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The Rebuilding Year by Kaje Harper
Jun. 30th, 2019 03:53 pmThe Rebuilding Year
1/5. This started out as a pleasant M/M modern romance (former firefighter injured on the job goes to med school and falls for the campus groundskeeper with teenagers and a nasty divorce behind him), but then it was all awkwardly stapled to a poorly-done plot about students dying on campus. And then.
I had to look up the pub date on this, because it reads like early 90's fanfic, in not the good way. It was published in 2012, FYI, and is clearly meant to be set right around then. But the two leads spend literally half this book performing 'we're not gay, we just love each other.' My god. I can't even remember the last time I saw that. And the homophobia. Not just the internalized stuff. Everyone in this book -- everyone minus a few bit parts – is toxically homophobic. Like 'gay men are all pedophiles' homophobic, and 'all gay people have HIV' homophobic. Up to and including the teenagers? Who have been living in L.A. for several years?
Here's the thing. Stories about homophobia are important to tell, because it is a fact of life for queer people. But there are stories about the realities of queer life, and then there are stories that are so relentlessly, uniformly, cartoonishly homophobic that it's like oh, I see, you just really enjoy writing about people being the targets of hate. And that, I do not respect at all.
1/5. This started out as a pleasant M/M modern romance (former firefighter injured on the job goes to med school and falls for the campus groundskeeper with teenagers and a nasty divorce behind him), but then it was all awkwardly stapled to a poorly-done plot about students dying on campus. And then.
I had to look up the pub date on this, because it reads like early 90's fanfic, in not the good way. It was published in 2012, FYI, and is clearly meant to be set right around then. But the two leads spend literally half this book performing 'we're not gay, we just love each other.' My god. I can't even remember the last time I saw that. And the homophobia. Not just the internalized stuff. Everyone in this book -- everyone minus a few bit parts – is toxically homophobic. Like 'gay men are all pedophiles' homophobic, and 'all gay people have HIV' homophobic. Up to and including the teenagers? Who have been living in L.A. for several years?
Here's the thing. Stories about homophobia are important to tell, because it is a fact of life for queer people. But there are stories about the realities of queer life, and then there are stories that are so relentlessly, uniformly, cartoonishly homophobic that it's like oh, I see, you just really enjoy writing about people being the targets of hate. And that, I do not respect at all.
