Lead and Roses: Love Songs at the End of the World

by Natalie Ironside

The past lies like a nightmare over the world. Following up her debut novel, The Last Girl Scout, award-winning author Natalie H. Ironside presents a new collection of tales exploring the irradiated post-apocalypse of the 23rd century and the worlds we’ve built up from the ashes. Spanning genres including queer slice-of-life, military adventure, and horror, the five tales in this collection are sure to have something fun for all lovers of the post-apocalypse, whether they’re fans of The Last Girl Scout or just fans of the genre. This collection Two women stand on the edge of oblivion and dare to believe in a future. The Last A red star is rising over southern Appalachia, and one man has the courage to remain true to God and embody the spirit of Old America against the godless communist hordes. It goes about as well for him as you’d expect. The White A group of scientists set out to explore the wasteland and come face-to-face with the pernicious refusal of the past to die. A boy who became a stormtrooper chasing dreams of heroism discovers that being a man of action doesn’t quite live up to expectations. That’s a Christmas to A woman struggling with her faith, her identity, and her dark and troubled past finds some small shred of redemption and learns an important lesson about motorcycle safety. (Originally published as a Patreon exclusive for the 2020 winter holiday season)

Genres: Fiction, Queer

158 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2021

About the author

Natalie Ironside was born in Warren County, Mississippi in the early 1990s and still hasn't gotten over it. She primarily writes speculative fiction.

Reviews

[aj · Rating 5 out of 5]

review originally posted on tumblr: https://greatshell-rider.tumblr.com/p...

here's most of it:

i read Natalie Ironside's Lead and Roses short story collection and without having even read The Last Girl Scout, i enjoyed it immensely. it’s rare for me to find stories i like + stories with good, honest rep + stories told well, but this has it all!

my favorite stories were The Last American and Werewolf, mostly because the POVs were great. i loved mack’s interactions with sljflsdkfjlsd everyone but especially her cousin and their last conversation about girls and swords. for Werewolf, while not fun per se, it was kinda neat to sit in a character’s head as he starves and slowly dies and realize. hmmm. Not Gonna Do This Anymore. it’s kinda funky cuz his survival is pretty much sheer luck and that’s pretty sobering, but also refreshingly real. like. mood.

i love how the stories were structured in particular. they’re quick-paced, and the whole thing being 156 pages really lets you move along quickly, which is nice for me barely being able to slog through a 300 page book nowadays. beyond that, there’s a note at the stories’ summaries saying they’re arranged thematically, not chronologically, which really pays off! although each story has its own plot and such, and all take place at different times, together they all support another and form their own arc, which is a really neat touch that allows for opening, exploration, and closure. makes the collection feel like a unit, rather than just lumped together.

overall it’s just. the vibes are spectacular mate. the setting’s horrible yea and the antagonists are awful yes and all of that can make you feel small and YET. you don’t! because despite all the bad, our characters stick together and fight through it together. no one’s ever really alone, or if they go off alone, they find someone to help them pull through. i just *clenches fist* REALLY love stories that focus in on the power and strength of communities and supporting another, and lead and roses really hammers that home. it’s not afraid to have characters bicker and disagree, doesn’t pretend that everything can be made fixed and perfect through a single way, and that’s delicious to read

in summary:

[image id: gordan ramsey meme edited to say: “delicious. Finally, some good fucking dystopia” /end id]

so go read it!

[Sammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it began I didn't know what I was in for. A collection of stories from the world of The Last Girl Scout. It fills out the picture of that world with more compelling characters and revisiting some of the old ones. Every story follows a line of building and releasing tension, building and building it up. And it's scary, traumatic, beautiful, hopeful and loving all over again, knowing exactly what buttons to push to let me fill with that beautiful, cathartic release of tension for the last line of the last story.

[Roxanne Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very nice addition to the world of The Last Girl Scout, with a good variety of stories. If you read and liked TLGS, what are you waiting for?

[asmalldyke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Polished that off quick, because fuuuck, man.

I was and am so hopelessly desperate for more of The Last Girl Scout. What can I say, it's like Fallout: The Sum or something like that, it's such a weird and magical jewel of a book, so I was thankful Lead and Roses exists.

It's mostly just a lore scrapbook, a series of small and inconsequential stories from the ACR. There's a BNR war cleric that gets his shit punched, there's an Arditi troop who mercs a gunner and defects, you get to see Iris hack a vampire to death, it's all pretty normal, reading like the spare bits of TLGS. It has recycled phrasing and similar settings and all, it's what I expected.

The two shorts that actually matter are the war cleric one and the christmas one; mostly because the former gives us a look at Laurelei and her bad bitch wife Max, the short waifish trans™ and the giant muscly butch cis™, specialty combo. They have a larger-than-life legendary status in TLGS, and while this flashback to the Free Appalachian Army days shows that they were always big bitches, it also grants us a look at them just being people: the formation of the ACR, being unnaturally kind to some nazi fucks who want to negotiate (lol) surrender, and beating the living shit out of that war cleric.

The christmas one was a patreon exclusive once and it's the most significant, because it's about Jules going fast at night and tangling with her horror problems and also general culture shock. It's cute and enjoyable, even if I wish she would stop fuckin' using slurs on herself, like goddamn bitch, seriously.

There's probably no point to reading this unless you absolutely adore The Last Girl Scout, and the trouble is I do, so here is an extra 200 pages or whatever of stuff happening, featuring lesbian trans commie soldiers and chill.

[Mark Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lead and Roses follows on Last Girl Scout, but, having read Lead and Roses, and now being midway through Last Girl Scout, I don't feel that reading them out of order is confusing. Much of the lore is relatively straightforward... combinations of common tropes like post-apocalypse, zombies, nations with conflicting political views united against a common foe... but they're fun to read and well-told. The characters click... you understand who they are, and why they're acting the way they are, without needing to hold your hand.

Definitely worth your time, if the idea of a post-apocalypse where queer folk, communists, and anarchists work towards a happy ending against the fascists.

[Michaela Lubbers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just dadgum fun - and I so enjoyed getting to hang out with the darlings from TLGS again :)

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid follow up to The Last Girl Scout. A good handful of short stories from both before and after events of the novel.