable realities, either skip this one or come in prepared—this book’s examination of catastrophic decisions shows no mercy.

The Atlantic—salt-bitten and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that tidal metronome, letting sentences drift eastward onto Uruguay’s raw ocean edge. Some clauses stretch out like the low-tide flats while others are cast out to sea, where they leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my own ribs: the prose brims with wind-whipped grit yet slips into the lyrical just as easily. What makes the novel sing isn’t only its technical poise—those long, wave-tossed cadences against staccato spray—it’s the way each page insists that queer joy can be both intimate and revolutionary all at once. The book hands you contraband tenderness the way a friend might pass you a match in a blackout: casual and necessary.

Flaca and Romina start out planning together in a cramped bedroom, knowing that five women in one place would be more than a sleepover—it’d be an outlawed assembly. Under the junta, five was the magic number that turned friendship into “conspiracy” on paper; each of them loving other women turned that danger electric. Yet, somehow, these central five dared it anyway—building a hidden world out of laughter, cigarettes, and midnight whispers, where the threat of prison and worse only thickened the bond. In this story resistance is brewed, not broadcast: a dented cuia of maté—leaves gathered where Guaraní caretakers still tend the riverbank—circles clockwise. Sip, pass, and breathe even as a patrol spotlight slices the darkness and the slur “cantoras” scuffs over the sand. De Robertis shows us that fear can hone our wit without halting it. Laughter, barbed and buoyant, is often the brightest armour.

Time whips back like a boomerang tide—just when you think you’ve skipped to safety… splash! Yeah, it’s the same water, but it’s a new decade as we step into 2013. Pepe Mujica’s in the big chair (when he’s not chauffeuring himself in his famously scruffy VW Beetle), and Uruguay has just signed the dotted line on marriage equality. The news comes by phone—tidy and inconclusive—while a cat, collected as any revolution, lounges on a battered suitcase kept by the door, just in case. Many of us today are being reminded what these characters clearly remember: passports expire, sure—but promises? They can curdle faster than the milk lounging in my fridge door.

Maté gurgles. Salt gusts. A battered radio pirates forecasts, figures, decrees; its twitching aerial mimics river reeds rehearsing rebellion. Even static turns polyphonic, a stammering choir refusing silence as songs, once buried, sing back to life—not ghosts, but grounded voltage. When the syntax of this story snakes, it does so while it mirrors the covert paths these women trace. Every stylistic swerve moonlights as both the map and the territory. Survival is a collective thing, and language—mocked or mumbled—cuts loopholes into the law.

By the last page, reciprocity resounds. Jokes, alarms, and hand-me-down radios tug tomorrows toward the shore, hauling future listeners with them. The sand remembers older pacts than roadside checkpoints, and the sea holds its impartial elegy. Cantoras tunes us into a frequency that outruns the static, asks us to lean close, then leaves us listening for the next unruly voice.

Read this book if you want language to reroute statutes, if you believe a gourd can double as megaphone, if you crave a tale where fear and wit clasp elbows and stand together. Skip it only if you need your sentences tamer and your rivers clearer. Otherwise, pour whatever passes for decent yerba maté where you live, crack open the battered paperback, and tune your radio’s dial—I’ll meet you in the static.

Maggie Millner's Couplets is a novel-in-verse that explores the fierce intensity of falling in love and how it affects one's expression, especially when the initial excitement begins to falter and fail. This debut reads like a challenge to form itself: can desire, betrayal, and queer longing be woven into the rigid dance of couplets without dulling their edge or dimming their jagged shine? Miraculously, musically, the answer is yes.

Here, an unnamed narrator—anchored by habit to a boyfriend both familiar and fading—plunges headlong into an affair with a magnetic older woman, drawn by the raw gravity of new desire. What begins as a bright rupture soon grows knotted and rough: shame, self-questioning, the anxious rewriting of the self in search of a truer script. Millner captures the exhilarating rise of infatuation with a poet's sharpened precision. She also portrays the gradual erosion of certainty with a storyteller's hunger for ache and truth.

The couplets themselves are never ornamental. They reflect the novel's deeper tensions: two lines yoked by attraction, expectation, sound, and sense. Their rhymes are at turns tender or jagged, slipping loose or locking tight. When rhyme feels effortless, it becomes dangerous and deceptive; it creates a sonic echo of alluring surfaces, revealing how ease can shimmer at the lip of threat. When rhyme strains or snaps—under friction, under force—it carries the sting of consequence: the pattern buckling under the weight of real life. Millner, skilled as a composer, knows exactly when to tune the music, when to fracture it, and when to let the seams unravel.

Millner blurs the boundary between poetry and prose, paralleling how her narrator navigates the blurred lines between intention and impulse. Some passages slip into almost conversational clarity; others flare into dizzying lyricism. Even the book’s most musical moments feel like strategic self-constructions, as the narrator tries—and sometimes fails—to shape a story clean enough to believe in. The tightness of the couplets becomes its own quiet confession: that the narrator’s language, like her love, can sometimes be untrustworthy.

There’s breathtaking intimacy in how Couplets renders queerness—not just the fevered dream of first queer love but the slow heartbreak of remapping oneself around that love. In Millner’s hands, queerness is less a revelation than a destabilization— not a fixed arrival point, but an open wound, a reordering still in progress. The narrator's shifting relationship to her own language—how she confesses, conceals, and reconceives—proves as tense and as tender as her relationships with others. And when the rhymes begin to fracture, it feels less like a literary experiment and more like a human heart stuttering, an identity unspooling with uneven breath and a terrible, breathless honesty.

If you’re looking for a triumphant coming-out story, Couplets may challenge your expectations, but it does so with exquisite beauty. It reveals what survives after reinvention's shimmering promise gives way to the messier music of real life: loneliness, contradiction, and the half-songs of longing we hum. This is a book about falling apart and the fragile, ferocious labour of becoming again.

Millner leaves the ending tender, unfinished, and true to the story's belief that becoming is never a clean victory, only an endless, vulnerable act of persistence. She has written this tale for anyone who loved badly but dreamed defiantly, for anyone whose story was too wild, too intimate, too unfinished to ever fully master its telling. She offers us harmony and fracture, resonance and rawness, and in the process she creates something so clear and searingly honest that it aches.