Celeste's Reviews

This comprehensive volume of female photography pioneers contains historical images and biographical snippets to chronicle the change in photography from traditional portraiture to nude forms, gender-flipping portraits, and still-lifes, all the way to abstraction and collage. Historians and photographers alike will be enchanted by the whimsy and skill of female explorers of the photographic landscape.  —Celeste 

This amusing novel is a merry-go-round of absurdity and strange characters. We begin our journey with a forensic clay sculptor who takes the skulls of unidentified missing persons and recreates what they may have looked like in life. When she happens upon a clay head that looks eerily similar to one of her missing persons at an art gallery, the chase is on. With twists and turns that jump across time and space but are always interconnected, Daitch’s prose is skillful and compelling. —Celeste

Only Maggie Nelson could knit together the lexicon of “freedom” with references from academics, writers, and activists in such alluring fashion. This piece is perennial while being timely with the recent adoption of the word “freedom” by authoritarian and right-wing ideologies. She guides the reader along the passageways of freedom and its negative (through paradoxically sometimes truer interpretation) “unfreedom,” through art, sex, drugs, and climate. —Celeste

A cross of memoir and cultural criticism, Busby is known online for her takes on performative activism and white fragility. In Unfollow Me she turns the lens on the very mechanism through which she came into the public consciousness. How whole people are reduced to blurbs and likes, plus her personal history that led to the collision of the public and the private on social media. —Celeste

Seasoned fans of Meg (a witch), Mogg (a black cat), and Owl (an owl) will recognize some familiar panels from the R-rated daily postings that kept me on the edge of my phone during 2020. This tome perfectly captures the paranoia and confusion of early quarantine, but tenfold in the insanity that is the crew’s hard partying ways including werewolf divorce, arson, several bags full of thongs, a doomed treehouse, and a whole lot of dysfunctional love. —Celeste

This book is like getting gentle advice from your queer, sober older sister. Marlee's wisdom is given in a generous stream of tender insightfulness. Touching on addiction, art practice, divorce, and intimacy, this will be a book to revisit for its practices and comfort again and again. - Celeste

A teenage girl, Danuis, whose mother's family is white and father's family is Ojibwe, gets pulled into an undercover FBI meth investigation. The author wanted to write a "Native Nancy Drew" and Danuis is a heroine you want to root for—her culture and connection to community is her strength. With a distinct sense of place, this taut thriller is almost impossible to put down. - Celeste

Lillian is a poor and apathetic twenty something working mundane jobs with little sense of purpose. When the past comes calling in the form of her former posh boarding school roommate asking a favor, curiosity gets the better of her. That favor? Nannying her friend's step-children who happen to catch on fire when they get upset. - Celeste

Hailed as one of the original detective novels, this whodunit is full of satire and social commentary. The gift and subsequent theft of the fabulously valuable (but possibly cursed) Moonstone diamond sits at the heart of this twisting and turning caper. Despite some less than sympathetic colonial representations of Indian people, this book is host to many memorable characters. - Celeste

If I had a passing interest in Iceland before, after this book, I'm ready to book the plane. What a delightful mix of natural history, sociology, and myth of a unique and special island. The musings on the nature of museums and collections is clever and broadens the scope of the piece. The museums all have some sort of fantastic origin story and capture the essence of something purely Icelandic. - Celeste