lightreads

Finding Zach by Rowan Speedwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


M/M. Hurt/comfort of the 'kidnapped for five years of rape and torture in the South American jungle, followed by lots of sexy cuddling' variety. Like you do.

I'm tempted to think the flickers of beauty and interpersonal complexity were accidents. I mean, look, if someone wants to write a book for the sole purpose of hitting emotional buttons connected to the healing powers of love after ludicrous amounts of suffering . . . go for it. These types of stories are often intensely wrong-headed about trauma in ways that make me angry for reasons I won't get into. But I keep reading them because they also do push my buttons. And once in a while you find one like this, with a little richness to it, some thought.

But the wrong amount of thought. You get these quick, casual moments of delicate character work, and then an entire subplot that was so poorly thought out, I honestly have no idea what she even meant to accomplish with it. So frustrating, because I strongly suspect what I'm seeing here is a talent under-exercised, and that just makes me sad. I'd almost rather have read this by a lesser author . . . almost.




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Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Totally the best dystopic queer orphan superpowered Latina boxing novel I've ever read.

Some of you guys are going to seriously dig this. (Or, you know, already did. In 2008.) It's about the daughter of a super soldier trapped in a militarized border town, and social injustice, and vengeance. And it's throwing down some interesting stuff. Our heroine tries on and discards assorted narratives – vigilante folk hero, redemptive underdog boxing hero. It's sorta about how when you change the gender of the protagonist, the shape of the story changes too, and it's sorta about what would have to be "wrong" with a woman for her to bend these stories around her (Loup is physiologically incapable of fear, even when it would be really useful).

But only sorta, because a lot of stuff gets thrown down, and most of it never gets picked back up again. I kept waiting for this book to be more than it was. And it was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but there was a promise of greatness here, and I don't think it was fulfilled.




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Bear, Otter, and the Kid by T.J. Klune

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


M/M romance. Boy raises his kid brother, hooks up with best friend's older brother, that's about it. Oh, except for one little thing.

You know how some authors can write about closeted people and all their internalized homophobia, and it's interesting and complicated? And then you know how some authors write about closeted people and all their internalized homophobia, and it's just poisonous and awful and incredibly unpleasant to read?

. . . Yeah.

Spending a couple hundred pages in this guy's head while he insisted he wasn't "…like that" made me want to scrub my entire life out, and then go have a lot of self-affirming queer sex as loudly as possible.

Of course the problem isn't really the narrator, or even the writing. The problem is that the book is carrying so much internalized homophobia of its own, it's falling down under it. Like, okay. On two separate occasions in this book different people who have been busily explaining to each other that it's okay for someone to be gay have a serious, not even kidding conversation about what you say to a nine-year-old who asks if a guy is gay. Because, like, do you tell him the truth? But – wait for it – the eventual consensus is that it was okay to tell him the truth because he's pretty mature and he can handle things that send most adults running away screaming.

No. Seriously.

I assume I don't have to unpack the multiple levels of fucked up there, because if I do, I'm gonna need another couple thousand words. Suffice it to say, this whole book thought it was telling a heartwarming story of family and growing self-acceptance, but what it was really doing was perpetuating a lot of notions of queerness as othering and abnormal and, you know, like that.




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Steamroller by Mary Calmes

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It's kind of confusing how hit and miss Mary Calmes is for me, considering that everything she writes is fundamentally the same. It doesn't matter whether she's writing contemporary or urban fantasy or whatever, I could pick a Calmes out of an anonymous lineup after ten pages. It'll be the one with the serious desire kink—where every other guy desperately wants the protagonist – and possessive behavior on the part of whichever muscle-bound Neanderthal is the central love interest of this one, who will win the protagonist after somewhat strenuous pursuit. It's a formula. She really, really, really likes it. And it seems to be working for her, so hey, carry on.

I keep reading them because her protagonists have a range and vividness I'm not used to seeing in this genre. These guys get to be real and flawed and complicated in ways that ring true (though don't expect the same treatment for the love interests. Like . . . at all.) And she has a nice touch with the friends and community. (Though as a side note, I can't tell if I'm perturbed or entertained to see that the gay romance genre substitutes "douchebag straight friend" for the "sassy gay friend" of your standard het romance.)

This one was a total miss because it wanted to be a novel, but she didn't let it be one. Dunno why, but this novella is missing about 40,000 words. Prickly overworked poor college kid is wildly pursued by wealthy adored football star on the way to the draft, see above re desire kink. Cut so many emotional corners it lost all tension and interest, and didn't live up to the promise of the protagonist.




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Stars & Stripes by Abigail Roux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Somethingth book in this series about the FBI partners who do the things FBI partners do – solve crime and bang a lot. I seem to read this series when I’m traveling, and I’ve gotta say, on a long transatlantic red-eye with no sleep in sight? Nothing better.

I’m really ridiculously fond of these guys, but above and beyond that, here’s something you don’t see every day. And by “every day” I mean in most of the lgbt fiction out there. See, these guys, they have lots of sex, right? But somehow – get ready for this, it’s crazy – somehow their entire relationship dynamic doesn’t turn on who is getting penetrated. I know! I mean, what they want in bed changes over time with the changes in their relationship and circumstances and their moods. And who is sticking it to whom at any given moment has nothing to do with who is holding the upper hand emotionally, or who is calling the shots on important relationship questions.

In fact, it’s more like who is calling the shots also changes with the circumstances, and with need. Almost like these are two guys who think of each other as equals, and who pass the lead back and forth as needed and pick up each other’s slack and have a dynamic, healthy partnership! Just as if who is getting penetrated isn’t, like, the definitional framework by which they construct their personalities!

It’s weird.




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Making Promises by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Amazingly treacley small town gay romance – he’s a cop, he’s a dancer (not like that). Hit some buttons of mine, missed others, details uninteresting to anyone who isn’t me.

But this book did make me think about the value of romance as a genre. This is a story about two people coming together while one loses his adored mother to slow, wasting disease. And it’s about their friends’s struggle to keep a business alive, and a soldier come home but not the same, and making the best of the baby you didn’t want to have. It’s about *gestures* all the shit that just happens. And because this is a romance, it doesn’t have to mean anything, and we don’t have to, like, have a drum circle about the unbearable lightness of human existence or whatever. It just is. The shit that happens. The way people die and how money is short and sometimes there’s no condom, but you do your best anyway, and at least the company is good. “contemporary fiction” or whatever we’re calling it these days can never reach me like that, because it’s usually trying too damn hard to have a big fucking epiphany. This book was mostly trying to get a couple of guys laid, and somehow it managed to get so much vital stuff of life into every frame.

So okay. I’ll chalk one up for romance. Sometimes, it’s just about the shit that happens to you. And as a person to whom shit happens on a startlingly frequent basis, I appreciate that we don’t have to talk about what it all means.




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Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullinan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Snagged because it won a whole bunch of awards last year, and I'm in that mood. Having read it, I'm kind of going "…oh," because apparently a lot of people loved this, I didn't, and that's always a frustrating datapoint when you're dipping a toe into a genre.

I don't actually want to talk about this book qua book much, except to say that a lot of you probably will really like it (ranching, horses, families-of-choice, kinky sex including ponyplay), and also for the subset of you who want to know these things, the narrator has a learning disability and separately is somewhere on the autistic spectrum (or has sensory integration issues at the very least, but whatever, armchair fictional diagnosing) and it is handled unusually deftly.

What I do want to talk about is how it drives me bugfuck when gay romance has a Very Special Episode about homophobia. Homophobia is bad guys, did you know that? Homophobia in these books being almost entirely of the gaybashing, family-destroying, cartoonishly evil sort, and not the creeping, stereotyping, othering, unconscious sort that has a lot more to do with the real lived experiences of most queer people right now. Not like violence isn't a big concern, just. That is a very narrow idea of what homophobia actually is.

And these books. So many of them have to have a big dramatic scene where someone gives a homophobic person the big crushing speech of righteousness. (Very often, this is delivered by a straight person, by the way, as it is in this book). And it pisses me off.

These books are by and large written by straight women who have varying experiences or connection to queer people or any queer community. And there is something so pointless and cheap and manipulative about these ra-ra feel-good anti-homophobia moments. Like 'we're cool! We know homophobia is bad!' While these books so often participate in the more subtle forms of homophobia by writing about queer people as fundamentally different from straight people, or by importing creeping sexist ideas about what it means when someone gets penetrated, or by treating women in general really horribly, or by -- I could go on. At great length.

It's the ripped-from-the-headlines idea of what homophobia is, without any grasp of the whole iceberg under the water. The reason I'm not out at work has nothing to do with being afraid I'll be gaybashed, or even that I won't be promoted, let me just put that out there. It's that I'd rather not be the queer person first and the human being second, thanks not so fucking much. And watching mostly straight people appropriate the awful things that can be done to queer people in order to say "that's bad, everybody!" and feel smug is not my idea of a good time.

Whatever. This book didn't even do most of that (though some of it, it totally did) and if these books never addressed homophobia at all, I'd also be pissed off about that. Just. Arrrrrrgh, in general and specific.



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Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


We interrupt this flow of childhood nostalgia rereads to bring you some gay porn -- excuse me, "manlove."

This is the one about the two undercover LEO's in a mob war and one of them calls the other -- I swear to God, I am not kidding about this -- gatito and there's lots of sexual dominance and tragedy and eventually some really dubious disability content. There is an exponentially higher component of batshittery than I usually expect out of Josh Lanyon, but you know, for that long stretch from 2 to 5 a.m. when there's just absolutely no way I'm getting to sleep, I was really down with that. In the light of day . . . yikes.


The thing with the limes and the net bags? That wasn't sexy, not even at 4:30 in the morning.




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A Perfect Blood by Kim Harrison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Can I be fickle for a sec?

Or, no, actually, I'm not asking. I'm drinking wine at 10:00 on a Saturday morning while I start to wrap everything glass that I own and put it in boxes. And I'd turn this into another all-about-me review, except if I actually rattled off everything that's going down with my dying grandfather and the fertility clinic ridiculousness and my girlfriend's radiation treatments, no one would believe me because really

So I'm going to be fickle. Suck it up.

All of which is to say . . . um . . . I liked this. After having alternately sneered and bitched at the past four books. All Harrison's more obnoxious ticks are still present and accounted for (and why does she have to introduce a random new dude we don't care about yet again?) but somehow this still hit the sweet spot. It was distracting and comfily familiar and --

Okay, not just fickle. Totally honest.

The elf and the witch? I ship it. I ship it bad. And this book clearly set them up as the endgame so yeah, I dug it. Don't start with me.

And now I drink more wine.




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Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I guess if I were the sort of person who bought books for young teens I cared about, I'd get them this one. But I don't buy books for teens because I generally don't care about them. (The teens, I mean. I care about books plenty.) And that, I think, is the problem.

It's a slight, cute LGBT high school romance, set in an island of utopian well-adjustment. The quarterback is also the homecoming queen, the narrator came out to his parents at the age of five, and their only reaction was to think it was cool that he'd learned a new word, that sort of thing. It's basically saying, 'what if gay kids got to have romances like their straight peers, where the big question is does he like me? and not will we be relentlessly tormented until hanging ourselves in the garage is the only way out we can see?' It's a gay teen romance without homophobia or identity insecurity (at least for the narrator), and it's about how in this world he's just a kid like any other, with a silly crush and bad romantic judgment and sweet, mixed up friends.

Except, you know, I don't care about teenagers. So for me, the answer to the question -- what do you get when you write a gay teen romance without the gay angst? -- is that you get teen romantic angst. And that's boring.




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