Hi 🙂 For those of you who don’t know, I (Sasha) started a Sapphic Book Club on Twitter back in February. Every month we read a sapphic book and chat about it, which is a lot of fun! Our May book is We Set The Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia, and if you want to join, we’d LOVE to have you, just DM @midnightb00ks or @bookishsappho on Twitter!
Our April read was The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake, and I convinced a few members of our lovely book club to contribute to a blog post. Five of us share our thoughts on this amazing book 🙂 Do go follow all our wonderful fellow book club members on their various platforms 🙂
Sasha | @midnightbookgirl_
The Last True Poets of the Sea left me sobbing. This is a gorgeous story of friendship, grief, family and mental health. It is at once heart-warming and heart-wrenching, deeply emotional and profound. The sapphic romance is raw and beautiful, real and stunning. This book is lyrically and gorgeously written, a powerful and moving story that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
Amber| @bookishsappho
This book is truly breath-taking. I was not expecting to love it as much as I did and I definitely didn’t expect to see so much of myself within the main character, Violet. I think this book is SO important, and preaches lots of important points such as seeking help when you need it, talking to people about how you feel, therapy and self-discovery. Violet’s growth throughout the book was heart-warming and I adored her relationship with both her brother and Liv.
Izzie| Izzie’s Busy Reading
This book was absolutely beautiful in every way possible. The author loved these characters, and that was so clear from the start. They were all so well fleshed out with clear and unique personalities. What was most special to me was the conversation around trauma and being a survivor. It’s something I struggle with every day and when I read some of the sentences I literally just had to hold the book for like 5 minutes because I felt so seen. I also think the relationship between Violet and her brother Sam was beautiful because they were both ‘broken’ but loved each other enough to try and help each other to put themselves back together. This was a book with so much love and heart and stunning writing. It showed trauma in so many different ways, and how people cope with it so differently, and it did it with such care.
Léa| We Have No Apologies
The Last True Poets of the Sea is definitely a book that owns my heart. The prose is everything you could expect from such a novel: sharp yet completely lyrical. The part that played generational trauma in the plot really resonated with me. My favorite aspect of this novel was how perfectly fleshed out the characters were, and how beautiful friendships and romance were depicted. I really loved how anxiety and mental illnesses were represented, and how each character had their own authentic way to cope. This book gives us a beautiful sapphic romance, and it’s really refreshing to see a sapphic main character having space to be messy without it being used as a mean of moralization. This book gave me space to breathe in, to dream and to hope.
Ivet| @penpxls
Okay, I absolutely loved this book so much!! From the very beginning it was a page-turner, and I immediately loved the main character (which I usually find very hard in YA contemporary) The author’s writing was SO captivating, it kept me engaged and kept me thinking about the book when I wasn’t reading it, it made me /want to/ read it Personally, I couldn’t bring myself to be too interested in the “hunting for the wreck” subplot (?) but the characters and the prose kept me going even when I wasn’t too preoccupied with the plot Let’s talk characters, First of all, you can DEFINITELY tell she loved them and loved writing them I feel like I can see that it meant a lot to her to write about them? if that makes sense They were handled with so much love, and care, and respect; and were so beautifully characterised, so WELL shaped out, their relationships so raw and imperfect and real Reading about Liv’s coming out made me feel so seen! To quote, “I’m going to have to have this conversation with them a million times, you know. I might wait a while for the next one.”…. “Part of me thinks it’ll take years.” This scene hit so close to home, it hurt I adored the mental health representation, which was, like the characters, handled with SO MUCH respect and so realistically depicted! The relationship between Violet and Sam broke my heart, several times. To see these two broken people, part of a broken whole, love each other so much and work so hard to understand each other, even when it seems impossible; to learn to forgive each other, to heal each other.. it made me feel so much Overall: that was honestly a once-in-a-lifetime book experience and I am EXTREMELY thankful to the author for providing us with something this beautiful.
Sasha and Amber Read 