Lady Business

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!

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