Dykette A novel

Three Brooklyn couples descend on a Hudson Valley farmhouse over Christmas in Davis's waggish send-up of lesbian culture (after Everything Must Go). The reader's guide through the gay yuletide antics is Sasha, a high-femme graduate student whose relationship with Jesse hits the skids after she overhears Jesse's virtual therapy appointment: "It feels like I'm starving for love, and she's feasting on it." The house is owned by Jules, a primetime newscaster à la Rachel Maddow, and Jules's partner, Miranda, a therapist with a podcast. They're soon joined by Darcy and Lou, the former an artsy influencer. The six cook in the house's commercial-sized kitchen, hike in the Catskills, and sip hot drinks made with oat milk. Together, they revisit the 1990s film Boys Don't Cry, and Sasha lusts after Miranda while thinking about Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, Darcy, whom Sasha dismisses but secretly envies, pronounces the film "dated." The couples' extended stay becomes more fraught after Jesse and Darcy take to livestreaming an erotic art performance, and Sasha, who thought she'd incorporate the trip into her graduate research on queer domesticity, reexamines her fantasies and theories. Though there's a bit too much exposition, Davis delights in upending concepts of gender and sexuality. It's more digressive than propulsive, but it's worth adding to the weekend bag. (May)

In her first novel for adults, Davis explores what happens when people are isolated physically while remaining very much online. Over the course of 10 days--as 2019 turns into 2020--three New York couples convene for an ostensibly bucolic holiday getaway. Cable-news host Jules Todd and her partner, therapist/podcaster Miranda Saraf, are the "queer elders" with enough money and enough of a sense of domesticity to own a second home in the Hudson Valley. Lou runs a home-goods shop in Bushwick that has been featured in Vogue. Their new girlfriend, Darcy, retails coveted fashions on the Lower East Side. Perhaps more importantly, she's leggy and gorgeous and has a blue checkmark next to her name on Insta. Jesse is a set decorator by trade and a "Renaissance butch" by inclination. He's there with Sasha, a graduate student working on a cultural history of femininity as defined by small spaces and miniaturized objects. Most of the story is narrated from Sasha's point of view, and if the descriptions of the main characters seem hyperspecific, it's because Sasha is acutely aware of both status and LGBTQ+ typology. How readers react to this novel will largely depend on how they react to Sasha. Both she and her creator clearly understand that she's a whole situation--radically insecure and spectacularly self-involved, emotionally demanding but never not playing a role, impulsive while never losing sight of her immediate goal. During the time covered by this narrative, her immediate goal is to not let Darcy replace her as the adorable bimbo in this particular ménage. The battle for high-femme dominance comes to a head when Jesse and Darcy collaborate on a piece of livestreamed performance art that Sasha perceives not just as infidelity, but also as a parody of her sweetly pink aesthetic. A view of contemporary queer life presented by a spectacularly unreliable narrator. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.