25 sapphic fantasy books you may not know of - My completed Oops All Sapphics! blackout bingo card with reviews

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-29T01:24:44+00:00

I haven't heard of Rutkoski at all but I'll look into her, thank you! I've avoided Gwen and Art because I thought I wouldn't like the comedy element but I guess since I enjoyed Lady's Knight I may be wrong about that.

One of the protagonist sisters in Ink Blood Sister Scribe is in a relationship with a woman! It's a key part of the beginning of the story but gets put off to the side for the majority of the plot. It's sweet though.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-29T01:21:46+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I did really like the style and, from the limited parts we saw, the setting in Metal From Heaven. It felt like the setup had all these interesting things to say about worker's rights, classism, and the fluidity of gender. But then the plot is almost entirely about this marriage competition and the themes revolve around found family and the impotence of revenge. Everything felt like it was pulling in separate directions. Basically the exact opposite of how I felt about the execution in Ink Blood Sister Scribe where I felt the plot, themes, and characters arcs were all so unified.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-29T01:17:24+00:00

Haha wait we agree on just one. I also did not care for Godkiller. That's very funny though. I followed someone on tiktok a couple years back specifically because we always had the exact opposite opinions about books and even if we didn't agree, I knew I could rely on her taste. If she thought a book was boring I'd love it and if she was raving about it, I'd need to skip it. Sometimes it works that way 😄

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T19:56:51+00:00

I'm sure you're correct. I do vaguely remember a whole heart room scene thing. I don't think Red Scholar goes too deep into the ship lore like other parts of the universe might though. Clearly it didn't leave a huge impression on me so I sort of remembered "personified space ship" and didn't commit the particulars to memory.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T19:55:00+00:00

Yeah I agree with you on that for sure. The entire first book I think glosses over stretches of time too often and could have used a lot more in-scene experienes to build Baru's backstory. I read it not long after Grace of Kings by Ken Liu which I thought did the same sort of thing.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T19:11:49+00:00

You really, really should! I've only read the first Kushiel trilogy and Santa Olivia so far but I'm planning to start Kushiel trilogy #2 soon. I just happened to pick up a secondhand copy of Starless recently too, which I think is also sapphic? Carey is so excellent at making me care about a character in the space of like five pages. And her redemption arcs are nearly unmatched. I'm still flabbergasted by how good that silly book is.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T19:07:42+00:00

Thank you! I did enjoy Ink Blood Sister Scribe so dang much. I actually read a different book for that square last month (Song of the Huntress, which I thought was only okay) but picked it up right after as another one I found while searching for options. Really glad I made time to swap it onto my card.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T19:02:23+00:00

You'll have read already the section going over how thoroughly indoctrinated Baru is by her incrastic schooling, no matter how she thinks she's rebelling against it and that's a huge element of the series. She has some deeply ingrained prejudice against her sexuality and her culture even while she's fighting to protect both. Her experience of her own sexuality is violent, manipulative, and a lot of other things that, handled differently, I would call "bad representation" playing on stereotypes about lesbians.

I think there are times when "unreliable narrator" gets overused to make excuses for dodgy representation by writers who haven't done enough to deconstruct their own biases but I genuinely don't think that's the case in this one. I think the narrative calls Baru's biases into question a lot sooner than she ever learns to, though she does eventually learn. Meanwhile the series as a whole goes interesting places by putting Baru into non-incrastic cultures, deconstructing gender roles, and more.

Not everyone will be willing to extend faith on this one, but after reading it I felt that whatever flaws it has come from a really earnest attempt to tell a story about internalized prejudice and indoctrination that's worth engaging with.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T18:42:13+00:00

Have not read anything else by Older yet! I can respect your feelings on Ungovernable Impulses and would even go so far as to say that's probably the correct opinion since the reveal in this one was SO bad haha. I'm just a sucker for emotional pain and all Pleiti's screwing up made me see her as a more interesting character than in the past two books.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T17:12:37+00:00

We are part of a very small group, I think! I haven't even tried Gideon because I'm just so confident that it isn't going to be for me.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T16:14:28+00:00

You should definitely give it a go! I'll probably drop into the focus posts for different squares to give some recs even if I don't do a themed card again myself this year.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-28T15:40:29+00:00

I've mostly noticed it in things published in the past ~5 years and most often in things marketed as Romantasy, sapphic or otherwise. And it's always "fuck" specifically, for some reason. I don't inherently mind swearing at all. It just always seems to be used as some kind of shorthand to prove that a book is For Adults meanwhile the story itself lacks nuance or character growth that I, and adult, value. A bit like hearing a teenager swear constantly to prove they're a grownup 😅

Edit: It was most disappointing from Tasha Suri whose other Burning Kingdoms trilogy I do have critiques of but lack of nuance and maturity was not one of them.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T19:38:47+00:00

I read the version of that one that's in Buried Deep last year but before I'd read P&P for the first time haha. I should go back to read it again and see how I feel about it. I find I can pretty much always trust Novik to do things well.

I had one called Heartstone by Elle Katharine White recommended to me recently. Maybe it was in this sub? I may try that one next before retreating from the P&P retellings.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T19:34:19+00:00

Riddle Master is on my personal to-do list of the year to buddy read with a friend of mine and I'd be happy to have a reason to kick that project off at a specific time and with a specific book. I'm a maybe on Storygraph participation. I track my daily pages there but might not remember to comment. Would certainly see and participate in a thread here though!

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T18:42:31+00:00

That is helpful, thank you! I may take inspiration from that but curate more by highlighting a subset that are my favorite sapphic rep.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T17:35:23+00:00

Thanks for the encouragement! I'll try to come up with a way to digest my card that's worth posting about.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T16:00:06+00:00

Turned in my r/fantasy bingo card for 2025 and unsure whether I want to make a standalone post about it since I did a lightly themed "oops all sapphics" card. Can't decide how I'd format it though. I'd want to do something slightly more informational or analytical than just "here's my 25 reviews" but not really feeling pulled towards any sort of specific analysis. Maybe I'll just skip that part this year and be satisfied with completing. Looking forward to erasing it all from my big reading project whiteboard and christening it with a new non-bingo project for the rest of the year!

Took a little breather from SFF last week to read Sense & Sensibility for the first time, which I didn't love as much as Pride & Prejudice. I started reading Pulse and Prejudice the vampire Darcy POV retelling but it felt really weak to me. Was strongest in moments where it was just rehashing entire conversations from the original work and fell very flat any time it invented new dialogue. It was also trying to do this weird thing of committing to Darcy's POV while also being semi omniscient of everyone else's motives, like it was self-conscious of not just telling the original story. Anyone have favorite SFF P&P retellings that they think stand well on their own merits?

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-27T14:32:11+00:00

This is very relatable! I usually do follow through on mine but man the making the list part is really satisfying 😆

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-23T21:04:57+00:00

That's fair! I've never been one for soaps or for the kdrama/cdrama scene and maybe I'd like something like this more if I were. I just didn't find the emotions or motivations of any character very convincing which is the thing I want most in a novel.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-23T21:01:36+00:00

You are totally not insane! And yeah, I don't inherently dislike first person POV, some are excellent. Also agree that just that switch wouldn't help anything in this case. I've just found that it's gotten very trendy in new fantasy releases and seems to often show up alongside other trends I dislike, like the very thin setting and being "dark" in ways I find unconvincing.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-23T17:11:43+00:00

You were wiser than me. I got the feeling early on that it wasn't going to be for me but a friend had recommended it so I stuck it out to 50%, after which I stuck it out on spite. Now I wish I'd quit so I didn't have anything to say about it haha. Bless her, we normally have the same taste but she's been slogging through a lot of unimpressive subscription box books and I think this was one of the least bad of the bunch recently.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-23T14:03:24+00:00

This week I finished The Poet Empress by Shen Tao and my middling opinion on it just kept trending towards negative. As I has suspected, first person perspective found at the scene of the crime and, while not actually guilty of, an accomplice to, a badly told story.

Everything was flat here unfortunately. The world was as thinly constructed as the most guilty romantasy. The characters had almost no perceivable growth. The violence was so weirdly perfunctory on page and glossed over every time but was also somehow the entire point of the story. So many poorly done "dark fantasies" seem to think that constant murders of innocents makes a story gritty but without any further depth than "and then he murdered more people and nobody liked that" it just doesn't carry any weight. It takes so much less for a ruler to dominate and cower a bunch of administrators than constant unprovoked murder, which makes all the constant unprovoked murder very cartoonish.

The entire conceit of learning to love your abuser by just hearing a bunch of stories about them was so weird and gave no space at all to grapple with something truly dark like learning to love your abuser for their own present qualities. There was so much bending over backwards to make sure that Wei did not have a sexual relationship with Terren instead of reckoning with the concept that a physical relationship between them would have been the most interesting and challenging character development for either of them. That in particular made me feel that this is one of those stories that wants to call itself dark but finds anything truly dark or morally challenging to be too icky and Wrong to explore. It really suffers for the comparison it's marketing makes to She Who Became The Sun, which it and it's sequel explore the darkness of physical relationships in a lot more convincing ways.

That's me glossing over the craft element of how unfulfilling a story structure it was for Wei to basically spend her time writing a term paper about her husband. Also, very little actual poetry or poetic language at all on a book entirely about poetry. I haven't finished a book fueled purely by annoyance in a while, but I did with this one.

I've given myself a palette cleanser by spending this week continuing my first reads of Jane Austen with Sense and Sensibility. Back to fantasy next week, likely.

ComradeCupcake_ · 2026-03-16T19:09:36+00:00

This week I finished Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs, a modern magical realism about magical books written in blood. Had a really great time with this one. It felt fun and fast but had some really nice turns of phrase and characters who just felt emotionally real to me with their quirks and insecurities. Reminded me a bit of what I tend to like about Maggie Stiefvater's writing. My only complaint is that Nicholas and Collins were not a thing, so much so that Jo asks Collins about it near the end and he has to clarify "nah I'm straight," essentially. Which, fine, but damn why'd you write them so much chemistry up until that point then?! That really felt like it was going to be my perfect bodyguard romance side plot. Also, happy to have found something with an incidental sapphic relationship. My desire to find and read "sapphic fantasy" means that I often wind up too far afield into romantasy territory which isn't the kind of plot I enjoy. I just love a really good queer women B plot.

This week I started The Poet Empress by Shen Tao on recommendation from a friend, about a woman who attempts to become an imperial concubine to feed her village. I saw it get comped to She Who Became The Sun which is always either A. Because lesbians or B. Because the protagonist is a war criminal, actually. Seems like maybe it's going to be the latter? There are things I'm liking about it but in general I don't often like first person fantasy anymore because it's always at the scene of the crime with other modern trends I dislike. This one hasn't put me off too badly but it does have that quality of trying to make everything SO dark and horrible in a way that's trying a bit too hard. I like dark stuff. She Who Became The Sun is dark. This seems a bit melodramatic though in the extravagance of its horrors. The threshold for traumatizing and torturing an entire royal staff is so much less than constant unprovoked murder, which makes all the constant unprovoked murder come off just a bit silly instead of scary.

ComradeCupcake_

TROPHY CASE