Is This A Cry for Help? by Emily Austin

Is This A Cry For Help?

Author: Emily Austin

Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Queer Fiction

Publish Date: January 2026

Read: November 2025

Favorite Quote: I’d sooner defend the image of me as a hideous, withered hag, rather than the image of me as coy, quiet, sexualized teenaged girl. It’s appalling that I was trained to behave the way I was when I was younger, and I think of it as a societal betrayal, and a depraved way to treat girls.

Story Synopsis: Darcy is living her best life… after a bit of a rocky start. She works at a library, helping the community, and she’s married to Joy - the love of her life. However, when protestors start haranguing the staff for policies they dislike, Darcy becomes involved in finding out who’s been emailing her violating things, while also trying to represent the queer community.

Why does this book beguile? I love Emily Austin’s Interesting Facts About Space, so I was super excited to get a copy of Is This a Cry for Help? as an ARC. While I enjoyed the book, it was a bit on the nose for me. I liked Darcy and I liked how she was written as someone overcoming traumas from her childhood and how that affects her adult relationships. However, the importance of libraries, the queer identity components, and the self-discovery angle, while important, were all overt, and sometimes a bit preachy. While it seems like Darcy was written to be on the spectrum (a trait I love in books and characters), her directness translated to a lot of exposition and info-dumping for the reader without any subtly or finesse. Maybe that was the intent?

Bookshop.Org Link*: Is This A Cry for Help? by Emily Austin

Amazon.com Link*: Is This A Cry for Help? by Emily Austin

If you’re interested in this, read*: Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin