Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk

[lightreads]

Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


M/M "historical" horror mystery where the introverted museum philologist teams up with the ex-Pinkerton (why is it always an ex-Pinkerton?) to investigate a paint-by-numbers plot involving mummies and chimeras in basements and blah blah. This is a cut above the usual commercial M/M standard, which isn't saying much, because . . . well, but it's still worth noting. And yet, this roundly bored me. Many other people are way into it, though, so don't let that stop you. But do take the quotes around "historical" advisedly – I swear to God when I wasn't paying attention my brain was fooled into thinking this is set in the 1990's or so, only to be surprised when the main characters take carriages instead of cabs and occasionally call each other "old fellow." Some day when I have a little more time you guys are getting a full-fledged essay on queerness and historicity in romance fiction and how our stories which portray queerness as an entirely modern invention transplanted into the hostile soil of the past are really messed up, and then you'll be sorry, but today is not that day.

I am, however, deducting a star as a penalty for one of the stupider pet names in recent memory. Ival? For Percival? Really? That just hurts my soul.




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Comments

[lightreads]

This is actually mostly the faults of eruthros and thingswithwings who got me thinking about this with the extended and hilarious rants on the general topics of "Steve Rogers knows about [insert topic here]!" Where [topic] could be anything from television to queerness. It's interesting to me because people getting it wrong re what Steve Rogers knows isn't really a bad research problem, it's a problem rooted in the way we conceive of the past as conservative and the present as not, the past as ignorant and the present as knowing, etc. etc. Which bounced sideways in my brain into how, in historical queer romance, there's never a queer community. People have to reinvent queerness from scratch every time. Which I find quite problematic, and also not fun.

/thirty second simple version.