About Good Lesbian Books

Storybook Women print
Storybook Women
Greetings! As you've probably noticed by now, we're a book reviewing site for lesbian writing. There are two reviewers, Cat and Cress.

The First Reviewer, The Cat, likes fantasy, sci fi and graphic novels and started the whole thing, and wins awards for the longest, wordiest reviews ever. In most cases, I'll have written whatever you're looking at.

The Other Reviewer, Cress, is the manga explorer but steals a lot of books off The First Reviewer and posts their own opinions as well. They will probably be deliberately contradictory (the blaggard).


 About the Site
Good lesbian reading matter has been few and far between for many years, and what existed has been very hard to find. Luckily for all of us, the number of books and comics is growing - but do you know how to find them? And which ones are worth reading?

We've got a FAQ page about running the site and reviewing books over here. We'll add to it as people ask us stuff!

Find us on...


Good Lesbian Books is a guide to a selection of good lesbian (and bisexual) books, along with a description and some kind of review for each title. This includes fantasy, romance and biographies, as well as graphic novels and webcomics. To skip the reviews and just start browsing, check out the Good Lesbian Books Amazon Store.



Who runs it?
There's two of us, Cat and Cress. Cat is the one who started the site and writes most of the reviews, but Cress is better at keeping up with the emails! We're mostly out of the habit of writing 'I' instead of 'we', but (unless it's in a review), 'I' means 'we'. For example, on this page. We're both avid readers, and you can read about how we got into lesbian fiction in this guest post at KT Grant's Babbling About Books blog.


What is a 'Lesbian' book?
If you're looking for a book that's sapphic in some way, you probably don't want books where 'the cousin of the main character is lesbian' or 'the main character thinks about it once then goes out with a boy for the rest of the book'. And while you might want to support lesbian authors, I know I tend to go for their books because I expect them to be, well, about lesbians. At least occasionally.

This site is about books that have a lesbian or bisexual female main character, or are set in worlds that assume everyone's bisexual or gay (and actually includes women as important characters!), or are written by lesbian authors (but the books have to be good, and there will be disclaimers if the characters aren't both queer and female). Basically, any time we use the word 'lesbian', in the context of this site, we mean 'there is girl/girl attraction and/or romance'. Whether either of the girls involved might also spend some time being, or being attracted to, some other variant, doesn't really matter, as long as the girl/girl part is the important part of the story. Also, it has to be positive (or at least 'lesbians are normal, and can be horrible people too, but only because they're like everyone else').

Occasionally, there will be reviews of books that have a mythos of being 'lesbian' but on closer inspection aren't exactly (e.g. Paksenarrion and Sassinak), for example, books with female asexual characters or generally genderqueer women. Or lesbian books that appear to be good and... aren't.


Buying Books
We've set up a lesbian books Amazon store that exclusively contains lesbian fiction and nonfiction. It's probably the best place to start, if you're just shopping.

I'll be investigating other online bookstores as well and comparing prices, but so far Amazon has stocked almost everything (and prices change so much online!). Almost every book now has a kindle option available from Amazon as well, especially the newer publications.

Prices: 
Obviously it's out of our hands, and can change, so we're not going to try and list prices in most cases.
As a general guideline: For fiction, the price is usually between $10 and $20 (new best sellers may be more, paperbacks may be less). Kindle e-books can be from $1 to $15.  Non-fiction can be anything from $10, to $200 for the more obscure textbooks.


Any comments or opinions? I'm open to guest reviews, recommendations, and suggestions!

Yes... with a few rules. 


To start browsing: click through to one of the Category pages above for an overview, pick one of the tags at the lower left of the page to bring up all related posts, or browse the popular and newest reviews and the archive on the left and right of the page! Or browse our quick review guide here.

To JUST look for titles, rather than reviews, then the  Good Lesbian Books Amazon Store has a lot more  lesbian books (and only lesbian/bi books) to look through, in organised categories.


The Categories  
These are somewhat approximate, as this site will only allow me so many main pages, but as I review and discover titles, I'll be adding a brief description and links to the reviews in the relevant category below. (bear in mind that the reviews will generally be ahead of the categories). Also see the Themed Book Lists for suggestions of lesbian books along specific themes (e.g. pirates, fairy tales, vampires)                                       
While it's not complete, I have a long backlog of books I'm putting up - slowed by the fact that I want to at least introduce each one, and preferably properly review it. I do take guest reviews, even of books I've already reviewed (you might have a different perspective - or simply confirm mine!) - if you are interested, contact us via the Contact Us page.

Comment Policy
It's pretty simple. Comments should be:
1. Vaguely on topic
2. Not abusive, to us or to anyone who might be reading them
3. Not be spam. We are not a place for you to drop links to your dating service/ viagra offers/ other unrelated site. Even if your comment looks genuine, spammy links will get it deleted.

Otherwise, please comment away! We love feedback and getting responses.

Good Lesbian Books is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. If you like our reviews, buying stuff through us makes us happy and causes us to write more!
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