She’s stowed away in the Librarians’ book wagon when it leaves her town because she thinks that if she joins them, she can try to become good, or at least to do good before her badness brings her to a bad end. In this future, Librarians – supposedly chaste, upright women – bring carefully authorised reading material from town to town.Įsther, the protagonist of Upright Women Wanted, knows she’s bad. This is a dystopian future America ruled by fascists – homophobic, misogynist fascists (so a lot like the past). Upright Women Wanted sets itself in a future American South/Southwest that owes a lot to the Westerns of the past. I’ve read enough of Sarah Gailey’s work at this point that I’m reasonably sure I enjoy their work more in concept than in execution, but they are such appealing concepts and, with Upright Women Wanted, the concept is squarely in the centre of any graph of things I love in fiction. A love letter to the power of representation, of getting to read about a love and a life like the kind you’ve only dreamt about, and choosing to fight for a world in which you can live without fear.Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey ( Tor.com Publishing 978-1250760654, $20.99, 176pp, hc) February 2020. Upright Women Wanted weaves the conceits of a Western romp with the fabric of an anti-fascist call to arms, all wrapped in a love letter to queer resistance and community. The short, sharp plot moves swiftly, and Gailey’s biting voice shines in this setting, brimming with wit and alive with joy. They demonstrate the patriarchy inherent in the tropes of the genre, and they write resistance into it.

They reckon with the complexities of 'fighting back,' of violence as resistance, of the weight of killing, even in self-defense. They give queer women and nonbinary folks agency, letting them be the heroes of their own stories. They center this narrative on Esther choosing to resist. The deliberate misunderstanding of 'deviancy' as a capital offense, whether in sexuality, gender or political thought, is not fiction, and though the novel begins with the unjust, state-sanctioned murder of a queer woman and alludes to many more, Gailey lets that injustice read as injustice. There’s queer tragedy here, but it’s never exploitative.

Upright women wanted sarah gailey