Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho presents a fascinating and ambitious concept: it attempts to link the lives of queer, lesbian women across different decades, weaving a tapestry of connection, resistance, and creativity. This idea, of building a collective voice for women so often left out of traditional historical narratives, is both touching and powerful. However, as someone who enjoys nonfiction, I found myself constantly wondering what was real and what was fictionalized. While I truly wish these women had all known and inspired each other directly, the book’s genre blurs the lines between imagination and fact. This made it difficult for me to fully trust the narrative, even though the emotional resonance was strong. The book also offers a very Eurocentric perspective, both geographically and historically. The timeline covers only a few decades and stays tightly focused on Western Europe, which limits its broader historical value. Considering the global diversity of queer histories, this felt like a missed opportunity. There are many familiar names mentioned—famous lesbian poets, authors, and activists—as well as some new ones I hadn’t heard of before. But unfortunately, all of these figures were white. There is a notable absence of BIPOC voices, which only reinforces the Eurocentric and white-dominated focus of the book. Stylistically, the prose is lyrical and poetic but for my taste, it leaned too heavily into the abstract. The narrative thread often slipped away from me, and I found myself craving more structure, more concrete details, and a clearer sense of direction. Adding to the confusion were the fragmented, non-chronological chapters. Names were changed or altered, and with so many characters introduced in short, impressionistic segments, I often struggled to keep track of who was who and how they related to one another. It demanded a level of memory and mental mapping that disrupted the reading experience for me. I have a deep passion for LGBTQ+ history and want to learn as much as I can about queer and lesbian women of the past. But I want this knowledge to be grounded in sources, facts, and clear historical context. I understand the difficulty in accessing such histories due to their erasure but then say that openly. Criticize the lack of sources, demand that historians do more to recover women’s stories. But please don’t wrap it in speculative connections and poetic license: I just couldn’t connect with that approach.