Esther, fresh on the heels of watching her best friend (and the girl she was in love with) hang for possession of resistance propaganda, has stowed away on the Librarians’ wagon. She can’t bring herself to stay and marry the man her father has chosen for her, and she believes that if she can just join the Librarians and do some good, it will even out the bad she believes lives inside her and that she causes wherever she goes.

The Librarians aren’t what she thought, however. In fact, they seem to be like her, and when they aren’t in the cities, pretending to be upright citizens, they share their feelings openly and seem pretty happy. They’ll just deliver Esther to a safe place in Utah and be rid of her, but the trouble has just begun, and Esther will have to become one of them to survive.

Can we talk for a moment about how much I loved this book? I devoured it almost completely in one setting. Queer girls on horseback, trying to save the world, or at least those in the world who don’t conform or fit to what this society expects of them. The women in this story aren’t all white, they aren’t all straight (in fact, none of them really are), and they aren’t all binary.

This book is pretty short and moves very quickly. I’d love to spend more time with these characters. A prequel featuring Head Librarian Bet and her Assistant Head, Leda would be most welcome. I wouldn’t scoff at a sequel, either. In fact, this could be a whole series about the badass lady librarians who smuggle contraband and operate within the resistance.

It’s out today, so if you need something exciting to pep up a slow winter, definitely pick it up.

Sarah Gailey is currently my favorite author. The plot ideas that they come up with resonate so strongly with me, namely: interesting speculative twists on "historical" settings, important and strong female characters, effortlessly queer, all types of representation within the main casts, romance. And they have done it again, my friend.

This novella is an attention-grabbing peek into a fascinating new setting for Sarah Gailey to play in. I hope that there will be more novellas or even full-length novels expanding our grasp of this world and its Librarians because I am right there waiting to devour them. Queer Librarian spies/revolutionaries on horseback in a Wild West setting is everything I never knew that I wanted.

My only complaint was that this is too short!

I received an advanced copy of Upright Women Wanted through NetGalley so I could review it early!

Esther is on the run, stowed-away in the back of a transport wagon crossing the country. She’s not entirely sure what is more dangerous, however: the past that lies behind her, or the open unknown in her future. The one thing she is certain of is that the owners of the wagon are not going to be please if they find her tucked away amongst their cargo. The Librarians are tasked with transporting information to people across the country, and their sensitive work has made them known as wild, efficient, and unlikely to appreciate stowaways. Esther hopes to join them, because traveling the open world seems like the easiest way to escape what she’s running from. It’s hard to get away, though, when it’s yourself you’re running from.

Sarah Gailey filled a hole in my heart I didn’t know was empty with this amazing novella! I wish it was longer, because I absolutely cherished every second of reading it! A queer, wild-west, dystopian future story is something so unique and wonderful! The characters are also fantastic, and feel fully developed in spite of the book’s shorter length.

You can get your copy of Upright Women Wanted on February 4th from Tor Books!

My Recommendation-
If you have a deep love for all things Wild West, this book will be an absolute treat! If you’re not sold on the whole Wild West concept, but you love books about finding self-acceptance and family between friends, this book will definitely be a great pick for you! If you’re from both of the earlier groups (like me) you will find this novella to be one of the most engaging things you read this year!

It's hard to describe Upright Women Wanted without making it sound far more frothy and absurdist than it is. It's a dystopian pulp Western. Featuring queer librarians. Who traverse the Wild West on horseback. Facing down bandits and smuggling persecuted people to safe zones within a fascist America. Each layer invites another nod and "oh, this should be fun!" But then you start reading it and, well, when a book opens with a hanging, you get the sense that it's not fooling around. Which isn't to say that it isn't also a fun read, but it's more than guns-blazing action. There's a quieter story of courage and identity and trust and truth at it's core.

I've never read Sarah Gailey before, but apparently they have a whole backlist of weirdly wonderful work that I may want to check out. Including Magic for Liars, which looks to be right up my alley.

Note: If you have a hard time with singular "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun, this quick read will be great practice for you.

Initial twitter reactions: Started Upright Women Wanted today as well and I'm SO HYPE for the angry Old West librarian.

I'm maybe ten pages in and I have the feeling I did reading their essay "Between the Coats."

I think I want to cry and maybe punch someone. https://t.co/ZzbuOQVzpP

I CAME HERE FOR ARMED LIBRARIANS, I WAS NOT WARNED THAT I'D BE CRYING ON A TRAM BEFORE 7:30 IN THE FUCKING MORNING.

Listen, sometimes I forget how lucky I was with my internet humans and their support of queer baby!Susan and her muddling through queerness via fandom and YA novels, okay.

I'm 90% certain that I both know the twist and am supposed to know the twist, btw, so I'm content.

Review at Lady Business: <center><img src="http://lady-business.org/bookcovers/cover_uprightwomenwanted.png" ></center>

<blockquote>Esther is a stowaway. She's hidden herself away in the Librarian's book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her--a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.</blockquote>

I don't think that I can review Sarah Gailey's <em>Upright Women Wanted</em> without mentioning "Between the Coats," an essay that Sarah Gailey wrote about queer tragedies and realising that they didn't have to be inevitable. The question at the heart of that essay – <em>Do you know that queer people are allowed to have happy stories?</em> – is one that I felt like I could see beating at the heart of <em>Upright Women Wanted</em>.

Esther is on the run. She's smuggled herself out of the town where her father executed her girlfriend, hiding in the back of the librarian wagons in the hope that the librarians – perfectly appropriate women who travel around distributing government propaganda – could maybe help her be the person society expects her to be before being <em>herself</em> gets her killed. ... She wasn't expecting the queer gun-slinging librarian spies, okay!

I have a <em>lot</em> of empathy for Esther. She's a queer woman who doesn't know that it's possible for her to have a life <em>as</em> a queer woman, let alone a happy one. She's been trained to smile and appeal to men as the only reliable way of staying safe, and that her life and safety hinges on her ability to monitor those around her. She can't tell when people are joking, she knows in her soul that she only has value when she's useful, and every interaction she has is a deliberate choice between being who someone else wants her to be and being herself. I have <em>been</em> Esther, okay, I love her and was not expecting to be crying over her on the tram to work.

Most of the book is her learning the answer to that <em>Do you know that queer people are allowed to have happy stories?</em> question and realising that so much of what she knows about her world is wrong. Some of the things that she figures out – like the resistance and the role of the librarians in it, and what's going on with the capital-W War – honestly surprised me when she explicitly works it out, because I thought she'd already come to those realisations gradually beforehand, but the shock when she actually puts it into words suggests not. Friend of the Business, <user name="readingtheend" site=twitter.com> points out in her review that the world-building is quite light, and I can't argue because I didn't realise until at least a third of the way in that it was supposed to be a dystopian future version of the Old West, not a historical fantasy like Rivers of Teeth. The speckling of world building we got was enough to intrigue me rather than frustrate me, especially because it made sense for Esther's point of view, but if you like your dystopias to be explained you might be disappointed. Apart from that, there's bandit attacks, plenty of action, and a series of reveals that again, aren't necessarily as much of a surprise to the reader as they are to Esther, but I still found them satisfying. Plus: if you were in the mood for hardbitten gunslinging women and non-binary people taking in someone who is distinctly <em>not</em> hardbitten but trying to keep up anyway, <em>this is for you</em>.

I don't know if I want to describe <em>Upright Women Wanted</em> as subverting the queer tragedy narrative that I keep highlighting, but it's definitely engaging with it. Sometimes that engagement feels a little shallow – Esther's girlfriend is suggested to have died less than a week before the story starts, and Esther becomes interested in Cye fairly soon after, which means that there isn't much space for grief or mourning! But it does specifically talk about those tragic narratives and the effect they have on the people who consume them with no counter-argument, and the fact that sometimes it's not fiction that brings us this counter-argument, but the people around us who are living their own lives and showing us that it's possible.

... What I'm saying is "I came here for grumpy militant librarians and now I'm crying about how lucky I was that I had fandom friends to take me in when I was a baby queer who knew nothing about the world," which wasn't the take-home point I was expecting. I liked it, it broke my heart a little, and it gave me <em>such</em> a book hangover after I finished it.

[Caution warning: off-screen abuse, hostages, homophobia, internalised homophobia, backstory death of a queer character] [This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.]

A girl named Esther, fleeing the town that hanged her girlfriend for possession of illegal books, stows away in the wagon of a visiting group of Librarians. In part she's drawn to their work -- distributing Approved Materials for reading so people all around this postapocalyptic version of America will know what to think -- but mainly she wants to escape an arrange marriage and can't think of another way. The Librarians aren't thrilled to have a stowaway, still less considering that they're on a risky mission. But they let Esther stay with them, for now. The longer she stays, the clearer it becomes that the things she thought she knew about the world were very, very wrong.

"Mousy, fearful girl finds her spine" is a genre of books I enjoy, as a spine-having fearful girl. Esther comes from a world that has told her over and over that there's something wrong with her. She's wrong, particularly, for being a girl who's attracted to people that aren't men; and the proof is that her girlfriend, and best friend, Beatriz, hanged for it. When she joins up with the Librarians, one of the first things she learns is that the Head Librarian, Bet, is queer too and in a longterm relationship with another Librarian, Leda. As she's still recovering from that shock, she's introduced to Cye, who's nonbinary.[1. Gailey does a nice job of avoiding pronouns for Cye in the narrative before Esther learns Cye's pronouns. I liked it that Cye doesn't get misgendered, even when the narrator doesn't yet know how to correctly gender them.] There are more shocks ahead, including the realization that the Librarians are part of a bigger resistance to the status quo. But the biggest and best and most emotionally satisfying realization for Esther is that becoming more like the Librarians really means becoming more like herself -- the self that she's been hiding from and trying to repress, the self she's been told was inherently a transgression.

Esther's realization that she has been lied to vis-a-vis what the world is like and what sorts of being are available to her personally occupies a good chunk of the book. But that's a plot mechanism that offers readers limited satisfaction, given that we -- and most of the characters who aren't Esther -- know all along that it's okay to be queer. Plus, part of Esther's journey to this realization involves acknowledging her attraction to Cye, and this feels kind of heartless given that she just watched her last girlfriend get hanged. Like, that just happened. So not only does Esther move on very quickly, but the book is so interested in her relationship with Cye that it gives short shrift to her relationship with, and grief for, Beatriz. Which again makes it harder to invest as much in Esther's self-actualization as a queer woman.

Overall, I think my problems with the book broadly lay in the worldbuilding. Gailey uses a lot of buzzy words like resistance and Approved Materials, which are clearly meant to evoke a dystopian and repressive world -- and they do! But worldbuilding requires more than just evocation, and Gailey skimps on the additional details. What happened to the world to get it to this state? Who enforces the bans on non-approved materials? Like, does that happen at the local level, as it appears to have happened in Beatriz's case? Because if so then I would expect a lot of regional variation, but the premise of the book seems to suggest that there's a more top-down approach to Approved Materials, in which case, who on earth is at the top? I had no idea of the answers to any of these questions, which kept the book from feeling like it had real stakes.

All in all, a medium read for me! I'd have preferred it to have a little more bite, both on the personal level where we get to know Esther a little better as a person rather than a symbol of the world's failings, and on the broader scale where we learned a bit more about the world itself.

I felt this book in my bones. I am a sucker for a good western story and this fit my expectations nicely. I loved the growth the main character makes and how her strength is what gets her through some of the tough times she experiences. The writing is superb and has such a clear voice. I would read anything that Sarah Gailey writes and I feel that they tell the stories not necessarily that we want but that we need.

I knew, without a shadow of a doubt that I would enjoy this because it's Sarah Gailey. I came for a f/f wild western complete with books and got exactly that, PLUS a strange dystopic element that caught me completely by surprise! There were lots of twists and turns alongside the perfectly executed exploration of each characters sexual identity and how it empowered each of them. My only criticism is that there was not more.

Upright Women Wanted is the latest novel by Sarah Gailey, and I’ve been seeing nonstop chatter about this book online for months (I’m not joking). Between that fact, and the fact that I love this author, I knew this was a book worth checking out (pun intended).
Imagine a Western novel merged together with several key elements; librarians, equal rights, and a strong queer identity. Now you’ve got a decent idea of what’s in store. Set in a near future, this novel portrays a darker world in which people are not free to be themselves. That’s where the Librarians come in. They carry books, supplies, and everything else needed, across state borders to the people that need it most. Though that is a gross simplification of what they do.
Esther didn’t know the full breadth of what a Librarian does, but that didn’t stop her from running away to join them. It was her one hope – her final hope – for saving her life and herself. Little did she know, that they were exactly the people she needed in her life.

“Keep fighting. It will be hard, and it will be awful, and it will be worth it. Don’t give up, even when it feels like dying. Don’t give up.”

If you’ve ever felt like you’ve had to hide or lock a part of yourself away, then Upright Women Wanted is the novel for you. This is a tale of Librarians, courage, love, and resistance. It’s a chilling world, but the characters themselves are full of grit and determination.
Upright Women Wanted was a thrilling – and terrifying read. Anytime you read a novel such as this, set in a near future, it’s hard not to feel the full impact behind the words. This story rang true to me, as I’m sure it will to many other readers out there.
I’m not ashamed to say that Esther’s plight made me cry. I couldn’t hear those words and hide from them. I’m sure that was part of the point here. But it was all the more heartbreaking because of that. It certainly added to the power and impact of this tale. And even though it did make me cry, I don’t regret that for a minute. Because it also made me smile. It made me proud.
I can see why people have been talking so much about Upright Women Wanted. This is a book that is going to make you feel things. The Librarians, Esther’s story. They all had an important story to tell, and I for one enjoyed every moment of hearing (well, reading) it.
Upright Women Wanted was a brilliant read, and well worth all of the online attention I’ve been seeing. I’m so happy to have finally joined the ranks of people who have read it, for now I can understand and follow all of that chatter!

What a delight! I loved Gailey's American Hippo novellas, but struggled with Magic for Liars. I wasn't sure what I was going to get when I picked up an eARC of Upright Women Wanted. It is more more in line with their American Hippo novellas, so if you are a fan of those, you are certainly going to want to pick up Upright Women Wanted. It's sharp, fast moving, touching, and an all around solid read. It's set in a near future dystopia, and it does come with some distressing and upsetting themes about government oppression if you are looking to avoid that kind of topic, but it has a hopeful ending.

This is probably the first "Western" book I've ever read, and I'm so glad I did! A Western with a love letter to books in it was right up my alley. Give this a try, even if outside your normal reading.

Upright Women Wanted is a western type dystopia. The book definitely leaves it open to explore the world a little more. I can't say the book's plot was the most engaging but it did set up some interesting people and stories that I would like to see hopefully explored a little further. The book definitely gives us a taste of what the society that our characters are living in but we mostly hear about it rather than see it. The story feels more like a novella that is set between major events rather than being an entire story itself. It's a quick read and worth giving a try.

Sarah Galley does it again. She pulls you in on page one, and by page four, there's no putting this down!

I'm... not really sure how to describe Upright Women Wanted. In a way, it reminded me a bit of The Handmaid's Tale but with a Wild West flair, but that feels almost a disservice to this story because it's so much more.

Upright Women Wanted challenges the heteronormative mindset. Here we have a world where women should "know their place," as it were. Where men make the rules, hold the weapons, decide how to run their household. Where the War reigns supreme. And where brave individuals have stepped forward to rebel against this close-minded lifestyle and acknowledge all people.

Esther, our protagonist, is fleeing marriage to a man after also being forced to watch her girlfriend hanged. She views herself as wrong, and thinks joining a group of women she believes to be chaste and "right" will cure her of loving someone other than a man. This book isn't just her journey to accepting herself and understanding there's a world beyond what she's been taught, but that her love is as right as the sun in the sky.

I liked the fact that it's her perspective we see because it's also the one being challenged right off the bat. As soon as she joins the small band of Librarians taking their Approved Materials across the land, she's exposed to another same sex couple (F/F) and Cye, who has to explain to her the difference in pronouns (they go by they/them, and she/her when in the company of strangers). In addition, Esther learns that the Librarians aren't just moving the written word from place to place, but helping "people like her" as she starts to think of them. All against the backdrop of a dystopian wild west.

Talk about a ride.

I loved almost everything about Upright Women Wanted. I've come to expect that I can't get as much world-building in novellas as I'm used to in a novel so that aspect didn't bother me as much. I still felt immersed in the world from start to finish, and would have gladly read a longer book based in this dystopia. The overall plot worked too, keeping the story moving and tension high from start to finish. The only part that lost me a bit was Esther's romance. 

I'm fine with the romance itself (and honestly it was so sweet, I loved it), but the timing wasn't great as Esther just watched her girlfriend hang and turns around and starts swooning over someone new. I'd have liked to see a bit more time spent between those two events because that death lost its impact, but otherwise I liked it.

Without getting too much more into the story because SPOILERS, Upright Women Wanted centers a group of strong people willing to stand up against the patriarchy and I am HERE for it. This book conveys so much in such a short period of time and I need everyone to start talking about it. So yes, I would absolutely recommend picking it up!

2.5 I guess this was fine but I won’t remember a word of it in six months Stars.

I loved Sarah Gailey’s American Hippo books, so I keep picking up her other work and expecting better than what I end up getting.

While this is a far better book than Magic for Liars in terms of narrative quality, it suffers from the same problem of being far, far better in concept than in execution.

Parts of this are cute and charming, but mostly the whole thing feels flat. Add in a protagonist who melodramatically wallows in “Everything is my fault, I am a pox on all houses!” at nearly every turn, and a potentially interesting story turns into a slow slog of eye roll inducing angst.

I don’t require my female protagonists to be flawlessly hard or lacking in any self doubt to consider them tough and worthy, but Esther was woefully uninspiring, much like those two dolts at the center of Magic for Liars.

Where have the likes of the admirably tough but imperfect ladies of the American Hippo series gone? I know Gailey has them in her repertoire. I just wish she would dust them off and put them to good use in her next offering.

I’ve been a public librarian in Topeka, Kansas since 2001 and I am passionate about serving my community but @gaileyfrey’s Upright Women Wanted is the alternate history adventurous love letter to my life choices I didn’t realize I needed. Thank you.


I read an advance copy of this book and LOVED it. I’m not saying that every line is quoteable. Some excellent words are devoted to world building and plot and such. But...some lines are truly great and I can’t share them yet because spoilers.

There are quotes from this book I want on coffee mugs and quotes from this book I want on notecards and at least one quote I’d like on a T-shirt. It’s that kind of witty and wonderful and powerful and meaningful and I don’t think you need to be a Librarian to enjoy it immensely.

Sarah Gailey creates vivid characters in the span of a paragraph, and they use that skill to full effect here. The world created here, that's both past and future, feels real and lived-in and believably challenging.

Plus, it has the best tag line in history: "Are you a coward or are you a librarian?"

Everything I look for in a great Western… and populated by queer women trying to live their lives the way they desire.

Esther’s forbidden love is hanged and instead of staying to participate in a marriage arranged by her father, she runs. She hides under the blankets in Librarians’ wagon only to be discovered down the road aways. There she finds out the secret of the Librarians’ work: they use their cover of delivering “Appropriate Materials” to the settlements in the Southwest to move illicit cargo to the forbidden zone north in Utah. Bet, Leda, and Cye are moving through what had been Arizona before The War, when there was gas for cars and people where free to love who they wanted. But now those relationships will get you the noose. Yet, Esther learns that these women are not just partners or sister librarians; their kinship runs deeper that that. And Esther sees in them a way to break out of the strictures of her past life.

A novella that took me to a beautifully desolate version of the barren wilderness. A place of six shooters, posses, and a restrictive moral code. But also a place of acceptance, mentoring, and unconditional love. I was struck by Gailey’s writing on every turn of the page. Their descriptions were the only thing that slowed me down in my glorious afternoon of reading. Pick it up to find a post apocalyptic western that loves, loves, loves it characters.

P.S. My highest praise: I talked to my librarian at my school and she has already ordered this book. Also, I have ordered a copy for my classroom.

5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Tor Books, and the author for an advanced copy for review.

Esther is a stowaway—a stowaway who got caught. After trying to convince the Librarians—those upright, morally virtuous distributors of Appropriate Materials—that she belongs and needs to join them, Esther begins to realize that the Librarians aren't as just as they pretend to be. They're part of the resistance, and out to deliver a package to safety from the authoritarian patriarchy ruling over the country.

I was intrigued and entranced by this Western-inspired dystopian, which took the idealized American Southwest and transformed it into a (further) dystopian hell designed to keep women contained and men in power.

Esther was the product of the environment she lived in, the good girl who had a heavy bit of bad in her that lasted up until her secret girlfriend, Beatriz, was hanged for being caught with corrupting materials in her possession. Scared of her own future if her badness was discovered, Esther runs away to join the Librarians, hoping they will cure her and realizing that there is nothing wrong with her beyond her own brainwashing into a homophobic culture.

I loved Esther's literal fish out of water story, as she learns to live outside of the protective but constraining confines of society, and thrive in a world of horses, desert and danger. Where things aren't black and white, but rather shades of gray, and people can be they in the desert and she in the town, and have a relationship under the open sun but pretend to be nothing more than business partners amongst people.

Upright woman distributing lawful materials in town, and rebels smuggling illicit packages and materials out in the open.

While it took me a minute to fall into the world itself and get aligned to Gailey's writing style, I loved the rep—there is trans rep, nonbinary rep, people of color and so many sapphic folks that my heart was bursting with joy.

Cye was awesome, a big-hearted, gruff softy who grumpily helped Esther along even though she was a liability who would probably kill everyone.

And Amity. Not going to reveal anything else on her because #spoilers, but damn. That woman is going to change the world.

Anywho, if you're looking a queer dystopian twist on the Western cowboy, this is the book for you.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher I was able to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
***
Upright Women Wanted follows Esther as she flees her home to end up with Librarians. Women who travel between different areas to distribute state approved material. Esther believes if she becomes a librarian she can become the person she knows she’s supposed to be, the person the state approved material tells her she’s supposed to be, but the librarians and the adventure she shares with them tells her a different story.
This was a fun novella that introduced some fun, no-nonsense, gun toting, lgbt women fighting against a repressive government in a way they are able to.
I loved the cast of women, I loved Esther’s self journey (but wish there could be more). The joy of a novella is being introduced into a world and characters in a short limit. The pains of a novella is the short limit.