The Librarian of Burned Books by Brianna Labuskes

 

Holy shit, this novel is good. I mean, there's subtext kinda constantly bubbling to the surface, but given the themes of censorship at play, here, that's hardly surprising, and given that the novel was published in the Year of Our Lord 2023 (and was therefore probably in process for a couple of years before that) it's almost certainly not an accident that there are parallels between the historical moments in the novel and the present day. All that subtext isn't anything like a problem because all the textual stories--I can think of at least three, two of which are love stories, one of those queer--are all strong as fuck (so to speak). I'm now powerfully curious about Ms. Labuskes' other books.