Book Beat aims to highlight other books that we may hear about through friends, social media, or other sources. We could see a gorgeous ad! Or find a new-to-us author on a list of underrated romances! Think of Book Beat as Teen Beat or Tiger Beat, but for books. And no staples to open to get the fold-out poster.

• Daughter of Daring

  

  Author: Mallory O’Meara
  Released:
  February 18, 2025 by
  Hanover Square Press
  Genre:
  Nonfiction

  From Los Angeles Times bestselling author Mallory O’Meara, the exhilarating story of America’s first professional stuntwoman, Helen Gibson, who worked during a time when women ruled Hollywood

  Helen Gibson was willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as “The Most Daring Actress in Pictures,” Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, producer, performer and stunt double for iconic stars of the era. Her exploits were as dangerous as they were glamorous, featured in hundreds of films and serials—yet her legacy was quickly overshadowed by the increasingly hypermasculine and male-dominated evolution of action films in the decades that would follow her.

  In this fast-paced and feminist biography, award-winning author Mallory O’Meara presents Helen’s life and career in exhilarating detail, including:

  • Helen’s rise to fame in The Hazards of Helen, the longest-running serial in history

  • How Helen became the first-ever stuntwoman in American film

  • The pivotal and overlooked role of Helen’s contemporaries—including female directors, stars and stuntwomen who shaped the making of narrative film.

  Through the page-turning story of Helen’s pioneering legacy, Mallory O’Meara gives readers a glimpse of the Golden Age of Hollywood that could have been: an industry where women call the shots.

  A biography about Hollywood’s first stuntwoman seems up the Bitchery’s alley.

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• The Emilie Adventures

  

  Two novel-length steampunk adventures from the author of the wildly successful Murderbot Diaries.

  Together in one volume for the first

  Emilie and the Hollow World
  Running away from home and stowing away on the wrong ship, Emilie embarks on a fantastic adventure.

  Emilie learns that the crew hopes to use an experimental engine to journey to the interior of the planet, but when the ship becomes damaged on arrival and evidence points to sabotage, they encounter the treacherous Lord Ivers, along with a strange new race.

  Can Emilie and her new-found friends possibly reach the surface world again?

  Emilie and the Sky-World
  When Emilie arrives in Silk Harbor, Professor Abindon, an old colleague of her friend Lady Marlende, warns them of something strange and potentially deadly in the sky, a disruption in an upper air aether current. On further investigation they realize it’s a ship from another aetheric plane.

  How to determine if it’s a friendly explorer, or something far more sinister? Nothing less than a journey into the dangerous air currents will do.

  Join Emilie and she navigates the strange landscapes of the upper air, and the deadly menace that inhabits the Sky World.

  Tor is re-releasing the first two books of Wells’ steampunk YA series in one volume!

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• Girl on Girl

  

  Author: Sophie Gilbert
  Released:
  April 29, 2025 by
  Penguin Press
  Genre:
  Nonfiction

  “Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies.” —The New York Times

  “So clear-eyed that it’s startling.” —The Washington Post

  “Entertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry.” —The Boston Globe

  From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

  What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

  Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

  The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

  Elyse mentioned this in the SBTB Slack and I have a feeling I’ll find this one pretty enraging.

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• Tarot in Other Words

  

  Author: Cassandra Snow
  Released:
  May 5, 2025 by
  Weiser Books
  Genre:
  Nonfiction

  A collection of alternative approaches to reading the tarot for those looking to gain new and deeper insight—especially for marginalized folk who don’t see themselves reflected in traditional presentations of the tarot.

  Cassandra Snow’s groundbreaking Queering the Tarot helped change the shape of tarot discourse for scores of new readers to reclaim this ancient practice in their own way. Tarot in Other Words opens doors for these brilliant tarotists, offering unique insights and concepts for tarot readers of all levels. Queerness will be a thematic thread running throughout the project, with individual essays tackling a variety of topics that expand on that theme in new and compelling ways.

  Presented in two parts—Part Finding Ourselves in the Tarot, and Part Finding the Tarot in Ourselves—the anthology comprises ten essays that shine a light on the tarot from multiple queer perspectives. Understanding queerness—and why it matters in tarot—can teach all of us so much about not just gender and sexuality but also how and why we should liberate ourselves in the first place. These essays on queerness show us that who we are is right, beautiful, and sacred. Queerness teaches us to honor differences in others and understand that what is good for one may not be good for all. There is a historical basis for why tarot and queerness go hand in for a lot of cultures, such as the Romani and other oppressed groups forced into nomadic lifestyles, fortune-telling using cards and other tools was and is to this day survival work. This is the same reason we see so many queer, BIPOC, and disabled people take up tarot in the US.

  Contributors Asali Earthwork, Charlie Claire Burgess, Maria the Arcane, Maria Minnis, Junauda Petrus, Siri Vincent Plouff, Rebecca Scolnick, Cassandra Snow, Taylor Ursula, Meg Jones Wall

  Tarot in Other Words is an essential collection of writing by leading queer tarot writers and community leaders about their tarot practice and its relevance to LGBTQI2SPA+ [or QUILTBAG], QTPOC issues and beyond.

  Essays on tarot from prominent queer tarot writers!

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