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

[lightreads]

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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Comments

[cyphomandra]

Arrgh. This has been high up on the sales charts at AREbooks (where I buy a lot of my m/m from), and so I've checked it out - and been totally disinterested. I did wonder whether I was missing something but, um, apparently not. Thanks for clarifying this, and ouch. All the best for the self-affirming queer sex without even the tiniest hint of self-loathing!

[lightreads]

Yeah, people seem to love this one. It flashes a lot of signals suggesting that it is a warm ffluffy 'have loved you forever' story, and I suspect a lot of casual readers don't look past the advertising. But am a little alarmed to think how many people read this and didn't get the creepy crawlies.

[ecaterin]

*makes adolescent 'barf' face....cause sounds like that's about all this book deserves*

Blech! So, if I may ask, why in the world did you listen to the whole thing?

[lightreads]

Well, to be honest, I didn't. I hit the 40% mark and was like "what?!?" and cranked my player up to speed 9 out of 10, which gets you through an hour of audio playback in, like, 12 minutes. So "read" might be pushing it. But sometimes I feel a certain moral superiority in being able to trash a book for flaws I know it carries to the bitter, bitter end.

[ecaterin]

ROFLMAO!!!!! Aaaa ha ha ha ha ha :D I approve of your highly informed righteous dismemberment of dismal literature!!

I speed-read the Twi-books in order to properly eviscerate them....and then they didn't even deserve *that* much attention from me!

So when it came to deciding whether or not 50 Shades deserved my eviscerations, I grabbed the Kindle 'sample' off of Amazon for each of them. Thank goodness I didn't waste any more time than that!

LIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR AWFUL BOOKS.

And they haunt me. Uuugh. No brain bleach strong enough!

Now, see, I'll know my recording of Force over Distance is a good 'un, if Light listens to it at 1:1 speed :D :D :D

Speaking of which, there's no solid ETA just yet. Looks like I'm laying in a steady 2 chapters per week - I'm up to 16 now. I'm going to start recording her second epic fic in about a month - depending on how much I've streamlined my workflow, I may be able to do 3 chapters per week, alternating back and forth. I'd like to :) So it'll be a few months before you can have the assurance of listening start-to-finish! :P

[lightreads]

Oh, ha, I don't listen to anything at 1:1, even things I adore and want to draw out. I have so very little time to read these days, it just wouldn't work. Anything less than 2:1 means I'm really savoring; anything more than 3:1 is not a great sign.

...Which possibly explains why everyone complains that I talk too fast. Listen faster!

[ecaterin]

LOLOL!!! Yeah, I suppose once you ear is attuned....why go slower when you can enjoy that much MORE STORY?? I certainly read as fast as I can visually go because....MORE STORY!!

Ha - listen faster indeed :P As someone with a speed talking 15yo, I've had to develop that skill :P

Interestingly, in the course of recording thus far, I've experimented with how relaxed down I can get the pace of my narration - because it's an industry standard, yk? Audiobooks are paced slowly. I speak very quickly (you'd keep up!), and even my careful reading speed is a bit fast. So I slowed down a couple of chapters from my usual reading pace...and it sucked some vivacity out of my performance. It's probably not that noticeable to most people, but I can hear it, yk?

So I'm a bit faster than the industry standard - if it lets me give a better performance, well, no one is complaining yet... A substantial part of the refinement that's occurring is also more variation in pacing, and I suspect that *that* is much more important in preventing listener-fatigue than speed-per-se.

Arrrh - sorry!! I have had zero sleep, was up all night remastering 16 chapters to be volume consistent for the zip file and the Audiobook file AND I HAVE RECORDING ON THE BRAIN and i'll go away now :D

[lightreads]

Well, actually, I also think the industry standard is changing. A few years ago all narrators were professional readers. Now there are increasing numbers of actors, celebrities, etc. who do a marvelous job, but who don't always stick to that glacial pace. Like -- and I'm going to spell this wrong -- Kobna Holbrook Smith reads the Rivers of London books. He's an actor, and he does a truly wonderful job with them, just excellent. And he's several knotches faster than that standard pace, which I think actually contributes to his range and the excellent flow of sarcasm he gets going.

I occasionally have access to two copies of an audiobook by different narrators, one commercial and one made by the National Library Service. And it's amazing the difference in length. One could be 10:15:00, and the other 11:30:00. It's interesting.