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A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson
Apr. 5th, 2018 09:32 pmA Taste of Honey
4/5. A nonlinear fantasy novella. Young royal cousin falls into a scandalous queer romance with a soldier. The ten day story of their affair is told with its end at its beginning, interspersed with the rest of the protagonist's life after – his marriage to a princess of the court, his daughter, and this whole subplot with math and the gods and stuff.
Ha, okay. I thought this was the exact same things I thought the other Wilson novella I read was: strange, beautiful, frustrating. No one does language like Wilson does language. No one does dialect like he does, specifically. But I didn't think much more than that because this seemed, for all its structural fancy footwork, like a queer tragedy I've read a hundred times. Complete with requisite older brother who turns violent when he finds out and everything.
But then the end twists and sidesteps and oh, okay. The taste of honey was never the affair at all. And the whole thing is taking the feet out from under the standard tragic queer love story. I'm not sure it's doing much else (can he just! Write! The novel! That gets into all the science fantasy worldbuilding!) but it's worth reading for the trick of it and for his language, which is magic by itself.
4/5. A nonlinear fantasy novella. Young royal cousin falls into a scandalous queer romance with a soldier. The ten day story of their affair is told with its end at its beginning, interspersed with the rest of the protagonist's life after – his marriage to a princess of the court, his daughter, and this whole subplot with math and the gods and stuff.
Ha, okay. I thought this was the exact same things I thought the other Wilson novella I read was: strange, beautiful, frustrating. No one does language like Wilson does language. No one does dialect like he does, specifically. But I didn't think much more than that because this seemed, for all its structural fancy footwork, like a queer tragedy I've read a hundred times. Complete with requisite older brother who turns violent when he finds out and everything.
But then the end twists and sidesteps and oh, okay. The taste of honey was never the affair at all. And the whole thing is taking the feet out from under the standard tragic queer love story. I'm not sure it's doing much else (can he just! Write! The novel! That gets into all the science fantasy worldbuilding!) but it's worth reading for the trick of it and for his language, which is magic by itself.