Emily Austin has carved out a distinctive niche in contemporary fiction with her ability to render deeply flawed, profoundly human characters who wrestle with anxiety, identity, and existential dread. With Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin, she delivers her most ambitious and layered work yet—a novel that operates simultaneously as a queer coming-of-age retrospective, a treatise on the sanctity of public libraries, and an unflinching examination of grief’s strange mathematics.
The Architecture of Return
The novel opens with Darcy, a thirty-two-year-old librarian, returning to work after a two-month absence following a mental breakdown. Austin immediately establishes her protagonist’s observational precision—Darcy notices a man watching “Vintage Lesbian Cuckhold” pornography at the library computers and calmly explains to an outraged patron that yes, this is technically permitted. This opening scene accomplishes remarkable work: it establishes Darcy’s professional competence, her wry detachment, and the ideological battleground that will define the novel’s external conflict.
What follows is a masterfully structured narrative that braids together three timelines and thematic concerns. Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin moves fluidly between Darcy’s present-day navigation of library protests and book-banning campaigns, her therapy sessions unpacking her relationship with deceased ex-boyfriend Ben, and the slow-building romance with her wife Joy. Austin resists chronological simplicity, instead allowing memories to surface organically—the way trauma actually works.
The Weight of What We Bury
The novel’s emotional core rests in Darcy’s complicated grief over Ben, who died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at forty-three. Their relationship, which spanned Darcy’s ages eighteen to twenty-three while Ben was twenty-eight to thirty-three, becomes the lens through which Austin examines power dynamics, compulsory heterosexuality, and the ways we perform versions of ourselves to meet others’ expectations. This is where the novel achieves its greatest psychological depth.
Austin refuses easy categorization of Ben as villain or Ben as innocent. Instead, she presents a relationship that was simultaneously caring and constraining, protective and suffocating. Darcy reflects on how she “morphed into him,” how the line between their identities blurred, how she became “a stranger” to herself. The therapy scenes—which could have felt clinical or expository—instead become the novel’s beating heart, as Darcy slowly untangles her guilt from her genuine grief, her responsibility from her youth, her mistakes from his.
The author’s treatment of age-gap relationships demonstrates considerable nuance. Darcy initially defended their age difference, but at thirty-three—Ben’s age when they ended—she looks at eighteen-year-olds and thinks, “I can’t imagine dating an eighteen-year-old when I was twenty-eight. The thought of that not only turns my stomach, but it feels sinister and sad.” This delayed realization rings devastatingly true.
Public Spaces, Private Wars
The contemporary plotline involving library protests and book challenges provides Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin with its propulsive momentum and social relevance. Austin clearly draws from real-world battles over intellectual freedom, drag story hours, and the concentrated efforts of small groups to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color. The antagonist, Declan Turner, who runs the alt-right news outlet “Liberty Lately,” could have been a cartoon villain. Instead, Austin renders him with uncomfortable humanity—a man who genuinely believes he’s protecting children, who apologizes for crossing lines, who has a family watching him at the grocery store.
The novel’s examination of libraries as democratic institutions—”the last free space”—feels both timely and timeless. Darcy’s passion for her work shines through in passages about reference desk protocols, collection development policies, and the careful balance libraries must strike between serving diverse communities and maintaining intellectual freedom. These sections will resonate powerfully with librarians and library advocates, though some readers may find the procedural details occasionally slow the narrative momentum.
The Craft of Quiet Revelation
Austin’s prose style in Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin represents an evolution from her earlier work. Gone is some of the manic energy of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead; in its place is a more measured, contemplative voice that suits Darcy’s analytical mind. The writing operates through accumulation rather than pyrotechnics—small observations stack up until they achieve profound weight:
- Darcy organizing books by color versus Dewey Decimal, unable to find the “right” system
- The repeated image of Ben’s laugh, “big and booming,” contrasted with Joy’s “raw, precious laugh”
- The titular bath bomb photo that accidentally exposes Darcy’s nude reflection, becoming both plot device and metaphor for unwanted visibility
The novel’s greatest strength lies in these quiet moments of recognition. When Darcy realizes during her abortion at twenty-three that she’s gay, Austin doesn’t dramatize it with fireworks. Instead: “While I sat in that gross, murky bathwater, I felt myself split in two. I was no longer the person I knew myself to be.”
Where the Structure Strains
For all its considerable achievements, Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin occasionally buckles under its own ambition. The mystery subplot involving someone sending Darcy her nude photo feels somewhat underdeveloped—the revelation that Declan Turner’s daughter Sammy has been sending cryptic bird-related reference questions arrives with minimal setup and less payoff. What could have been a compelling examination of how children absorb their parents’ ideologies instead feels like an afterthought.
Additionally, some readers may find the pacing uneven. The novel luxuriates in therapy sessions and memory—which is thematically appropriate but can feel static. The external conflict of the library protests provides necessary energy, but these plotlines don’t always integrate seamlessly. There’s a sense of two novels awkwardly sharing space: the interior journey of grief and identity, and the social realist drama of intellectual freedom under siege.
The secondary characters, while serviceable, lack the dimensionality Austin grants Darcy. Joy, despite being Darcy’s wife and presumably the love of her life, remains somewhat sketched rather than fully realized. We understand why Darcy loves her—her authenticity, her “unguarded” nature—but Joy herself doesn’t achieve full personhood on the page.
The Triumph of Imperfect Organizing Systems
Ultimately, what makes this novel succeed is Austin’s central metaphor about cataloging and organization. Darcy obsesses over how to organize her home library, trying various systems—alphabetical, by color, by rating—before Joy creates a compromise: broad categories with no specific internal order. “A little disorder is okay,” Darcy finally accepts. This becomes the novel’s thesis: that life, identity, relationships, and even libraries themselves resist perfect categorization.
Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin is fundamentally about the messiness of being human, the impossibility of neat resolutions, and the courage required to exist authentically in spaces that would prefer you not to. It’s about forgiving ourselves for past selves who were doing their best with incomplete information. It’s about the radical act of providing free, uncensored access to information and stories.
Austin joins authors like Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House) and Torrey Peters (Detransition, Baby) in crafting queer narratives that refuse to be singular in their focus—these are stories about queerness, yes, but also about class, institutions, mental health, and the texture of daily life. The novel’s ending—with Darcy accepting a promotion, writing a letter to Ben she’ll never send, and watching wisteria bloom—feels earned rather than tidy.
For Readers Who Loved
If Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily R. Austin resonated with you, consider these complementary reads:
- Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin—the author’s breakout novel featuring another anxious, death-obsessed queer woman
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky—for its sensitive treatment of coming-of-age and trauma
- The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman—for readers craving more library-centric fiction
- Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston—another queer romance examining identity and public/private selves
- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters—for its nuanced exploration of queer relationships and chosen family
- In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado—a memoir examining a difficult queer relationship with similar psychological depth
This is a novel that trusts its readers to sit with discomfort, to accept that some questions don’t have answers, and to recognize that intellectual freedom and personal freedom are inextricably linked. Austin has written a love letter to libraries, to the messy work of building identity, and to the possibility of moving forward while carrying the past. It’s not always an easy read, but it’s a vital one.
