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

[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.