I teeter-totter on literary fiction like two children too small to touch the ground and end up flailing in a concerning limbo until one jumps off and sends the other crashing to the ground. I'm usually the one crashing to the ground; i.e. DNFing the book. This time, however, there was no crashing or jumping.

Emily Austin's Is This a Cry for Help? comes out January 13, 2026. I received an advance copy from NetGalley, and it's my first Emily Austin book. It's a queer literary fiction about a librarian who returns to work after having a mental health crisis. Darcy is 32 and married to Joy, who I'm partial to because she likes to make soup–and I love a good soup.

Darcy had a panic attack when she found out about the death of her ex-boyfriend, who she dated for five years when she was 18 and he was 28. She spent time in an inpatient facility and is now taking anti-depressants and talking to her therapist. We meet her on her first day back after a two-month break. She is still fragile but feeling better. If that wasn't enough, she hears someone watching porn on the library computers and reminds everyone to use headphones in the library. After checking that the porn wasn't illegal, she goes back to work. A library patron takes issue with the porn enthusiast, and Darcy tells her the library doesn't regulate what people search on the public computers. As you might expect, the patron doesn't like her answer and takes her story to a local right-wing journalist.

What follows is a predominantly internal journey as Darcy comes to terms with her complicated relationship with her ex-boyfriend and the guilt she feels for leaving him. We see her with her therapist, talking to her wife, who's out of town visiting family, and dealing with the handful of people demanding book bans and accusing the library of pushing a gay agenda.

The book is introspective and is a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day life of a librarian. It was helpful for my current book, where the main character is also a librarian. From the outside, the droves of MC writers, librarians, and bookshop owners might seem over the top, but we write what we know. As a reading enthusiast, I love reading about characters who also love books. It never gets old. Austin creates relatable characters and navigates their lives with wit and humor–like someone plugging in a crock-pot full of meatballs in the bathroom.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes literary fiction, especially queer fiction. While Darcy isn't having a queer awakening, she is looking back on that time and the ways compulsive heterosexuality kept her in an unhappy relationship with a man who was flawed but overall a good person. There's a moment when she's thinking about how people don't consider two women hooking up as cheating, including women, because of internalized misogyny. This is something I've thought about, and this was one of many times Darcy was thinking about things that occupy my thoughts as well.

I read this in two days, which is kind of wild for a slow-paced book. I think that's because it was an easy read. Austin isn't hiding anything from the reader. The author doesn't encase the book's meaning and themes in hard-to-digest literary flourishes or meandering metaphors. It's straightforward, and so is the language. The subject matter is literary, but it has a slice-of-life approach.

Darcy grows through the process, and while little changes externally, I happily went on her internal journey. To be fair, there are some external changes, including a ginger cat, a rearranging of bookshelves, and a job opportunity. We aren't only banging around in her head for three-hundred pages.

If you're in the mood for a sapphic contemporary literary fiction with wit and wry humor, then pick up Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily Austin.

Happy reading!

/rae/