Cascadia summer book bingo: Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco
Good morning! I'm traveling in Chicago this week, so instead of your usual news & arts roundup I'm publishing some brief reviews of various books I've been reading for Cascadia Democratic Action's Summer Book Bingo challenge. Want to join me in attempting to read 24 books about Cascadia or written by Cascadian authors? Download your bingo sheet here. Looking for suggestions in each category? You'll find them here! If you complete a sheet, send a photo to cascadiademocratic@protonmail.com or mail it to Cascadia Democratic Action, PO Box 20022, Seattle, WA 98102 to be entered in a drawing for some cool Cascadia merch!
Andrew Engelson
Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco
The gritty life of dockworkers and smugglers in the seedy port of Tacoma in the late 1800s is the setting of Katrina Carrasco's extremely enjoyable queer historical novel Rough Trade. Stevedore Alma Rosales, who's better known among her peers as the smuggler Jack Camp, becomes entangled in an opium smuggling plot and must solve a series of grisly murders while navigating her flirtatious friendship with Bess Spencer, a former Pinkerton agent who's taken up train robbery.
It's an extremely fun gender-bending rogues-gallery crime novel loaded with historical details from Cascadia at the turn of the century. Plus, plenty of steamy queer sex scenes! This is great summertime read by the Tacoma-based author who's also written The Best Bad Things, another gritty Pacific Northwest crime novel also featuring Alma & Bess.
Want to learn more about Carrasco? There's a great podcast discussion about writing queer genre fiction between Carrasco, Tess Sharpe, and Nicola Griffith at Autostraddle, "Surviving Isn't Enough."
Thanks for reading Cascadia books! – Andy
Do you appreciate Cascadia Journal's exclusive reporting on the ways the Pacific Northwest is pushing back against US fascism? If you have the means, please consider a paid subscription of just $5 per month. Each subscription helps me produce original reporting and opinionated notes on Cascadia's fight to build a more resilient and autonomous bioregion. And to those who already subscribe, thank you! --Andrew
