Sarah Diemer

Iiiiii wanted to like this one, I really did but it just didn’t do it for me. Your mileage may vary and all that but I just didn’t connect to any of the characters very much and the romance was such an instalove situation that isn’t usually my favorite. I also… look I am ALWAYS on the lookout for werewolf books centered on sapphic women but there just don’t seem to be very many out there and this one didn’t really hit the buttons I was hoping for. The fantasy elements felt really show more shallow, the MC was a witch, but like… a pagan who didn’t believe in real witches and I could never quite tell what we were supposed to think of her. The love interest is a werewolf, but besides shifting like once or twice and saying literally every line with a growl and giving the MC a wolffish grin, it’s not very relevant to the story. Idk, others might really enjoy this, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. show less

Monstrously Beautiful

Project Unicorn (“A Lesbian YA Extravaganza!”) is a ya fiction project created by the wife-wife writing team of Sarah Diemer (Love Devours; The Dark Wife) and Jennifer Diemer (Sappho's Fables). Though the project is currently on hold, the idea is this: every week they post two free short stories on their website; these are gathered in a monthly zine, along with two previously-unpublished titles, which you can buy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords. There’s show more also a quarterly edition that includes the contents of the previous three ‘zines, which is also available on etsy. As of this writing, there exist six zines and two volumes.

I first discovered Project Unicorn by way of "The Witch Sea," an enchanting story about a witch named Meriel and the unexpected love she feels for a sea creature named Nor. A multi-generational feud has placed Meriel in the heartbreaking position of denying Nor that which she most desperately years for: the depths of the sea. I loved it so much that I promptly added all of Sarah Diemer's titles to my wishlist.

The stories found in Project Unicorn, Volume 1 are every bit as magical as "The Witch Sea." Beautiful, glorious, rainbow-hued magic. Accompanied by a menagerie of fantastical creatures - Kelpie unicorns, werecats, Victorian mermaids, kind-hearted witches, demons, even trees made human - the authors invite us to find and embrace the weirdness, the alienation, the darkness within ourselves. Those monsters staring at us through the glass of a magical compact? They are different from us, but...also the same. And that's a wonderful thing. There's light in the forest, yo.

It's difficult to pick just a few favorites, packed as Project Unicorn, Volume 1 is with gems. I'm partial to those tales in which the plucky - yet still unsure and awkward - heroine comes to the rescue of a nonhuman creature. In "Surfacing," the narrator's cruel brother John delights in dragging mermaids - plentiful in the seaside town of Port Luca - into the forest to suffer a slow, painful death by suffocation. No one stops John and his friends, even when they brag about their exploits; the mermaids are just pests, after all, more closely related to fishes than humans. One day the narrator happens upon this murder in progress, and does the unthinkable: she stands up to her brother and saves the girl. And herself.

More than anything (save for lesbian protagonists, of course), this is a common theme in Project Unicorn, Volume 1: Self-discovery. Acceptance. Redemption. Transformation.

In this vein, "Two Salt Feet" springs to mind. While running an errand for her mother, Sam somewhat inadvertently helps to liberate a mermaid from her tank in the meat market. When the vendor fishes her out for sale to a customer, the mermaid unexpectedly sprouts legs and loses the webbing between her fingers; she becomes human! After years of being hunted and consumed by their earth-dwelling cousins, the mermaids are evolving. And Sam, for one, is on board.

In the Author's Notes, Sarah (herself a vegan - yay!) reveals the genesis of "Two Salt Feet": "I was thinking about how having a voice is crucial for having rights, and began thinking about gay rights and voicelessness."

Also worth a mention is "The Gargoyle Maker," in which the breadmaker's daughter falls for the gargoyle maker Annabella - the gargoyles being magical creatures who come to life at night and keep the nightmares at bay; a love which is doomed because one town only needs so many gargoyles, hence Annabella's transient nature. I also loved "A History of Drowning" (the angel in the sea); "Mirrors" (the elf in the compact); and "Dreaming Green" (the seed in space), to name but a few.

There are also some wonderful retellings here. "A Craving" recasts the seven dwarfs as the villains; captors who exploit a trusting and indebted Snow White as a source of free labor. The witch, who shows up each day at Snow White's door bearing apples for sale, melts her heart and frees her from a prison of dirty dishes and unmade beds.

Even more ambitious is "In the Garden I Did Not Sin," in which Meno - the daughter of a fallen Eve, recently dead in childbirth - and Lysys, daughter to Lilith, meet outside the walls of a crumbling Garden of Eden. Sarah reports that "In the Garden I Did Not Sin" is "part of the larger world" of a novel tentatively titled The Apple Queen, which will explore the relationship "between Eve, the first woman, and Lilith...the first first woman." Insert "hgfshghgf" noise here!

The supplemental Author's Notes and Interviews, by the way? Well worth a read! Usually I skip the back matter, but in this case I'm glad I didn't. The origin stories, if you will, are at turns interesting and revealing, especially since some of the stories have seeds in real life. For example, "Nike" is based on Sarah's research on hotline prevention scripts, including a call she placed to the Trevor Project hotline. (This might explain its overly sunny "it gets better" ending, which is inspirational in this context but not necessarily helpful as an LGBTQ campaign.) Also: "The Mermaid Circus" is a real-life, honest-to-goodness tourist attraction in Weeki Wachee, Florida, and the Diemers' rescue dog Link did go missing for a fear-making twenty-four hour stretch of time (though they did not conjure a demon to help find him, as does Corrine in "Devil May Care").

One of the primary goals of Project Unicorn is to "give greater visibility to lesbian teens in young adult fiction and to normalize their presence in genre stories," as well as "communicate a message of hope." In this, the Diemers have done a lovely job. Plus the stories here just plain rock! I'm definitely picking up Volume 2, and await the arrival if The Apple Queen with bated breath.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2014/07/30/project-unicorn-volume-1-by-sarah-diemer-an... show less

Guh. This book ate me. Chewed me up, pushed me back out, and made me something new and different. It's been nearly half a year and the ideas from it have stayed. Love. The notes tied to the tree. The girl who is a tree. The souls which can be swapped.

This is another glorious act of Elora's everyone should love on.

I’ve always loved mythology. Growing up, I did a lot of research about Egyptian myths, but as time passed I became increasingly familiar with Greek mythology. I’m very proficient in Greek mythology and can carry a conversation about this stuff with anybody really. I know quite a few of the myths and details, and can name quite a few of the gods both major and minor.

I was on the hunt for a few indie books about a year ago, and was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon this book in a show more list of recommendations. It was described as ‘myth retelling’, which we’d talked about a lot in my University classes in third year. So, naturally, I bought it.

And then proceeded to read it in literally a day.

Let’s give a bit of background: the original myth of Persephone and Hades says that Persephone was stolen by Hades and forced to the Underworld. After negotiations with Olympus and a marriage to the Lord of the Underworld, Persephone agreed to spend six months with her husband in the Underworld, and another six on Earth with her family. The story explains why we have winter – Persephone is the Goddess of Spring, so with her down in the Underworld, the world freezes over into winter. When she returns, spring blooms again. She is the illustrious and kind Queen of the Underworld, and Diemer’s novel is told completely through her point of view.

Oh, and Hades is a woman.

That’s right, the ‘lord’ of the Underworld is actually a very beautiful woman, and Persephone isn’t stolen away, rather she willingly goes to escape a fate she thinks is worse than death – having to live alongside Zeus on Olympus.

Why is this terrible? I’m glad you asked.

There’s a very common joke with people who know Greek mythology that everything that happens is all Zeus’s fault. In this novel, this is taken to a whole new level. In common Greek myths, Zeus is the King of the Gods, who does whatever (and whoever) he pleases. He’s fathered demigods and monsters alike, and he, as said in the novel, takes whatever he wants coz he’s the ruler. Persephone hates him, for something he did that wronged her terribly in the past. And because of this, she refuses to even be anywhere near him. Zeus in this narrative is described as what he probably would have been – an arrogant selfish man, hellbent on getting his way at every turn. He spreads lies about other gods to make them less favourable; he forces himself on Demeter and then tries to do the same with her daughter (who is also his daughter); at a point, he even tries to orchestrate Hades’s murder.

Persephone runs away from all this, and nobody can blame her really. And she does it all to find her own happiness and make her own destiny.

Who knew that that meant that she’d end up running into the arms of a woman?

As far as myth retellings go, I think this book is spot on. It keeps to the original myths very well, with some changes towards the end that I’m sure are justified for the sake of the story. Persephone is a wonderful narrator, who is full of emotion and who leads you through the story gently, rather than with the boring tone some first person narratives tend to take. And the romance, while a slow burn (and I fucking hate slow burns) is a very satisfying one, even though it got a little cheesy towards the end. But hey, we all need some cheese in our lives sometimes!

Final rating: 4.5/5. A must read for fans of Greek mythology and LGBT literature alike. show less