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

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 Lost Conspiracy by Francis Hardinge

The Lost Conspiracy by Frances Hardinge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Straight up, I'm not going to do this justice. It's so good in ways I'm still trying to fully articulate a week later.

It's young adult fantasy about post-colonialism. Also sisters, and secrets, and revenge, and people who can fling their senses hundreds of miles away, and ashes, and volcanic love triangles (Me: It has volcanic love triangles! My girlfriend: . . . Their love is so hot? Me: No, I mean there's three volcanoes. In a love triangle.)

It's a book that spends hundreds of pages teetering, teetering on the brink of ethnic cleansing, and it made me laugh. It is tight and accomplished and wrenching and wonderful and strange and smart as hell. And okay, one reason I'm not telling you about the actual story is I honestly don't know where to start.

So many of you guys are going to go nuts over this, and I can't wait.




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