F/F Friday is a project recently started by Rachel Manija Brown, described thusly: “Every Friday, review, recommend, or discuss an FF book, short story, or other work.” There is also a community on Dreamwidth.
So I’m going to rec a really delightful lesbian werewolf novelette that is available for free online: The Cage by A.M. Dellamonica!
Jude, the narrator, is a contractor (in the carpentry sense) with a broken-woman problem and a string of fix-upper ex-girlfriends. So of course she falls for another one, Paige, a single mom who is raising an adorable baby. A perfectly normal baby. Nothing weird about this baby, no-ma’am. Oh, by the way, she needs to hire Jude to help her soundproof her basement and put cage bars on the windows. For … a band. That is recording in her basement. And trashed the place last full moon. Yep, that’s totally it.
So basically this is a story about how the Vancouver lesbian community comes together to help raise a baby werewolf, and two slightly broken people start to fix each other up. It’s cute and sweet and funny, with a great sense of place and interesting worldbuilding — the story is set shortly after werewolves were revealed to humanity for the first time, and the antagonist is a self-proclaimed Buffy-type werewolf hunter who is a serial killer from the point of view of the werewolves. The characters were a lot of fun (Paige is a bit flatter, but I absolutely loved Jude’s narrative voice) and I loved the sense of community in the story. Sometimes it takes a village (of lesbians and other social misfits in the queer community) to raise a baby werewolf!
(Note: My posts show up as posted by Lauren Esker. That’s also me, using a different pen name – it just has to do with my WordPress settings. I can’t find a way, yet, to switch between WordPress identities under the same account.)
Mar Delaney 