Celeste's Reviews

You're in good hands with professional food stylist Elle Simone Scott and her versatile spreads for any occasion—boards that have so much than the traditional charcuteries. Scott provides both homemade and store-bought options and offers plenty of variations for vegans and vegetarians as well as meat eaters, and includes recipes for drinks to pair with these creations. You can catch me filling up on the hummus board.  —Celeste

Drawing on a broad array of interviews from people of all genders and sexualities, Fine asks the reader to consider the myriad ways our gender is separate and intertwined with our being. It doesn’t pretend to have answers to these queries but does offer relatable experiences and a depth of self-reflection. A wonderful addition to the bookshelf of any intersectional feminist or anyone curious to have more understanding of their gender–expansive community.  —Celeste

Nora Stephens is a high-powered literary agent with platinum blonde hair and a kickass Manhattan apartment. The only thing she loves more than her bestselling client is her little sister Libby, who is very pregnant with her third child. Libby suggests a vacation to the small North Carolina hamlet of her favorite romance novel. Nora, recently left by a beau who falls in love with a girl next door on his travels (again) begrudgingly complies but even in escaping to a small town, she can't avoid her professional nemesis, Charlie. Emily Henry is at her peak with publishing world and romance genre inside jokes. The heart of the story lies in the sweetness of sisterhood and bravery in the face of big change.  —Celeste

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