Reviews tagging 'Lesbophobia'

The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara

1 review

waytoomanybooks's review

I was assigned this book in my Contemporary Queer Literature class, and I and several of my classmates told our professor that we couldn't and wouldn't finish reading it. The book steps out of "gritty realism" and veers into "tragedy, trauma, and grief porn" a la A Little Life. Every character in the novel is graphically raped multiple times. Every underage character at one point or another enters into a "relationship" with an adult. Every character at one point or another becomes a prostitute. There is even a character that had a mummified corpse in their closet. This is not an exaggeration. I'm not putting this behind spoiler tags because I think everyone should know about this before reading it. I wish I had known! Upon realizing that we weren't going to finish the book, our professor said that if we found the first third to be horrific, then we certainly shouldn't finish the book because it "gets worse."

Grief, loss, trauma, death, rape, etc. are unfortunate parts of life, but the author seems to take almost ghoulish delight in hurting characters who are based on real people. Don't read this book.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Terminal illness, Addiction, Alcoholism, Blood, Chronic illness, Classism, Death of parent, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, Body shaming, Bullying, Drug use, Dysphoria, Eating disorder, Gaslighting, Gore, Hate crime, Injury/Injury detail, Lesbophobia, Misogyny, Murder, Outing, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Transphobia, Abandonment, Ableism, Alcohol, Child abuse, Cursing, Deadnaming, Death, Excrement, Grief, Homophobia, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Pandemic/Epidemic, Panic attacks/disorders, Pedophilia, Rape, Self harm, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment, Toxic friendship, Toxic relationship, Violence, and Vomit