Dykette

December 1, 2022

Partners Sasha and Jesse are thrilled to escape Brooklyn for the holidays, having received an invitation to the country home of two older, distinguished lesbians, news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda. They're joined by Jesse's best friend, Lou, and Lou's latest lover, Darcy, whose queer confidence Sasha envies. It will make for roller-coaster week. Davis wrote the YA novel Everything Must Go; with an 80,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 2, 2023
Three Brooklyn couples descend on a Hudson Valley farmhouse over Christmas in Davis’s waggish send-up of lesbian culture (after Everything Must Go). The reader’s guide through the gay yuletide antics is Sasha, a high-femme graduate student whose relationship with Jesse hits the skids after she overhears Jesse’s virtual therapy appointment: “It feels like I’m starving for love, and she’s feasting on it.” The house is owned by Jules, a primetime newscaster à la Rachel Maddow, and Jules’s partner, Miranda, a therapist with a podcast. They’re soon joined by Darcy and Lou, the former an artsy influencer. The six cook in the house’s commercial-sized kitchen, hike in the Catskills, and sip hot drinks made with oat milk. Together, they revisit the 1990s film Boys Don’t Cry, and Sasha lusts after Miranda while thinking about Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, Darcy, whom Sasha dismisses but secretly envies, pronounces the film “dated.” The couples’ extended stay becomes more fraught after Jesse and Darcy take to livestreaming an erotic art performance, and Sasha, who thought she’d incorporate the trip into her graduate research on queer domesticity, reexamines her fantasies and theories. Though there’s a bit too much exposition, Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality. It’s more digressive than propulsive, but it’s worth adding to the weekend bag.

April 1, 2023
In her first novel for adults, Davis explores what happens when people are isolated physically while remaining very much online. Over the course of 10 days--as 2019 turns into 2020--three New York couples convene for an ostensibly bucolic holiday getaway. Cable-news host Jules Todd and her partner, therapist/podcaster Miranda Saraf, are the "queer elders" with enough money and enough of a sense of domesticity to own a second home in the Hudson Valley. Lou runs a home-goods shop in Bushwick that has been featured in Vogue. Their new girlfriend, Darcy, retails coveted fashions on the Lower East Side. Perhaps more importantly, she's leggy and gorgeous and has a blue checkmark next to her name on Insta. Jesse is a set decorator by trade and a "Renaissance butch" by inclination. He's there with Sasha, a graduate student working on a cultural history of femininity as defined by small spaces and miniaturized objects. Most of the story is narrated from Sasha's point of view, and if the descriptions of the main characters seem hyperspecific, it's because Sasha is acutely aware of both status and LGBTQ+ typology. How readers react to this novel will largely depend on how they react to Sasha. Both she and her creator clearly understand that she's a whole situation--radically insecure and spectacularly self-involved, emotionally demanding but never not playing a role, impulsive while never losing sight of her immediate goal. During the time covered by this narrative, her immediate goal is to not let Darcy replace her as the adorable bimbo in this particular m�nage. The battle for high-femme dominance comes to a head when Jesse and Darcy collaborate on a piece of livestreamed performance art that Sasha perceives not just as infidelity, but also as a parody of her sweetly pink aesthetic. A view of contemporary queer life presented by a spectacularly unreliable narrator.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 15, 2023
Sasha and Jesse, twentysomethings who've been together for a year or so, get the invite of a lifetime: a winter week upstate at the Hudson, New York, home of their ""queer elders,"" iconic national news anchor Jules Todd and her therapist partner, Miranda. Joining them are a couple whose relationship is even fresher than Sasha and Jesse's, their friend Lou and blue-check-verified Darcy, ""of artsy-elite, Slavic-vibes internet fame."" This first adult book from the author of the YA novel Everything Must Go (2017) unfolds from the perspective of Sasha, who's working on a doctorate in gender studies and quotes Leslie Feinberg, Chris Kraus, Sarah Schulman, and Vanderpump Rules in equal measure. Because Sasha can only be herself, ""frenetic and dissociated, believing that emotional presence actually ruined most things,"" mysteries and jealousies abound for her and us: Who keeps texting Miranda? Do Miranda and Jules still have sex? Is Jesse crushing on Darcy, or is the erotic/disturbing art piece they're working on together just that? An engagingly self-aware and entertainingly claustrophobic story of performance and realness.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 13, 2023

Author of the YA title Everything Must Go, Davis makes her adult debut with a darkly humorous exploration of gender, lesbianism, and the struggle to be known. The story centers around Sasha and her butch partner, Jesse, who are spending the winter holidays with their acquaintances, liberal news anchor Jules and her therapist wife, Miranda, at their home in Hudson, NY. Joining them is Jesse's best friend, Lou, and Lou's influencer girlfriend, Darcy. Since Jesse has made friends with Darcy, Sasha sees Darcy as a rival and harbors a furious jealousy as Jesse helps Darcy prepare for a live performance planned during the trip. Davis's prose is simple and rhythmic, making it easy to get absorbed in the story. The middle of the novel drags a bit, but tensions run high near the end before crescendoing to a dramatic finale. The narrative is deeply entrenched in queer culture, and many readers will find the portrayal genuine and have plenty to discuss. VERDICT A niche read that will really stick the landing when it finds its audience; recommend to readers of messy, queer dramedies who enjoyed Jen Beagin's Big Swiss.--Jennifer Renken

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.