"A librarian shouldn't ever have need of arguing" — Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

[spindizzy]

Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

I don't think that I can review Sarah Gailey's Upright Women Wanted without mentioning "Between the Coats," an essay that Sarah Gailey wrote about queer tragedies and realising that they didn't have to be inevitable. The question at the heart of that essay – Do you know that queer people are allowed to have happy stories? – is one that I felt like I could see beating at the heart of Upright Women Wanted.

Esther is on the run. She's smuggled herself out of the town where her father executed her girlfriend, hiding in the back of the librarian wagons in the hope that the librarians – perfectly appropriate women who travel around distributing government propaganda – could maybe help her be the person society expects her to be before being herself gets her killed. ... She wasn't expecting the queer gun-slinging librarian spies, okay!

I have a lot of empathy for Esther. She's a queer woman who doesn't know that it's possible for her to have a life as a queer woman, let alone a happy one. She's been trained to smile and appeal to men as the only reliable way of staying safe, and that her life and safety hinges on her ability to monitor those around her. She can't tell when people are joking, she knows in her soul that she only has value when she's useful, and every interaction she has is a deliberate choice between being who someone else wants her to be and being herself. I have been Esther, okay, I love her and was not expecting to be crying over her on the tram to work.

Most of the book is her learning the answer to that Do you know that queer people are allowed to have happy stories? question and realising that so much of what she knows about her world is wrong. Some of the things that she figures out – like the resistance and the role of the librarians in it, and what's going on with the capital-W War – honestly surprised me when she explicitly works it out, because I thought she'd already come to those realisations gradually beforehand, but the shock when she actually puts it into words suggests not. Friend of the Business, readingtheend points out in her review that the world-building is quite light, and I can't argue because I didn't realise until at least a third of the way in that it was supposed to be a dystopian future version of the Old West, not a historical fantasy like Rivers of Teeth. The speckling of world building we got was enough to intrigue me rather than frustrate me, especially because it made sense for Esther's point of view, but if you like your dystopias to be explained you might be disappointed. Apart from that, there's bandit attacks, plenty of action, and a series of reveals that again, aren't necessarily as much of a surprise to the reader as they are to Esther, but I still found them satisfying. Plus: if you were in the mood for hardbitten gunslinging women and non-binary people taking in someone who is distinctly not hardbitten but trying to keep up anyway, this is for you.

I don't know if I want to describe Upright Women Wanted as subverting the queer tragedy narrative that I keep highlighting, but it's definitely engaging with it. Sometimes that engagement feels a little shallow – Esther's girlfriend is suggested to have died less than a week before the story starts, and Esther becomes interested in Cye fairly soon after, which means that there isn't much space for grief or mourning! But it does specifically talk about those tragic narratives and the effect they have on the people who consume them with no counter-argument, and the fact that sometimes it's not fiction that brings us this counter-argument, but the people around us who are living their own lives and showing us that it's possible.

... What I'm saying is "I came here for grumpy militant librarians and now I'm crying about how lucky I was that I had fandom friends to take me in when I was a baby queer who knew nothing about the world," which wasn't the take-home point I was expecting. I liked it, it broke my heart a little, and it gave me such a book hangover after I finished it.

[Caution warning: off-screen abuse, hostages, homophobia, internalised homophobia, backstory death of a queer character] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.]

Comments

[batrachian]

Well, shucks, I'm going to have to read this now, aren't I.

[spindizzy]

I mean, I vote yes because I want more people to read it and tell me what they thought...

(Also I love your icon, that's really cute!)

[bethynyc]

Preordered and expecting it tomorrow or the next day. So excited for this book!

[spindizzy]

Oh that's exciting! I hope it arrived quickly for you! Did you go for the hardcopy or the ebook?

[bethynyc]

Hard copy! It is the next book on my tbr, and I have a doctor;s appointment to day so I will probably get to read it!

[readingtheend.com]

Oh, this is such a wonderful lens to read this book through. I liked it maybe a little less than you, but I did love the whole idea of Esther exploring the possibility of a better ending for herself.

[spindizzy]

It was the first thing that occurred to me and then once I'd found that angle I couldn't stop looking at it through it! Yeah, I agree with all of your criticisms, I just loved Esther a lot. >_> That's a really good way of putting it, thank you Jenny!