Pajiba October 2024 Book Recommendations Superpost!

Hey, do you need a book-related distraction today?! Join in!

Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Margot Douaihy (@neonmargot)

Sister Holiday is an unlikely nun. She’s queer, covered in tattoos, has a gold tooth, and knows the Sleater Kinney back catalogue by heart. Still, she’s committed to taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and working as a music teacher at the crumbling New Orleans high school, Saint Sebastian’s, that took her in. And she’s also an apprentice PI, working for former fire inspector Magnolia Riveaux’s Redemption Detective Agency. Their latest case was supposed to be a bust against a cheating husband, but that was a set-up, and now there’s a body of a priest floating in the Mississippi River.

The first Sister Holiday mystery, Scorched Grace, was one of my favourite reads of last year. While sold as a quirky, cozy-esque read, it was a far darker proposition with some prickly ideas about redemption and evil at its heart. Sister Holiday herself, a chain-smoking Catholic of endless contradictions, was a snappy noir-esque protagonist who defied easy categorization. Her decisions weighed on her. Becoming a nun wasn’t an issue of easy salvation or an escape from her past but something far more personal and genuinely faithful. I was excited to see what she did next, and the sequel more than lived up to my expectations.

In Blessed Water, the floods are engulfing New Orleans. The slow-rising rainfall adds urgency to this languidly-paced story that is as much concerned with the living as the dead. Sister Holiday is devoted to God but not necessarily the church, which remains a corrupt and sexist organization where the old men at the top are lavished with money while the nuns do all the heavy lifting. The sleaze of the church spills over into the crimes that she investigates. Its stain touches everyone in the community, from Holiday’s fellow nuns who are still traumatized from the drama of the first book to the students who don’t see faith or its promises as viable to a city still troubled by its near and far past. To truly follow the church’s teachings seems to be to go against what the almighty institution preaches. In that context, to solve a murder is to battle an endless wall of silence that only grows more empowered the longer it refuses to speak out.

Douaihy does a striking job of navigating the unrelenting misery of this conundrum without descending into melodrama or cliché. It’s also ultimately a hopeful series that believes goodness has a place in society if people are willing to fight for it. She’s a welcome new voice in the crowded crime genre.

Gaudi Afternoon by Barbara Wilson

Irish-American translator Cassandra Reilly is meant to be working on an English version of a Spanish-language novel when she gets an unusual request. A stranger named Frankie Stevens calls her out of the blue to ask for her help in finding her ex-husband Ben, who she claims has gone missing in Barcelona. It’s a weird gig but it pays well so Cassandra takes it, but things quickly spiral out of control.

I found out about Gaudi Afternoon when I discovered its film adaptation, directed by Susan Seidelman and starring two of my all-time favourite actresses, Judy Davis and Lili Taylor. Since the movie wasn’t as easily available as the book, I settled for reading that. This is an odd duck that is thoroughly of its time.

First, it’s a fascinating portrayal of queerness in the early ’90s. Cassandra is gay, and it’s soon revealed that Frankie is a trans woman and Ben is a butch woman. There’s also a hippie-dippy bisexual foot masseuse in the mix, just to keep things spicy. The portrayal of these LGBTQ+ characters veers from refreshingly mundane to, ah, being within the expectations of their era, let’s say. That largely means that Frankie gets misgendered a lot, largely from her bitter ex who weaponizes it as an attack against her.

The plot itself is very loose, to the point where it feels non-existent at times. There’s not much of a mystery here, and Cassandra spends most of her time going from one place to another and back again. One character gets kidnapped so frequently that I just groaned by the time we got to the third instance. It felt like the author wanted to capture the frenetic camp and vibrant queer melodramas of Pedro Almodovar. I can certainly see all of this playing out with Carmen Maura and Rossy de Palma, but Barbara Wilson lacks the tangible understanding of genre that makes Almodovar’s films sing. A narrative like this should be non-stop, but Gaudi Afternoon is too soporific to replicate that joy. I so still want to watch the film, though. I mean, Judy Davis AND Lili Taylor?!

Plastic Jesus by Billy Martin

Sometimes, you just have to admire the audacity. We’re now all too used to seeing ‘original’ novels that were, once upon a time, fanfiction. Filing the serial numbers off of the Reylo epic you wrote for AO3 is just good business in a post-Fifty Shades world. But long before all of that, Billy Martin, one of the titans of disturbing queer horror, wrote the novella Plastic Jesus and dared to ask the question: what if John Lennon and Paul McCartney boned?

In this proudly thinly veiled fanfic, the Beatles are called The Kydds. They’re a quartet of nice young lads from working-class England who are driven to become pop superstars. Seth and Payton are the frontmen, both fiercely ambitious and talented, and soon in love with one another.

The story is only about 60 pages long and it’s not exactly rollicking with surprises given what it’s about. It does, however, pose an interesting alternate past. Would the path of LGBTQ+ rights have been different had, post-Stonewall, two of the most famous people on the planet come out? But it would require a far longer and heftier narrative to truly delve into that idea. I love Martin’s work so I’m predisposed to be fond of this, but I was left lacking (and I didn’t love how the Brian Epstein stand-in was used.) I’ll take the Liquor series instead.