lightreads

Living Promises by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


M/M modern romance of her usual 'make lots of melodramatically bad things happen to these people and stick a wedding at the end' variety. I can't think of another M/M dealing with HIV off the top of my head, so there's that. And I did like this in a distracted, way-more-important-shit-going-on-give-me-a-book way. Even with all the emotional breakdowns and nonsense.

But – and I realize I sound like a broken record here – but. This genre does not understand homophobia. According to this genre, there are two kinds of people: there are homophobes who disown their queer children in dramatic fashion, and then there's everyone else who isn't homophobic. Riiiight. I mean, those homophobes do exist. But writing about that is writing the most cartoonishly villainous face of it, and entirely missing the grinding, subtle, every day corrosion. You know, the complicated parts. Like how a friend's mother gave the old family silver to the straight daughter and not the queer daughter because – and mom didn't articulate this or probably even know – because the straight daughter had the sort of family/table on which ancestral silver belongs, and the queer daughter and wife did not. When the M/M genre defines homophobia only by violence and blatant hate, it fails to get its hands around some fundamental truths of what it is to be queer. And also perpetuates homophobia, but it does that in a hundred other ways too, so.

I'll stop bitching about this eventually.




View all my reviews

Clear Water by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Basically I climbed into a psychological hole towards the end of this week and pulled this book in on top of me. For those purposes, it was great. Twenty three year old party boy with ADHD is trying to get his life together when everything goes to hell in one night, and he basically falls into the lap of a biologist studying toxic effects on frogs. There's this half-hearted afterplot about the pollution and an ex and blah blah blah, but honestly 75% of this book is just taking two guys and sticking them in a small space and watching them be ridiculously happy to have found each other, and then watching all their problems get solved. So, you know, aces for my purposes this week.

The thing about Amy Lane, though, is she's so damn committed to her kinks. She takes that whole 'older put together guy' and 'younger flighty struggling guy' thing, and then she brings all the kitten and bunny descriptions for the younger guy, with extra 'fragile' and 'slender' in case you missed the memo on the dynamic here. Which is all well and good for her, and probably for a lot of readers, but personally I like this trope in subversion, not straight-faced. So to speak.

Oh, but I do have to talk about the audiobook. And by "audiobook," let's be clear. I mean podfic. In a good way! This is the sort of production with a fair amount of unfiltered sound in the background, and a narrator who clearly has a lot of feels about this story, and who persistently says "kway" for quay. Basically it made me grin and want to pat them all and call them darlings. And I'm not talking about the characters.




View all my reviews