Cut and Run + sequels by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

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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Origins: How the Nine MOnths Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You know, it is hard to find relevant books when you are really interested in gestation but not at all interested in babies. I frequently find myself in conversations these days with one of my compatriots in Project Make a Baby Like a Boss that go something like, “blah something something childhood development blah, what do you think?” And I go, “not my department – hey, have you read that cool stuff about omega 3 intake in the first trimester correlated with better labor outcomes?”*

This one is pretty close, though as usual I would have honestly preferred a textbook over popular science. There’s a lot of pretty great stuff here. The sections on the perinatal transmission of vulnerability to PTSD were particularly striking, and I was delighted to finally come across a sensible biological explanation for the finding that the more older brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay. None of this creepy Freudian incestuous homoeroticism bullshit, thank you.

Still, there just isn’t all that much to epigenetics to talk about yet. Insert joke about a science in the embryonic stages here. And while Paul writes a good survey, all her shopping at Whole Foods, living in Manhattan, attending pre-natal meditation classes makes it pretty painful when she starts going on about the plight of poor mothers and the things “we” can do to make sure “they” have access to the sanitation/nutrition/medicine necessary for healthier gestation. It’s not that we need to force women to make healthy choices, you know, we just need to encourage it. Uh-huh. Said with the blithe ignorance of someone who’s never been on the wrong end of a government poverty program based in “science”, like I have.

*Personally, I think the way the four of us are dividing the labor on this one is brilliant, even if it’s dictated by medical necessity, since the people required to feed/care for the shrieking infant will not be the person who has just shoved a shrieking infant out through her v-hole. I’m just saying. Sensible.




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