Books: Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon & All This Could Be Different
By Zach Shattuck
Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon
by Annie Mare
Do people really choose each other, every time, when the love is actually real?
Across the multiverse of infinite possibilities?
When you just know about someone you’ve just met, is it just blind faith or is it the force of the entire universe letting you know that this is the person who is right for you, across timelines and worlds, no matter what?
“Every one of me wants every one of you.”
Annie Mare uses a cast of quirky characters to explore this loving idea in Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon. You’ll meet a couple lawyers, a writing professor obsessed with long queer sci-fi novels, an engineer, a stoic father, and a hairstylist with severe allergies. And two cats.
Taking place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Tressa Fay has found contentment in her ability to make a living on lifechanging hair styles, eating good soup, and her beloved cat Epinephrine. She’s moved on from her past heartbreak but knows better than to get herself worked up over a date that could go a thousand different ways.
All this changes when someone texts the wrong number – her number – and the two hit it off so well Tressa Fay doesn’t notice that Myrtle’s texts are being sent with a time stamp dated five months in the past. Questions quickly rise as Myrtle’s family finds Tressa Fay to let her know that in Tressa Fay’s present day October, Myrtle has been missing for a month.
What happened to Myrtle? Why, no matter what happens, does she disappear on September 4th? And why does such a mysterious woman also turn Tressa Fay on so bad?
As Tressa Fay attempts to warn Myrtle in the past, the present begins to change. Quickly, theories of the multiverse circulate within their circle of friends as everyone feels their pasts and presents shift in response to the experimental actions of Myrtle in May (and then June, July) who both tries to figure out how to not disappear and how to keep hold on the undeniable love which erupts between her and Tressa Fay.
If you are looking for a happily ever after, modern sci-fi which celebrates all the ways love can happen, you will love this book. If you’ve been waiting for a book with some hot ‘n’ heavy scenes between women, you will thoroughly enjoy this book.
I will say the writing sometimes feels a bit like reading a twitter story of meeting a woman. Lines like “Oh. This person was extremely yes” and “she didn’t ordinarily hear her awoo-gah horn go off so hard for a stranger” pepper the book, which sometimes works given the heaviness of navigating the multiverse. Still, if you’re looking for prose this is probably not the book for you.
There are only two copies of Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon available at San Diego Public Libraries, and as of writing this, both are checked out. If this review calls to you (in whatever timeline you read it), perhaps consider buying a copy from your local bookstore.
All This Could Be Different
By Sarah Thankam Mathews
Milwaukee, Wisconson 2013 is not the place most people might choose to build their career, but it is where Sneha finds herself struggling to do her best to earn sponsorship for a greencard as a consultant for a shady firm.
The life Sneha tries to leave behind back home in India, unfortunately, has a way of catching up with her as she makes new friends and lovers in Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different. Sneha struggles with every form of intimacy and showing the people in her life the love they need and deserve. This book, consequently, is a coming-of-age tale which Sneha narrates from the year 2018, looking back on her formative years in Milwaukee.
“We are, at the close of things, bags of meat and blood encasing what’s ensouled: mercurial, flickering holy.”
This is a charming, bittersweet book and I really enjoyed reading it. I love when authors use secondary characters as the balancing voice of reason, and Mathews does this artfully. I also appreciate her creating a story in which the parents are supportive and stand by their daughter, even when caught in difficult situations. This truly was a charming novel.
All This Could Be Different is available through the San Diego Public Libraries.