#asian wlw
Sweet Love
we don’t talk enough about the issues Asian lgbt people face? constantly being fetishized and constantly facing rasicm within the lgbt+ community. you all are so strong and you don’t deserve any of this
IG: @malki_perera
IG: @92.4.29
Falling Into Place by Sheryn Munir
8/10
Do the wlw end up together : Yes
I’ve been trying to diversify up my reading selections and finding lesbian books that take place outside America/Europe has been quite the struggle… Which Munir cited as part of her inspiration to write a lesbian novel set in India. Tara Dixit has not had a romantic relationship since a college fling because she believes there’s no place for her to fall in love in India. When Sameen Siddiqi jumps into her cab one rainy day she’s first annoyed by the bubbly and persistent woman, then finds in her a new best friend, and then falls hard. It just figures that the woman who’s sworn she could keep herself from loving again falls for a woman with a live-in boyfriend. Their romance seems like a lost cause, and nothing’s even happened yet. At its barest bones, this is a sweet romance with a happy end. More than that, though, is that this book is woven through with food and culture that makes it a unique read from any other wlw book I’ve posted about before. Tara and Sameen’s initial friendship is based on going out for momos and dosas and other street snacks that had me craving while I was reading (and drooling over some images, to be honest). There’s also so much humor woven in with Tara’s mother’s relentless quest to find a potential husband her daughter won’t reject and the lengths Sameen goes through to keep her boyfriend’s parents knowing that they live together. And while I of course love a good romantic end, the scene where Tara’s mother tacitly accepts that her daughter will not ever be choosing a husband touched me even more. So all in all, a classic romance that hits the rom-com tropes without being cheesy, set in a region that wlw publishing has severely neglected. Also, the cover is just gorgeous.
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Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan
9/10
Do the wlw end up together : Yes
So I know I’m quite late getting around to reading this one, but basically I’ve been on hold at my library for the last 4 months. And I’m not gonna lie, seeing a book with a main wlw couple hitting the mainstream so hard that there’s a hundred person backlog waiting to read it makes me a bit proud. And boy, was it worth the wait. We start off with some beautiful worldbuilding; Lei is a Paper caste living in world where humans exist on a range of fully humanoid (Paper) to mostly demonic in appearance (Moon). Subsequently, the more demon features one has, the higher their standing in society. Lei lost her mother in a raid on her village seven years prior, and is herself taken to be a Paper Girl, one of the Demon King’s yearly selection of concubines. She has two goals when she arrives: to find if her mother is still alive, and to stop this from happening to any more families across Ikhara. In the fantasy action sense, this book really is everything. It isn’t afraid to make its dystopian rulers actually… evil. A lot of YA fantasy/dystopian books seem to shy away from showing actual violence or class prejudice (I saw one website compare it to The Selection which was… an interesting choice to say the least). Lei’s anger at the persecution that she’s lived under and at the way she’s now treated as an accessory is raw and completely believable, and makes the end of the book all that more validating. Moving on, I do love a good romance-against-the-odds, but I do have to say that it was not one of my favorite parts of the book. Compared to the fantastic way that Ngan builds her fantasy world and fuels Lei’s motivation, there really didn’t seem to be any build-up or chemistry in the romance until it was already happening. A few genre-typical lines near the beginning of the book made it clear who the love interest would be, but they did more to establish connection than the actual character interactions. All in all, this book gracefully threads the line of creating a uniquely imaginative world but keeps all the human vulnerabilities that makes it recognizable, and I would highly recommend you all go read it (if I’m not too late already).
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with covid-19 being a popular source of racism in this day, I’d like to share all my love and support with Asian wlw. y'all are so precious and amazing, and I wish others wouldn’t excuse their racism with coronavrius. I luv you all!!
