With the blackmailer identified, there’s no need in Season 2 to play with mystery in the same way, which opens up so much more space to explore who these women are under their polite suburban masks. The push and pull of Season 2 is in the characters’ internal lives, as they desperately try to hold together their relationships after letting their masks slip in a civilized suburban setting. 

The devolution of these womens’ well-adjusted facades will undoubtedly garner more Emmy nods. But it means our main players are separated for the first half of the season. Thus Season 2 feels slower and more disjointed as the main four slowly work their way back together, eventually united by a new cause. 

What keeps the show from feeling too disparate is the combination of a tightly focused past timeline and the introduction of new(ish) characters in the present. Without spoiling too much, Season 2’s past timeline serves up some foundational scenes: a tease of the Yellowjackets’ return to civilization; the births of Shauna’s baby and Taissa’s alter ego; and most importantly, their descent into cannibalism. In 1996, winter is settling in with no hope of rescue on the horizon and the girls are focused on one thing only — how to survive. It’s more than just a question of food, though game is increasingly difficult to find. It’s a question of how they come together as a pack and keep those relationships beneficial to the entire community. The present-day women might be devolving, but their past teen selves evolve into something cohesive hardened by circumstance, experience, and Lottie’s (Courtney Eaton) rise to power.

As the teens cling to any sense of control over their situation, Lottie’s visions become even more prescient than in Season 1, and the dynamics of the team drastically shift. Suddenly, the team credits every victory against the wilds to Lottie’s connection with the spirits of place, and every loss hangs on the conscience of the handful of nonbelievers left among them. Romances fracture as lovers find themselves on opposite sides of the divide, and friendships burn in service to the resident Cassandra. The tension missing in the present timeline is so taut in the past that the inevitable snapback reverberates far into the future.

On March 20, the Trans Rights Readathon kicked off across social platforms, a decentralized fundraiser for trans rights organizations led by author and activist Sim Kern. The readathon challenges people to spend the week reading books written by trans and nonbinary authors, while asking their communities to pledge and support them in donating to trans rights groups like the Trans Health Legal Fund, or even local fundraisers to support their own trans friends. 

Anyone can participate in the Trans Rights Readathon by signing up through this form and then using their platform, whether it be TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, or something else, to post about the books they’re reading and seek pledges. 

Kern says they launched the readathon in direct response to recent legislative efforts that are proliferating across the country. 

“I was feeling so much despair about the barrage of anti-trans bills being proposed across the U.S.,” they told Publisher’s Weekly. “I think so many people, myself included, felt defeated and overwhelmed and not sure what to do.”

If you’d like to participate in the Trans Right Readathon but aren’t sure where to start in terms of what to read, here are 16 recommendations of books by trans authors, spanning across genres from memoir, YA contemporary, magical realism, romance, and more.

Happy reading!

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