![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In which there are gay cowgirl librarians
Sep. 22nd, 2020 07:01 pm Sarah Gailey is best known to me as the person who wrote the epic Twitter thread about the (thankfully scrapped) 19th century plan to farm hippos in the Mississippi River for meat, and who then wrote two novellas on the same theme. I read the Twitter thread but have not yet read the novellas, although I keep intending to, as the thread was very funny. But then a comrade recommended Upright Women Wanted, their post-apocalyptic Western about queer librarians. As I enjoy post-apocalyptic stuff and Westerns and many of my favorite people are queer librarians, I decided to read this one first.
This is a “high-concept” novella, in that it is very definitely and extremely a post-apocalyptic Western about queer librarians! Everything that happens in it is very much squarely within those things. The Librarians are tasked with distributing Approved Materials to far-flung outposts of what’s left of the United States a la the Pony Express, and while the story takes place in the future, the material conditions of life have regressed to a 19th-century frontier vibe because a forever war about nothing in particular has sucked up all the money and most of the petroleum-based products are diverted for military use only. This leaves us with an enjoyably mixed-time-period vibe to the worldbuilding, where people ride horses instead of cars because fuel is expensive, but every now and again something like a pair of latex gloves shows up.
While the Librarians are only supposed to distribute Approved Materials it turns out that they also secretly distribute Unapproved Materials, and also they are lesbians (all of them, as far as I can tell). This is very convenient for our protagonist, Esther, who has run away to join the Librarians in an attempt to basically get herself to a nunnery following the public execution of her girlfriend Beatriz, for deviant acts and possession of subversive literature. Esther is very sheltered and her dad is some sort of local political bigshot, and she has a lot of internalized queerphobia and is essentially ignorant of the existence of other queer people. The character development arc of the story is basically Esther coming to accept that she is not terrible and broken and learning that there are actually lots of other lesbians out there. Honestly I found it a little cheesy when we hit the emotional denouement and it was basically like “AND THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS: LESBIANS ARE EVERYWHERE,” although I did think it was cheesy in a very funny way, and I cannot argue with its truth value.
What did annoy me a little bit is that, although the story is basically about finding out that lesbians exist and the cast of characters is about 90% lesbians, the story not only never uses the word “lesbian,” it never uses any name at all for any kind of queer people, instead repeatedly having characters talk about “people like us.” Like you don’t need to go down the discourse rabbit hole of laboriously coming up with a different noun for every single possible variation of human sexuality--microlabels are fine if you want to use them, but they aren’t necessary and they aren’t usually real useful for communicating with other people--but it’s a bit weird to have the whole story be about a thing and to never name the thing. Please just name the thing; there are like five billion extremely charming historical terms for lesbianism you could dig up to play with.
I also was not real sold on the romance and I cannot tell if it is because it was too sweet and wholesome or if it really was kind of perfunctory; looking through some other Goodreads reviews it seems at least a few other people also weren’t real into it because it happened so quickly after Esther’s last girlfriend being publicly executed by her own father, so it appears that this actually isn’t the world’s most well-developed romance. I thought it was just me being incorrigibly aro again. But perhaps it also seems a bit rushed because this is a pretty short book and MOST of it is blessedly taken up with proper Western shenanigans like learning about the different colors of horsies and getting into dramatic shootouts in the desert.
The actual plot of the novella is a good time; it involves politics and murder and smuggling and all the kinds of stuff I like in adventure stories, although they are a bit strung together (there is a reason that all the summaries and blurbs and stuff focus on the themes and not the plot; it’s like, they’re journeying somewhere Esther doesn’t know to do a thing she’s not been told what it is, hijinks ensue). My favorite character is inarguably the charming, friendly, and emotionally supportive assassin, because of course it is. At one point our intrepid heroes shoot a cop and his entire posse, which is a satisfying thing to read these days. Overall I feel like this world could easily be expanded into a novel but it’d have to really go a lot deeper for the novel to be worth being a novel; as a novella it was a pretty fun popcorn read but if it were longer with the same level of cartoonishness I think that’d get old fairly fast. As it is, the thing takes like an hour to read, and it’s a pretty fun hour.
