Pride Month Pairings: 10 Queer Films and the Books to Read With Them
A recommendation guide for finding your new favorite queer movie, and the perfect book to go with it.
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Last week, I revisited one of my favorite films of the year, Julio Torres’s Problemista. Something this time around felt extra familiar, beyond the general “queer Latino lives in New York, creatively blocked, surrounded by annoying rich people, has artist mother.”
Around the same time, I was noncommittally pondering a third reading guide for this month, a way to celebrate the final week of Pride that didn’t feel obvious or pandering. I thought back to the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month my sophomore year of college, when the supervisor at an ill-suited work-study job who’d otherwise taken little interest in me was suddenly clamoring for my “unique perspective” on the “Latinx student experience.” Now, with free reign over my Substack, I had no real desire to self-commodify and write the Pride version of “How To Honor Your Latinx Friends This Month.”
My first two ideas were off-base, a Frankenstein’s monster collection of books and/or movies that felt too discoursed-out to recommend in a way that came off as anything but marketing. As much as I loved them, I didn’t know how much more there was to say about Detransition, Baby or Emma Seligman’s Bottoms. And there were plenty of other options I didn’t want to leave behind just because they had already accrued their share of discourse and/or praise.
Eventually, I realized the sense of familiarity in Problemista was stemming from the memory of something else fictional: Gerárdo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio, a novel I reviewed late last year about a Pet Sematary-adjacent, vampire-esque creature who, like Problemista’s Alejandro, lives a surreal existence with his artist mother. I thought about other books that had inspired me to watch certain queer movies, and movies that had tipped the scales on starting certain queer books. If there’s no real escaping the throes of artistic discourse, and no real way to write a themed reading guide that doesn’t feel like saying “Here, queers, try this one,” approaching my list from this angle might at least feel like something original.
So that’s what I’m doing. From here on, I’ll share a (very abridged) collection of my favorite queer films, from contemporary classics like Carol and Portrait of a Lady on Fire to smaller releases like Problemista and Fancy Dance. And, because this is ostensibly still a literary blog, they’ll be paired with the best novels to read alongside them.
Romantic Tragedies
Film: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, dir. Cèline Sciamma)
Novel: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador, 2022)
If one trope has dominated queer (and especially lesbian) cinema, it’s the doomed romance. When mishandled, it can get admittedly tedious. The extensive criticism of the “bury your gays” phenomenon—in which queer characters rarely see happy endings to their romance, and are instead deemed expendable, doomed to a tragic, lonely fate—isn’t unwarranted.
But a well-done queer tragedy, like the two in our first pairing, is anything but tedious. Instead, they honor the realities of queer histories in a way that recognizes queer stories as profoundly human, universal ones. Arguably, this pair subverts the “bury your gays” trope altogether, instead meeting a romance that could only be queer with a sense of tragedy that feels universal, with central lovers who are anything but expendable.
My first movie recommendation is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, French director Cèline Sciamma’s now-iconic period romance. Set in late 18th century Brittany, the film follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a misanthropic painter who accepts a role as portraitist and companion to a flighty young woman, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). As Héloïse’s upcoming—and unwanted—wedding to a Milanese nobleman approaches, the pair form a bond in isolation that soon blooms into a passionate but doomed love affair, one that haunts Marianne in the final days of creating her portrait.
Meanwhile, in Julia Armfield’s part horror, part love story Our Wives Under the Sea, another tragic love affair meets its end by the waves. The novel follows Miri, a young British woman anxiously awaiting the return of her deep-sea researcher wife, Leah, from a mysterious expedition funded by an unknown entity. But when Leah returns—months later than expected and with unexplained physical and psychological symptoms—Miri must face the possibility that the wife she once knew is no longer.
Jumping between Leah’s time under the sea and Miri’s time mourning (and trying to salvage) her lost marriage, Our Wives Under the Sea—like Portrait of a Lady on Fire before it—is a tragic, lyrical elegy for two grieving lovers mourning each other, the life they had, and the life that could have been.
Enigmatic Lovers
Film: Carol (2015, dir. Todd Haynes)
Novel: The Adult by Bronwyn Fischer (Algonquin Books, 2023)
Obviously, this is a special case. Carol itself is already a film adaptation of iconic author Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, giving it an automatic literary mate. And if you’re starting from the movie as a reference point, it’s more than worth it to take a chronological step backward to visit Highsmith’s original novel. But in addition to The Price of Salt, think of Bronwyn Fischer’s The Adult as a contemporary answer to the mid-century story.
In Carol, it’s Christmastime in 1952 when lonely shop girl Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) meets Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a glamorous, mesmerizing older woman. Before long, the pair are in the throes of a whirlwind romance. But as Therese soon learns, very real stakes—from Carol’s messy divorce to the concrete legal and social consequences that would accompany coming out—threaten to disrupt the lovers’ budding fantasy at every turn.
Meanwhile, in The Adult, Natalie is a lonely college freshman when, like Therese before her, she meets an enigmatic neighbor, Nora. Like Carol, Nora is a secretive, sometimes distant older woman navigating a complicated divorce when she sets her sights on Natalie, beginning a hypnotic affair that oscillates between nonchalant and all-consuming.
If anything, The Adult is The Price of Salt’s more cynical, insidious spiritual successor. Though freed from the societal restrictions that haunted Carol, Nora is anything but liberated. Instead, The Adult finds her viciously maladjusted to the position of power she holds over Natalie, flighty and manipulative where Carol was understandably cautious. And with all the same obsessed infatuation as Therese, Natalie finds herself not at the center of an easier, freer love story, but something much darker.
Growing Pains
Film: Shiva Baby (2021, dir. Emma Seligman)
Novel: All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews (Viking, 2022)
Okay. A pause on tragic love affairs. Instead, a pivot to post-recession queer comings of age.
In Shiva Baby, the cult-favorite debut from Bottoms director Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott stars as Danielle, a bisexual college senior preparing to graduate with few prospects other than her sugar daddy relationship. Praised for its high-anxiety, real-time pacing, Shiva Baby follows Danielle over the course of a claustrophobic shiva service for an unnamed relative, where she’s confronted with nosy extended family, judgmental neighbors, the sugar daddy himself, and worst of all, her beloved, successful ex-girlfriend, Maya (Molly Gordon).
A decade earlier in Milwaukee, Sarah Thankham Mathews’s All This Could Be Different sees another young queer woman graduate into the height of recession. Luckily, unlike Shiva Baby’s Danielle, protagonist Sneha has managed to land a decent—if soul-sucking—corporate job. With a modicum of economic freedom and independence from her family back home in India, Sneha begins to explore her previously-repressed queerness, collecting a motley crew of part-friends and part-lovers along the way. Then, the reality of recession begins to set in, and the life that once seemed stable becomes anything but.
Though different in pacing and delivery—Seligman opts for supersonic wit in places where Mathews chooses melodic prose and slower, building dread—All This Could Be Different and Shiva Baby match each other’s high-anxiety tones. Together, they also reflect another wave in sapphic storytelling, an alternative to the wave of period dramas that instead offers blissfully messy comings of age. With nuanced voices that oscillate between sharp, acerbic cultural commentary and refreshingly sincere reflections on love, friendship, and young adulthood, Seligman and Mathews’s respective debuts cement them as refreshing, exciting queer voices on the ascent.
The Queer Surreal
Film: Problemista (2024, dir. Julio Torres)
Novel: Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Zando, 2023) (full review here)
If you’re lucky, you’ve already seen Problemista. In it, Torres stars as Alejandro, a young gay Salvadoran living in Bushwick whose dream of becoming a toy designer for Hasbro is put on hold when he learns his work visa will expire in a month’s time without a sponsor. Desperate to stay in the country, Alejandro accepts a job assisting Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an eccentric, reclusive art critic attempting to stage one final show for her late husband. Soon, Alejandro finds himself on a wild, surreal goose chase to please Elizabeth and navigate immigration bureaucracy, encountering every manner of obstacle—from entitled art world gatekeepers to literal capitalist ghouls—along the way.
Monstrilio is another kind of magical realist odyssey. In Monstrilio, Magos is grieving the death of her 11-year-old son when she impulsively removes a piece of his lung, and, following an old wives’ tale, cultivates the tiny organ into a sentient being. In the years that follow, she and her two co-parents watch as the being grows from a tiny, anthropomorphic monster known only as “the lung,” to Monstrilio, a bloodthirsty creature with fur and fangs, to M, a teenager who looks almost like the lost boy.
Set between an isolated farmhouse in upstate New York, a sprawling family estate outside Mexico City, and the avant-garde art scene in Berlin, Monstrilio follows each member of Magos’s unconventional family as the young M journeys to discover himself—his queerness, his vampiric tendencies, and eventually, his independence.
Monstrilio and Problemista feel like twin flames. Both book and film treat sexuality like a set piece woven into a larger surrealist backdrop; for Alejandro and M, existence itself is queer. Both protagonists find their immigrant status is just one facet of a perpetual out-of-placeness. Both are the sons of eccentric artist mothers, simultaneously eager for their unique, gifted sons to realize their destinies and terrified the outside world will not be so kind. And ultimately, neither son will know what the world has to offer until he experiences it on his own.
Ties That Bind
Film: Fancy Dance (2024, dir. Erica Tremblay) (full review here)
Novel: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2022)
A woman in her 30s with for whom “family” is a complicated term is suddenly thrust into the middle of a crime drama thanks in part to her beloved sibling, dredging up uncomfortable memories and forcing the protagonist to uncover histories the world would rather leave buried.
In Olga Dies Dreaming, the debut novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Xochitl Gonzalez, this premise is the catalyst for Olga and her closeted brother, Prieto, to finally reckon with their estranged mother, Blanca, a Puerto Rican revolutionary who has long since abandoned her post. In Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance, which premieres this week on AppleTV, the same premise marks the beginning of a dangerous odyssey for Jax (Lily Gladstone), a single queer woman caring for her 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson).
When Roki’s mother, Tawi, vanishes from their home on a Seneca-Cayuga reservation, local law enforcement proves less than interested in the case. Frustrated by the lack of response, Jax and Roki set out on a cross-country quest to solve Tawi’s disappearance themselves—and escape their own mounting legal trouble—in the days leading up to an annual powwow where mother and daughter are set to perform.
Olga and Fancy Dance are family dramas where very little of the family drama is driven by homophobia, but unconfronted queerness looms ever-present all the same. Instead, anchored by intricate relationships and rich, culturally hyper-specific storytelling, Fancy Dance and Olga Dies Dreaming are powerful, sometimes hard to bear, but impossible to put down stories about rejecting convention, forging family, and seeing one another in a world that deems you invisible.
The Tender Edge of Adolescence
Film: Pariah (2011, dir. Dee Rees)
Novel: Notes on Her Color by Jennifer Neal (Catapult, 2023)
Dee Rees’s beloved directorial debut hardly needs an introduction. It’s been added to the National Film Registry, won the Indie Spirits’ coveted John Cassavetes Award, and named one of was The Hollywood Reporter’s 50 Best Films of the 21st Century, making it easily one of the most acclaimed films on this list.
Pariah follows Alike (Adepero Oduye), a teenage poet in Brooklyn gradually coming into her own as a butch lesbian. Alike finds solace and affirmation in her sole gay friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), and a budding first love with her classmate Bina (Aasha Davis); but at home, her overprotective mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), is desperate to snuff out her daughter’s budding expression, while her overworked father, Arthur (Charles Parnell), is in denial altogether. With a hyper-intimate focus on Alike and her family as she barrels toward adulthood and each character comes to terms with her queerness, Pariah is as profound in its empathy as it is specific and moving in its storytelling.
A magical realist answer to Pariah’s hyperrealism, in Notes on Her Color, Black Indigenous teenager Gabrielle shares a similarly difficult relationship with her own mother, Tallulah. Except mother and daughter also share a secret: both have a genetic ability to change the color of their skin on command.
But when Tallulah experiences a mental health crisis that leaves her hospitalized, Gabrielle is left to spend her gap year alone under the strict, watchful eye of her controlling father. Eager to bolster her resume ahead of college applications, Gabrielle’s father enrolls her in piano lessons with Dominique, a musical prodigy who, unbeknownst to him, is also openly queer. Suddenly, Gabrielle’s hidden ability becomes just one of her many secrets. As her relationship with Dominique evolves into something more, Gabrielle must face the daunting prospect not just of coming out, but of coming out from under her parents’ thumbs.
As with many of the novels and films on this list, queerness in Pariah and Notes on Her Color means something beyond just sexuality—it’s a radical existence, one that draws lines in the sand between parents and children and demands a place for itself in a world far too ready to push it under the rug. With the same harrowing hyper-intimacy as Pariah and an added streak of something mythical, Notes on Her Color imagines queerness in its most radical state—as a transgressive, magical way of being.
Found Families
Film: Summerland (2020, dir. Jessica Swale)
Novel: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)
If I had a nickel for every time a fictional misanthropic lesbian unexpectedly found herself entrusted to care for misunderstood children who had nowhere else to turn, I’d have at least two. Niche as it may sound, this homage to the queer chosen family may actually be a critical chapter in the lesbian canon.
In Summerland, it’s 1940 in Kent when reclusive, unsociable scholar Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton) discovers she’s been unwittingly assigned to care for Frank (Lucas Bond), a young boy, evacuated from London ahead of The Blitz. Though reluctant, she allows Frank to stay, and soon finds that caring for him triggers long-buried memories of her former lover, Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). But after receiving devastating news, Alice makes the controversial choice to keep a secret from Frank—and eventually discovers even deeper secrets in return.
Across the world and three decades later, we find Lillian, the protagonist of Kevin Wilson’s (quicker, funnier) Nothing To See Here. It’s 1995 in Tennessee and Lillian, once a rising academic star, is now 28 and working a dead-end job after a boarding school scandal dashed her potential a decade earlier. Then a letter arrives from Madison, Lillian’s uber-wealthy one-time best friend and roommate, promising her a new life. Only one condition: Lillian must spend a summer caring for Roland and Bessie, Madison’s 10-year-old twin stepchildren. Oh, and the twins catch fire when agitated. Lillian skeptically accepts, and the life she once envisioned for herself finally seems within reach—that is, if she can manage to navigate the family’s sticky politics, reconcile what lies buried between herself and Madison, and keep the children from going up in flames along the way.
The idea of the queer found family is nothing new—queer people have always found ways to build community where biological relatives and institutions alike have fallen flat. It’s the reason one of these stories is set in WWII, the other in the mid-nineties, and both resonate today. So, where stories like Summerland and Nothing To See Here intervene isn’t in depicting a new phenomenon, but in celebrating the joy of the chosen family, as something not just born out of tragic circumstances, but actively joyful, necessary, and life-affirming.
Illicit Affairs
Film: Disobedience (2017, dir. Sebastián Lelio)
Novel: Mrs. S by K Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)
A close-knit religious community, and a closeted lesbian affair that threatens to unravel its very structure. It’s a tale that even with time, we—and its protagonists—can’t seem to escape.
In Disobedience,1 Rachels Weisz and McAdams star alongside Alessandro Nivola as Ronit, Esti, and Dovid, three childhood best friends separated decades earlier when Ronit left their Orthodox Jewish community. When Ronit returns following the death of her Rav father and discovers Dovid and Esti have since married, all three are forced to confront the feelings long since left buried between the two women.
In Mrs. S, a young, unnamed butch Australian finds moves to the English countryside to become the matron at a remote all-girls Catholic school. At first, existence is lonely as the school’s youngest and least religious employee and one of few queer people in the area. Then, they meet Mrs. S, the school’s beloved guidance counselor—who also happens to be the headmaster’s wife—and the narrator is thrown into a secretive. infatuation that places their very existence at the school on shaky ground.
With sparse, obsessive prose, Patrick’s novel captures the same haunting, all-consuming desperation that follows Ronit and Esti, a love that butts up against taboos and even threatens to bring down social structures, and feels worth it all the same.
Metamorphosis
Film: I Saw the TV Glow (2024, dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
Novel: Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (translated by Marjam Idriss) (Verso, 2018)
If you’re a fan of queer cinema (or just still on Film Twitter), doubtless you’ve already heard something about I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s allegoric trans horror. Like, a lot about I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s allegoric trans horror.
In I Saw the TV Glow, it’s 1996 when Owen (Ian Foreman, later Justice Smith), a lonely seventh grader, meets enigmatic ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who introduces him to her favorite TV show, The Pink Opaque. Owen quickly becomes obsessed with the series, which follows two teenage girls who share a psychic connection that allows them to fight monsters in a secret realm. But the more he watches, the harder it becomes to separate the world of the show from reality—and to bury the internal truths The Pink Opaque threatens to dig up.
Suffice it to say the hype is not unwarranted—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something quite like I Saw the TV Glow. Inspired by their own transition, Schoenbrun described the film as an allegory for the “egg crack” moment, “when you stop pretending you’re not trans, trying to desperately find every reason why you’re not, and admit for the first time that you are.” In constructing the allegory, they’ve built something perfectly horrific, a coming of age whose protagonist may never fully come of age, an interrogation of nostalgia that somehow conjures up the feeling for something that never really existed, a reality where repression is so suffocating it becomes surreal.
If any contemporary author could match the uncanny, purposefully disjointed, allegoric horror in I Saw the TV Glow, it’s likely avant-garde Norwegian novelist Jenny Hval.2 Hval has the kind of visceral weirdness to which Ottessa Moshfegh aspires, combined with a penchant for unnerving, fragmentary structures that mirror Schoenbrun’s time jumps and absurdist interludes.
Paradise Rot, translated from Hval’s 2009 Norwegian debut novel Perlebryggeriet, follows Jo, a young Norwegian woman who moves to a strange new country3 for university. And, in a Shoenbrunic turn, as Jo experiences a queer awakening and her ideas about gender and sexuality begin to unravel, so too does the fabric of reality itself.
Money, Power, Glory
Film: The Favourite (2018, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Novel: Come & Get It by Kiley Reid (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024)
It’s 1705 in Great Britain when The Favourite begins, and Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is middle-aged, lonely, and increasingly disinterested in reigning. In the background, her cunning, power-hungry lover, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), exerts increasing influence over the country’s politics. That is, until Abigail (Emma Stone), Sarah’s younger, all the more conniving younger cousin arrives at the palace, and the two women become locked in a battle to secure the queen’s affections by any means necessary.
Like The Favourite, Kiley Reid’s Come & Get It is a story about sex and power—one set three hundred years after the film and half a world away, but a queer, twisted story about sexual transactions all the same. In Come & Get It, Agatha Paul is a recently divorced, moderately successful writer in her late 30s, hoping for a fresh start when she accepts a professorship at a university several states away. Instead, she becomes the nucleus of a vicious power grab in the university’s scholarship dorm, where her budding relationship with Millie, a 24-year-old RA, goes from transactional to inappropriate, to much worse.
Come & Get It and The Favourite are far from twins when it comes to plot. One is set in the royal court of 18th-century England, the other in a middle-class dorm at a public university in Arkansas. One revels in its protagonists’ ruthless ambition, while the other is more forgiving and focuses more directly on clear-cut victims. But far beyond the tricky power struggles at their cores, Come & Get It and The Favourite are united on another, far more important front of queer liberation: both tell the harrowing stories of lesbians who suck.
That is, both are interested in the making and unmaking of morally bleak central characters, whose queerness is neither driving cause nor unrelated happenstance, but a fundamental part of their subversive existences, the object that is twisted to unleash their wrongdoing. They are lesbian stories uninterested in being straightforward parables about oppression while remaining deeply interested in being intricate explorations of power. Stories uninterested in respectability politics and instead interested in the full range of the human experience—sad lesbians, unlikeable lesbians, power-mad lesbians, and most importantly, lesbians who suck. And, if other sapphic favorites like Todd Field’s TÁR and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss have taught us anything, we are all desperately clamoring for more lesbians who suck.?
Honorable Mention
Film: Thoroughbreds (2017, dir. Corey Finley)
Novel: Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (edited by Carmen Maria Machado) (Lanternfish Press Clockwork Editions, 2019)
Like Carmilla a century and a half before it, in Thoroughbreds, a viciously intense friendship between two teenage girls becomes something more when one introduces violence to the list of things they share.
In the former—Le Fanu’s 1872 novella credited with shaping the literary vampire—Laura is an isolated British teenager living in a remote Austrian castle, haunted by visions of a beautiful specter who visits her at night. Then, a carriage accident brings her face to face with the subject of her dreams: Carmilla, a magnetic, seemingly ageless young woman. The pair quickly become inseparable, but, as Laura soon learns, their newfound friendship may bring far more than she bargained for.4
Meanwhile, in Thoroughbreds, Olivia Cooke and an early-career Anya Taylor-Joy star as Amanda and Lily, former childhood best friends who reconnect as teenagers in upper-class Connecticut, where Amanda has gained a reputation as a possible psychopath. As the pair nurture their resurrected bond, the privileged Lily hatches a plan that will put Amanda’s penchant for violence to use—if they can only go through with it.
The leading pairs in Carmilla and Thoroughbreds may stop short of acting on their tension sexually, but their relationships are no less intense for it. Instead, their dynamics take “physical” to another level, one where the emotional intensity of their bonds manifests in everything—and everyone—they’re willing to destroy for each other. What the women of Carmilla and Thoroughbreds experience is far from a romance, but queerness—subversive, unconventional forms of being and loving—drips from every word.
Final Word
For the purposes of this list, I opted to steer clear of direct page-to-screen adaptations for these pairings (where’s the fun in that?), but two that would have made the list:
Virginia Woolf’s early trans classic Orlando: A Biography (Hogarth, 1928) and Sally Potter’s film adaptation, Orlando (1992). In Orlando, a dashing male poet in Elizabethan England awakens after a long sleep to discover he’s inexplicably transformed into a woman. What’s more, he’s also seemingly immortal. Over the next three centuries, Orlando travels the world, trying out a variety of lovers and gender expressions and enjoying the company of generations of great poets along the way, all while becoming—like Woolf herself—a once-in-a-generation writer in her own right.
For a queer adaptation of a non-queer classic, I recommend Fire Island (2022, dir. Andrew Ahn), Joel Kim Booster’s reimagining of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. Set over the course of a week-long annual vacation to Fire Island, where the Bennett sisters are a close-knit group of gay men, the movie is a rom-com unconcerned with holding up the genre’s most heteronormative tendencies. What results instead is a hilarious, joyful celebration of queer love and friendship that pays homage to Austen’s beloved romance by seeing the subversiveness in Lizzie Bennett herself.
Pro Tip
If you’re looking to read any of these titles, I highly recommend Queer Liberation Library, a free digital library service that operates through Libby. QLL has a catalog of over a thousand LGBTQIA+ ebooks and audiobooks, and library cards are available to anyone with a valid email address.
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Like Carol, Disobedience is already a page-to-screen adaptation (of the 2006 novel Disobedience by Naomi Alderman), so here, it’s paired with a novel that meets it in other ways.
A less-contemporary author already has, many times over, and it’s Shirley Jackson with Hangsaman. In a very, very real and concrete sense, I Saw the TV Glow is 90s trans Hangsaman.
Almost definitely just England.
This final pairing is classified as an “honorable mention” for a reason: Le Fanu’s original text, much like Finley’s film, is admittedly light on its explicit textual queerness. That said, Lanternfish Press’s revised edition, which features the original text alongside a foreword and annotations from queer horror icon Carmen Maria Machado, offers a refreshed take on the classic story, inviting the reader to explore more than just the monstrousness beneath the novel’s surface.