A Charm of Magpies by KJ Charles

[lightreads]

The Magpie Lord, A Case of Possession, and Flight of Magpies

4/5. Historical M/M about a sort of magician and a younger son returned from decades in China to inherit the family title. Would you guys believe I read this for the articles? Seriously though, the magical plots here are truly engaging and, in some places, horrifying. Which is not to say I wasn't also into the romance. These two really struggled with themselves for emotional intimacy, and their conflicts always made satisfying sense. Though I do have to say that her portrayal of their height difference passed over from oh so you have a size kink and into something more like that feeling where someone tells you they crossed, like, a dachshund and a saint bernard and you're kind of like *headtilt* but....how?

Comments

I only read the first book

[runpunkrun]

I, too, tilted my head at the sheer power of Charles's size kink.

The magic really engaged me, and I was into the romance right up until they abruptly had sex.

[cyphomandra]

I also love this series and am right into it until the sexual logistics. I presume there is an audience for them somewhere.

[jadelennox]

I liked the magic and the social politics, but yeah, the size kink... very much "Huh." You know that thing that's common in some yaoi and A/B/O, where two dudes act out an unbalanced physical gender dynamic which would be deeply unsettling in het fic? That's how these read to me. I enjoyed the whole series but that sexual dynamic reminded me of 1980s romance novels. (The kind where the hero would wrap his hands around the heroine's waist, and then pick her up, put her on his--er, usually "manhood"--and then walk around the room while they did the deed. Or the illustrations in Phil Foglio's old erotica comics, where the guy's cock was sometimes bigger than the woman's waist.)

(Which reminds me of the one which was so enraging, where the characters fall in love with a non-humanoid hemaphroditic alien but the human guy somehow manages to only have sex with the parts of the alien that would be female on a human, because reasons. Oh, Phil Foglio.)

[lightreads]

Yeah, and that's the sort of dynamic Charles seems to really like. Which I think explains why my favorite books of hers are those that interrogate that from the perspective of class, and why I don't much care about those books that come at it straight on.