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The Guardian by Mary Calmes

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Abandoned at 60%. I am far too exhausted to work up the outrage this book deserves, so let's do this the quick and clean way.

Blah blah blah gay romance where the ad executive saves a giant dog from a fight, except the giant dog is actually a hot dude from a fantasy dimension.

Item the first: The first time they hook up, hot dude from fantasy land is startled to discover, mid sex act, that the protagonist is willing. This apparently never having happened to him before.

Item the second: Shortly thereafter, the protagonist meets up with the group of women who were hot fantasy dude's previous sexual partners (for financial remuneration). And these ladies elucidate that, indeed, hot fantasy dude is sexually brutal and violent, that it was rape at least some of the time, and that one of them frequently believed that he would kill her during sex.

. . .

You know how I often say that I don't care what a book's kinks are as long as the author knows it? Like, go ahead and have a watersports kink, whatever, it's not my thing but I won't stop you. But for the love of God, own it. Don't pretend it was an accident. 'Oops, my word processor slipped!' 'I just wrote a story about a dude sexing up someone who is drugged unconscious, but it's not rape and how dare you say I would write a story about rape, because I'm the author and I know the unconscious dude secretly wanted it, so there!'

There is very little more secondhand embarrassing than watching someone shame themselves over the kink they are writing stories about, often within the stories themselves.

So yeah, you know how I often say that?

Well, this book is the counter argument. This book explicitly makes sure we know hot fantasy dude is a violent rapist because that makes him sexier to the protagonist, and that is supposed to make him sexier to the reader. There's nothing coy about this, no inference games. Calmes thought being a violent rapist -- being an uncontrollable brutal animal, nearly a direct quote -- makes this guy hotter, and she owned that.

And it was so fucking gross, I have a bad taste in my mouth over a week later.




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Talker by Amy Lane

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


M/M romance. Our "hero" "tries" to tell his best friend that he wants him, but he never actually, uh, uses his words. So he figures hey, the problem here is that the bestie is just refusing to notice him, and the bestie was recently raped and is really "fragile," okay, so the thing to do – he has a plan, you guys – the thing to do is to manipulate events so he and the bestie are in a sexual situation but the bestie doesn't know who he is until after there are orgasms.

This being a romance, this is fed to us as romantic instead of, you know, creepy and awful.

…

DO. NOT. WANT.




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Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Cranky food columnist collides with hitman while trying to plan a wedding; sparks and flamingos fly.

Fun, zaney. There's no serious internal relationship conflict here, just a shrieking heap of mob enforcers and difficult relatives and frying pans to the head. And flamingos. This book is one half domestic hilarity and one half cartoonishly violent splatterfest, which was a bit odd, I will admit. But having read only two Crusie books, I already know that she is a no-brakes funny lady who has the skill and restraint to spin a ridiculous, so far over the top it's in orbit story like this, and then bring it when it comes to personal insight so subtly that I almost miss it. This time it was Agnes with her anger management and her court-appointed psychiatrist to prove it. And Agnes and her best friend talking to each other like only best friends can, in the middle of all this nonsense and splatterfest, and calmly saying to each other that it's not that they need to kill a man. They just need to know that if they had to, they could. Because they both know that this is the sort of world where it can absolutely happen that they'd have to.

The Bob Mayer sections are not nearly so good, but whatever. Flamingos, cupcakes, making room for angry women, cool.




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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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The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So I'm going to one-sentence this book, and you guys are going to make The Face, which I also made, for the record, and then we're going to talk about the ways it's great.

This is a book about Hazel, who Is sixteen and terminally ill, and the boy she meets at support group.

*Pause for The Face*

So it's a book about being young and being sick. And also being in love, but honestly that part was by far the least interesting to me, so we're basically skipping it. Because for me, this was a book about being young and being sick, and it was great. Around the time three disabled characters shared a scene together with no able-bodied characters present, and they sat around and discussed their love lives? Yeah. I was like holy shit, right, because I have read a lot of books, okay, and a lot of books about disabled people, and I have never seen such a thing. Ever.

I'm actually selling this book short by talking about it like that. This book gets at the experience of chronic pain in such casual, tangential, brilliant ways. And it gets the ebb and flow of illness, the way you just have to ride with it. And it is a bold-faced, no fucking around, passionate argument to the world that people with disabilities and people who are dying are still human beings. Which is absolutely something that we need to argue about, because for almost everyone I have ever met, illness or disability puts you in a box marked other in ways conscious but mostly subliminal. This book gets most of those ways – the infantilization, the way people eulogize before and after death, so much of it. And to see a book – and a very popular book – arguing the other way to teenagers, of all people, with conviction and clarity (and a startling lack of treakly bullshit) was pretty amazing for me.

I was far less impressed with this book as a story. One of the other things it's doing is cutting at this notion of disability and illness as metaphor. I don't know how many times I have shouted at a book or the TV about this. Disability isn't a metaphor for moral decay, or the dangers of industrialized society, or, I don't know, the fatal flaw of the human race. And it's not a learning experience, and it's not a gateway to wisdom. It's just disability. It's a thing that happens. It's chance. And as one character puts it in this book, "it's bullshit." I'd modify that to chance bullshit, but yeah, pretty much.

So the book is arguing about how disability isn't a narrative device. It spends a lot of time making fun of 'cancer books' where illness is the gateway to one heartwarming epiphany after another. But then this book turns around and delivers a plot designed to lead the protagonist through a series of epiphanies concerning what she wants out of the rest of her life, how she can make peace with her [parents and the hurt she will leave behind, etc. And it just . . . I didn't need that. And I didn't want it. This book could have been a series of days, it could still even have been a love story, and as long as it kept on about being young and being sick, I would have thought it was great. Everything else felt contrived to me, and particularly in light of the explicit arguments of the book.

Also, is John Green physically capable of writing a book in which no one ever takes a transformative road trip? Because honestly….

So yeah. Basically it's great on the page-by-page level. And I am so so glad this book was written and that it's doing so well. (Though the day a disabled author gets to write a book about disabled characters to international acclaim will be the day I'm truly impressed). And yes, it will make a lot of you cry. And I really did love it, even though his characters are beginning to sound pathologically witty to me after only two books. But I actually would have enjoyed this book more if it had less 'book' in it.




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Frederica by Georgette Heyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Oi. Heyer, I love her, but I swear sometimes explaining her books is like, “the dinner was fantastic, wonderful melon gazpacho to start, just a shame about the dead slug I found in my salad course.” The slug in this metaphor being, you know, sexism.

Like this one – really fun set up with the sister in charge of her colorful siblings and the selfish nobleman who becomes entangled in their mishaps and how she and they are the making of him into a better man. And it’s one of those good ones where the hero and heroine spend a lot of time making eye contact in the middle of ridiculous situations and laughing themselves sick on the inside while everyone else shrieks and runs in circles.

Except that part where he becomes a better man or whatever? Yeah, that’s because he needs to. To take care of her. Like a woman needs. Which doesn't even make any sense! I mean, the thing that's most attractive to him is her self-sufficiency! I don't understand!

I need to brush the taste of slug out of my mouth.



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Cut & Run by Abigail Roux

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


FBI agents are forcibly partnered to solve murders/go undercover/protect witnesses/insert law-enforcement plot device of choice here. It’s hate at first sight, until it really, really isn’t.

This was sneaky. I read the first book and went ‘yeah, okay, that was pretty good even though x and y and z were hilariously overplayed.’ And then it was like that thing where you have the bowl of popcorn in your lap, and you don’t even know you’re eating it until it’s halfway gone. It was like that, except all of a sudden I was reading the second book. And then there were these . . . feelings! And then the third book was undercover fake-gay-married-except-really-secretly-sleeping-together and it was four in the morning and what the fuck is happening to me? By the time the fourth book came around, I wasn’t having feelings anymore. I was having feels, guys. Huge difference. And then we hit the fifth book, which coincided with some business travel, and I had one of those moments of clarity where you realize a U.S. Congressman is networking kind of frantically at you on the Acela and you’re tilting your laptop screen away from him and thinking crankily, for fuck’s sake, Congressman, just let me get back to my gay porn!. True story.

Look, these are self-indulgent to the extreme, and silly to boot, and hilariously over-the-top. But they’re also slow and sweet and angry and complicated. This is one of those stories about two people who were not looking for love, let alone looking for each other. But then it happened, and the really interesting thing is how they deal. …Or don’t deal, on occasion.

I’m feeling kind of unsatisfied with this, the way you do when you have lots of feels about something and you can’t explain why because it’s too reflexive. I have been thinking and writing a lot lately about kink (in the broader emotional sense, not the narrow sexual paraphilia sense). That knot of tension deep down in the muscle of your psyche, and kink is the thing that comes and pushes at it, and pushes, and sometimes it hurts, but it’s good. These books pushed at something to do with what I value and respect in partnerships of all sorts, and about how the things worth having don’t come easy, and, and.

That’s a little closer.




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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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The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emmuska Orczy

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


So boring. So boring;.

I read this weeks ago, and I've been waiting ever since for someone else in the group to come out with a great review. Something transformative. It would compare this to Radcliff and nineteenth-century opera and talk about modes of romanticism. Or it'd be one of those intensely personal reviews about a grimey, sweaty summer spent singing in the chorus line for a production of Pimpernel, and the backstage affair whose passions ebbed in counterpoint to the story. Or, I don't know, something.

*crickets*

It's not like I got anything either. Except maybe one thing.

Of all the times in recent years for this book to hit my radar screen, this is probably the worst. It's not about rescuing people from the violence of the French Revolution. It's about those poor, persecuted rich people. It's horrible, they've never hurt anybody -- well, except for the starvation, and the institutionalized remnants of feudal pseudo-slavery, and the "I'm not concerned about the very poor" -- oh sorry, wrong guy. "let them eat cake." There. That's the one. This is a book convinced that people are interesting and worthy of respect by virtue of being very wealthy, and I just.

It's a small part of my job to absorb national political mood and reflect it back in different analytical modes. And I was not in the fucking mood for "let them eat cake."




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Faro's Daughter by Georgette Heyer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You could make a great emoticon set out of Georgette Heyer books. I mean, she wrote like 800, and she did so many things, she basically covered the entire gamut of human romantical pursuits. The emoticon for this book would be a squinchy scowly face with the tongue sticking out. An 'anything you can do I can do better' face, since that's basically how the hero and heroine communicate.

Fun, kind of forgettable, more conventional at the last than I was hoping. But sticking out your tongue is always a little enjoyable however old you are, so.




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