2025 read #46: Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller.

Patience & Sarah by Isabel Miller

192 pages

Published 1969

Read from May 29 to May 31

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

A classic of queer literature, an intimate and insightful love story set in the early nineteenth century. Miller’s descriptions of the small daily intoxications of love and desire are among the best I’ve ever read. Her prose is at the pinnacle of the mid-century style, simple sturdy phrases that get to the innermost heart of emotions and human connection.

Miller balances her story of queer love with incisive critiques of patriarchal power and heterosexual norms. At one point, Patience’s brother says,

These are the passions marriage is meant to discourage and then extinguish. At first we imagine and hope, but in marriage we learn we are not wanted.

This contrasts with the all-encompassing technicolor love of the two women at the center of our story, in all its possessiveness, eroticism, and need.

2024 read #70: Queer’s One for the Ages, edited by Viviana Annaelise Montez.

Queer’s One for the Ages: An LGBTQ Historical Fiction Anthology edited by Viviana Annaelise Montez

84 pages

Published 2020

Read June 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Collecting books and reading books are two separate pastimes. I’ve owned a copy of this anthology ever since early 2021, when I purchased it alongside a copy of the December 2020 issue of Prismatica Magazine (which was my very first print publication as an author). It’s come along with me on three big moves, but I’m only just now reading it. (To be fair, I didn’t do much reading at all in 2021. Too much fresh trauma and long-term recuperation.)

Ah, 2020. A miserable time for most, a tragic time for many. Yet it was also when I got reacquainted with the indie press scene. So many of the small litmags and micro presses that I read and published in back then are gone. A good chunk of my publications were lost in various website closures. In the case of Prismatica and its associated indie press, it enacted a small miracle by resurrecting after its initial shutdown in the summer of 2021. The magazine’s back catalog is still available to read online, which is another small miracle. All the press’s one-off anthologies and chapbooks, sadly, seem to be out of print, including this collection. I’m happy I got a copy when I did.

If any of the authors have since chosen different names, I  apologize. I don’t mean to deadname anyone here.

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“White Flowers to the Sea” by Jameson Hampton. A brief but charming tale of a priest of Poseidon at Sounion, and his curiosity about the furtive Athenian man who leaves offerings of white flowers at the temple. Hampton brings out character with deft phrasing, making this story feel deeper than its length would suggest.

“The Keeper” by Jacob Holmes-Brown. After a tryst in the lighthouse, warrior Kallias must leave to accompany Alexandria's governor on a voyage. Kallias' love, Timon, a keeper of the lighthouse, waits for his return, but riots sweep through the city in the governor’s absence. An effective story. 

“Miindo” by Lyndon Ang. A sweet, sapphic tale of an enslaved entertainer named Jeonghyang and a painter named Yunbok. Dynastic Korea is not the ideal place to be a woman, a commoner, or queer. This story grounds our protagonists in that system, but is mostly concerned with giving them a glimpse of a life outside those strictures, literally seeing past the male gaze. It also graces us with a strong dose of the "queer panic" trope. Enjoyable.

“Loss” by A.R. Salandy. Nathaniel and Tom taste love on the eve of the American Civil War. 

“Gas-Flame Countess” by Percival Vogt. An atmospheric stroll through 1865 Paris, a world of nocturnal pleasures, tribades, and complaisants. This story was inspired by the real-life "Countess" and her queer community, which I just now learned about thanks to this story.

“By the Mahoning River” by M.P. Armstrong. One close to my heart, this story takes place in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1943. Tony works at a steel mill, missing her brother, who's been drafted. Then a new family moves in above a corner storefront, and Tony meets Beatrice, who also finds work at the mill. Another sweet little story, a brief but vivid depiction of a moment in time. I wish it had gone on longer.

—

And that’s it! Overall, a solid and enjoyable sample of indie publishing. I’m sad the other offerings from the press are out of reach.

2024 read #57: Star Pattern Traveller by Joyce Chng.

Star Pattern Traveller by Joyce Chng

224 pages

Published 2023

Read May 22

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Something for me to unlearn: My snobbish dismissal of books that aren’t formatted “properly.”

That tendency is especially evident with this self-published book from the author of the lovely ground-level space opera Water into Wine. When I first opened my copy, I was immediately put off by how much it looked like a Word document: 12 point Times New Roman, double spaced; the first page of the text opened on an even number. I almost consigned it to my small pile of indie and self-pub books that I won’t read because I don’t want to give anything indie a bad review. (Giving a bad review to an indie title feels mean to me. I’d rather DNF and resist stepping on anyone just trying to make it out here.)

I’m glad I persevered through my own internalized gatekeeping, because this tale of a human scientist who crashes onto a planet and joins a clan of therian folk is charming and worth a read (as long as you’re open to a cross-species sci-fi romance with anthropomorphic wolf warriors in space). Chng’s prose is solid, better than many traditionally published sci-fi authors I won’t name — especially impressive, considering the fact that the manuscript saw no professional editing, the secret ingredient of mainstream publications.

In case my 2.5 star rating seems harsh, keep in mind that my ratings on this blog have always treated 2.5 as the midpoint, the “averagely good and worth checking out” threshold. It isn’t the same as a 2.5 you’d see in a place like Goodreads.

2024 read #49: The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson.

The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan

Introduction and notes by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

290 pages

Published 1806

Read from April 22 to April 24

Rating: 1 out of 5

I read this for the sole purpose of scrounging up another title for my list of 1800s reads. (Eighteen-oughts, that is — not eighteen hundreds.) That’s a form of historical interest all on its own, naturally, but it isn’t the most satisfying reason to read a book. It certainly didn’t help me stay engaged with the tedious, allusive, grandiloquent style of the era, or help me through the book’s desultory, epistolary structure (I can’t call it plot).

As a document of historical attitudes and advocacy, The Wild Irish Girl is interesting, availing itself of the unsophisticated political philosophy of its day to lay out a nationalist mythology opposed to English colonialism (hence the subtitle). Owenson responds to the 1800 dissolution of the Irish parliament by taking the broad, otherizing stereotypes the English consigned to the Irish people, and turning them into positive attributes. The usual English propaganda of uncouth, uncivilized barbarians across the Irish Sea is recast into a Rousseauean state of “wild,” “natural” grace, suffused with “primeval simplicity and primeval virtue.”

Many pages are spent enumerating fanciful mythologies meant to link the Irish to Phoenician exiles, the sort of nationalistic bridge between the Classical Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe so beloved by early Moderns, Victorian diffusionists, Thor Heyerdahl, and Twitter’s white nationalists. At one point, even the way women fold their scarves is underlined as a cultural link to Egypt. If you’re researching the history of how folklore gets spun to foment nationalism, this is a book for you.

The story itself isn’t worth a read. Horatio, our viewpoint letter-writer, is a woeful and apathetic wastrel, banished by his aristocrat father to western Ireland to rethink his ways. He’s prejudiced against the Irish people, buying into every negative English stereotype against them. Bored after just a few days, Horatio prowls around his father’s estate, where he learns the tragic history of an Inismore prince whose ancestor was killed and dispossessed by Horatio's own ancestor. Horatio, feeling the first pangs of conscience an Englishman ever felt over the depravity of conquest, decides to attend church and gawk at the prince and his family. Once there, he promptly obsesses over Lady Glorvina, the prince's daughter. He breaks his arm while stalking her, wakes up in her care, assumes a false identity to stay with her, pretends to be an art tutor to get near her, etc. Then he has the gall to get upset that she might be deceiving him. I couldn’t be done with Horatio fast enough.

Here in Turtle Island, we often forget that England’s second colonial venture was perpetrated in Éire. (Their first colonial venture, as even fewer people recall, was against their own lower classes.) It’s a depressing reminder of how vile colonialism has always been that the English literate classes needed to be informed by a half-English author that the Irish were human. The Wild Irish Girl takes that thesis and stretches a book out of it. Horatio lists out an English prejudice on one page, only to be shocked by the kindness and generosity of the Irish on the next. Again and again. For some 250 pages of modern typesetting. And such is the way of colonialist empire that this was considered too radical to publish by several presses at the time.

2023 read #128: The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag.

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

252 pages

Published 2021

Read from November 2 to November 3

Rating: 4 out of 5

A bittersweet exploration of the loneliness of being a queer teen, projecting a false self to protect yourself even if it risks never finding happiness within your true self. Morgan, 16 and with no plans to come out of the closet until she’s in college and out of her small town, is rescued from the sea by Keltie, a selkie. Thinking it’s a romantic dream, Morgan kisses Keltie — but it was no hallucination. True love’s kiss allows Keltie to assume human form and walk on land, and aspects of her identity that Morgan wasn’t yet ready to address suddenly become urgent. “You’re the true shapeshifter,” Keltie tells Morgan.

The character design work here is utterly endearing. Keltie and Morgan are also endearing as characters, immediately pulling you into an emotional investment. Morgan herself doesn’t always make the right choices or respect Keltie’s emotional needs. It’s realistic but occasionally heartbreaking.

The coming-of-age story — already emotionally fraught — is complicated by Morgan’s friend group, her brother, and a monstrous harbor tour boat that is endangering Keltie’s seal friends. Things don’t effortlessly fall into place, at least not right away. “Sometimes you have to let your life get messy,” Morgan’s mom tells her at one point. “That’s how you get to the good parts.”

2023 read #115: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Afterword by Elizabeth Hardwick

221 pages

Published 1818

Read from October 9 to October 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve barely read anything in the romantic classics vein. My experience begins and ends with Jane Eyre. It was just last month that I learned what “sensibility” meant in the context of Sense and Sensibility. So naturally I should begin with a satirical send-up of the genre, right?

Right from the start, the narrative voice is delightful, commiserating over young Catherine’s disadvantages as a Gothic heroine: her mother is alive; her neighborhood lacks a suitable rakish heir or mysterious foundling to court her; her carriage arrives at Bath safely without any upsets or dramatic robberies. The first young gentleman she meets exclaims over her failure to keep a journal, and goes on at length about quality muslin. But Catherine soon has her hands full with arcane social protocols, competing suitors, manipulative friends, and tangled knots of social pressures and civilities, afflictions enough for any tear-drenched heroine.

The central conceit, of course, is that Catherine filters the prosaic afflictions and limitations of her bourgeois life through the expectations of a Gothic novel. Existing as a woman in this era (or any other era) is full of horrors all on its own, so for the most part, it works. Courtesy masks the deepest cruelty; truth is delivered only through irony; money and title override everything. Much is made of the young woman’s choice to refuse, only for social pressures to remove her ability to choose. There are times when the banal detestability of the Thorpes makes the narrative drag. Honestly, when Henry Tilney gets into his “Oh, you silly women” speeches, he’s just as bad — even before the narrative brings us to the titular Abbey and the scheming general.

Like every other book of its time, Abbey brims with the bigotry and mores of its culture, which makes it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly, even with Austen’s wry commentary.

2023 read #61: Exodus 20:3 by Freydís Moon.

Exodus 20:3 by Freydís Moon

74 pages

Published 2022

Read June 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

In comparison to Heart, Haunt, Havoc, which Freydís Moon wrote first but published later, Exodus 20:3 is a more assured outing: polished, horny, and glittering with uneasy radiance. Moon’s prose is barbed and evocative, hungry and aching with holy lust. The Catholicism of Heart has been stretched raw to accommodate an almost pantheistic ravening for sanctity. Holiness here is the terror and wonder of being seen, of embodying creation with the sculpting of one’s body into its truest shape. Angel and human alike are conduits for the divine, the worship of the fragments of God scattered through creation. The unpacking of religious trauma has rarely felt this sexy.

2023 read #44: Heart, Haunt, Havoc by Freydís Moon.

Heart, Haunt, Havoc by Freydís Moon

152 pages

Published 2023

Read from April 29 to May 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is Freydís Moon’s earliest long-form work, though chronologically it was published after their Exodus 20:3, With a Vengeance, and Three Kings, all of which are on my to-read list. Heart has a touch of first-novel unevenness, a certain lack of polish that might also be correlated with its indie-press presentation. I went back and forth about how I wanted to rate this novella; even though my ratings are wholly arbitrary anyway, I couldn’t decide whether I should give it the 4 out of 5 I wanted to give it, or whether the first-book bumpy prose would bump it down to 3.5. In the end I decided I liked this story, and that’s enough.

Heart is a slim but affecting story of possession and possessiveness, of spiritual appropriation and delayed grief, of calling an exorcist (who’s rather more of a specialist, really) to help you move on from a particularly controlling past entanglement. At its best, Moon’s prose is bone-bending and blood-letting in its effectiveness (though their earnestness occasionally gets in the way of the flow). Our main characters, Colin and Bishop, are relatably scarred, layered, cautious to show their true selves. There might be a bit too much Catholicism for my tastes, but overall Heart is gorgeous and vulnerable and well worth the read.

2022 read #41: So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens.

So This Is Ever After by F.T. Lukens

345 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 9 to October 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This one is a high fantasy rom-com in which, after defeating the Big Bad Evil Guy and fulfilling the prophecy, the Chosen One and his band of adventurers settle in to rule the kingdom they accidentally inherited -- and also the Chosen One needs to find true love or he'll die. It's a charming set-up for a book and I had high hopes for it. Further, the cover is absolutely lovely.

Alas, Ever After eschews any real tension (romantic, humorous, or otherwise) regarding who Arek's soulmate is going to be. We know who it's going to be from the first chapter. That's not so bad in and of itself. This could have been a charming novella, a comedy of courtly manners as one complication after another impedes the course of True Love. What sours the book for me is how it stretches out a straightforward premise and places the burden of that extra length on our two romantic leads being absolutely oblivious idiots who can't communicate to (literally) save a life. That's a tried and true rom-com scenario, of course, but it long outlasted its welcome for me.

Beyond our two romantic leads, the main band of adventurers is a delightful cast. I'd happily read novels about Bethany's lusty adventures, about Sionna learning to loosen up and have fun, or Rion being the kingdom's sweetest himbo paladin. And I have to admit, when our two numbskull leads finally make things right at the end, I cried at how sweet and winsome it all was. The journey to get there could have been considerably shorter, though. Or maybe the focus could have been spread more evenly across the cast.

2022 read #26: The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner.

The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner

99 pages

Published 2021

Read from June 5 to June 6

Rating: 4 out of 5

As far as I know, the only gothic novel of any sort I've read before this was Monica Heath's Dunleary, a trashy and deeply misogynistic morality tale that did nothing to encourage me to seek out more of its ilk. My partner R has the same soft spot for "women running away from a house" books that I harbor toward crappy midcentury pulp, however, and slowly I've grown more intrigued about the genre. When I learned that a certain indie press had published a modern queering of gothic horror, I just had to give it a try.

Wagner's prose atmospherically unfurls a gothic tale that fits comfortably within the expected parameters of "woman running away from the house" horror: buried family secrets, repressed memories, half-forgotten tragedies, all breathing malevolent life into a once-magnificent manor house in a remote corner of 1920s Oregon. Wagner doesn't shy away from the racist underbelly of Oregon's white elites. Slight spoilers: The forbidden love that awakens between our narrator and her brother's new bride is stirring and far more believable than the so-called romance at the center of Dunleary. Everything is better when it's gay.

2022 read #13: The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

359 pages

Published 2020

Read from April 19 to April 26

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Gay pirates are having a bit of a cultural moment. Over the last few weeks I've been privileged to observe the emergence of the Our Flag Means Death fandom in real time. I get the vibe that a bunch of other queer pirate media has been released in recent years, too, but alas, I haven't been reading much in recent years. I can say that the best segment of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue involved pirates, and one of my favorite stories in Queer Blades, the LGBTQIA2+ fantasy adventure anthology I edited, involves sapphic pirates.

So I really wanted to like this book. I think the basic outline of its plot holds promise. The two main characters are interesting. The world -- while only thinly sketched -- has potential.

But overall, it was disappointing and under-baked. Tokuda-Hall's prose rarely rises above utilitarian. Outside of Flora/Florian and Evelyn, most of the characters feel like stick-figures, barely sketched in, lacking motivation or substance. The plot reads like an outline, with the characters forced into making the choices they make because the outline demanded it, not because the choices make sense in-character. Given the way the book ends (and this is a tiny spoiler), the entire witchcraft subplot feels completely superfluous, something left over from a previous draft. 

I won't say I dislike this book by any means. In my completely arbitrary rating system, 2.5 is essentially neutral -- an average book, not one I'd recommend but not one I regret reading. But I do feel like The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea could have been so much more. Especially given the caliber of some of the names Tokuda-Hall drops as early readers in her acknowledgements.

2022 read #12: The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee.

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

520 pages

Published 2017

Read from April 10 to April 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

Some people enjoy stories about rakish aristocrats behaving badly. I'm certainly not against the general idea, but our narrator and protagonist here is up to his ears in petulance and privilege. Monty is appallingly obtuse, feeling sorry for himself -- and justifiably so, given his shitty abusive father -- but never stopping to think that others might have it worse. I believe it's meant to be a critique of performative allyship, of swooping in to save the day without stopping to ask what others less privileged might want. But Monty is an unrelenting disaster, consistently making the worst (and most dramatic) choice whenever he is presented with one.

This book is entertaining, with a fun narrative voice and a plot that careens from one scrape into the next: a horrible social disaster at the French court! highwaymen! intrigue! prison! pirates! Thanks to our hero Monty's terrible decisions, it all becomes a bit exhausting, especially in the middle going. Long past the point where you'd think he'd start learning and growing, he sends it all crashing down once more in a fit of pique because, once again, he didn't stop to ask anyone else what they needed but barreled on ahead.

2022 read #6: Patience & Esther by S.W. Searle.

Patience & Esther: An Edwardian Romance by S.W. Searle

327 pages

Published 2020

Read March 12

Rating: 4 out of 5

Much like The Prince and the Dressmaker, this is a delightful historical romance that treats its queer leads with gentleness. It's a sweet and touching narrative full of loving sex, beautifully-rendered romance, and open communication. A sapphic tale without significant setbacks or dangers is such a breath of clean air. 

2022 read #5: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

308 pages

Published 2022

Read from March 10 to March 12

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Small-press publication is such an unpredictable beast. A couple weeks ago my Twitter feed -- almost entirely composed of small-press and indie writers -- exploded over Legends & Lattes, a queer cottagecore fantasy romance set in a D&D-adjacent world. It has hundreds of five-star reviews on Amazon and has presumably sold many more copies than that. Meanwhile, a couple months back I edited and published Queer Blades: An Anthology of LGBTQIA2+ Adventure Fantasy, which contains nine excellent short stories and novelettes of queer fantasy romance (one of them cottagecore!) from a delightful assortment of rising genre stars. It has, as of this writing, sold three copies and received zero reviews of any sort. I'm slightly biased toward the book I edited, naturally, so while I won't say that Queer Blades is necessarily better than Legends & Lattes, I do think it deserved somewhat more than three copies sold.

I'm somewhat embittered by that fact. I'm happy Legends & Lattes has found success! But sales are a result of marketing more than anything else, and I'm super not good at the marketing side of running a small press.

All of that is an unnecessary and somewhat petulant prelude. Legends & Lattes itself is a warm and frothy confection, an avowedly low-stakes high fantasy about an orc adventurer who retires from the blood-money lifestyle to establish the coffeehouse of her dreams. The book does exactly what it says on the cover, and it does so with a minimum of flourish but a whole lot of heart.

I will mention one small but glaring detail: almost every secondary, tertiary, and incidental character beyond the two leads is male. Whenever a random guard, organized crime enforcer, or city worker is introduced, they're almost invariably a dude. I'd say it reminds me of 1990s fantasy novels in that regard, except even in the 1990s Robin Hobb had already addressed that problem. 

2021 read #8: The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang.

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

283 pages

Published 2018

Read December 2

Rating: 4 out of 5

I adored this book. It's such a wholesome, heartwarming delight, rich with self-discovery and fabulous fashion. The character designs are winsome, the storyline gently moving, the dresses superbly detailed and astoundingly rendered. It takes place in a vague pseudo-historical Paris full of unmarried princesses and absinthe clubs, where all it takes is a single fashion show to spark social change. I'd move to this world in a moment if I could.

2021 read #4: Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip.

Winter Rose by Patricia A. McKillip

262 pages

Published 1996

Read from October 22 to October 31

Rating: 4 out of 5

If I used The Lord of the Rings to ease myself back into reading, Winter Rose helped to remind me of what I love about reading in the first place.

This is a gorgeous book, dreamy and full of feelings rather than certainties. McKillip's prose comes into its own here, spare at times and lush in others as the seasons turn through her narrative. It reminded me of the possibilities of the written word, the gentle heartbreak and delicate power inherent within fantasy. The whole time I found myself wishing I could write McKillip's seemingly effortless prose, reproduce the lightness of her touch, the richness of her ambiguity.

It all works far better for me here than it did in The Book of Atrix Wolfe. Whether that means McKillip's faculties improved significantly within a year, or my tastes changed significantly over the last five, is anyone's guess. (It's probably the latter.)

2021 read #1: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

 A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

419 pages

Published 2015

Read from January 1 to January 12

Rating: 3 out of 5

2020 was not kind to me, and this is reflected in how few books I finished last year: six, quite possibly the fewest books I've read in a calendar year since 1990 or so. My book reviews were never insightful in the best of times, and now I face the extra struggle of rust. I haven't written a review since July, when my life was entirely different, before so many things fell apart. What thoughts can I even string together here that feel worthy of such a return from bad places?

I don't want to give up on reviewing what I read just yet. I've maintained this blog since 2013. It's a luxury to be able to go back and read my thoughts (however vague and disjointed) on any random book I read in the last eight years. So I'll try to pull something together for now, and in the future, I hope to put in a better effort to write reviews worth reading.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the default YA fantasy books of recent years. If you go on Instagram and search tags like #fantasybooks, Sarah J. Maas titles will be ubiquitous -- tastefully arranged on beds of cotton fluff, bedecked with flowers. I've always had a hipster streak, a preference for forgotten or underappreciated works and a tendency (unconscious or not) to avoid the popular titles. But my partner R bought me a lovely copy of Thorns, and when I found myself picking up the pieces of my old life, it was one of the few things I took away with me, and just the sort of light escapism I needed to get me back into reading.

YA fiction has anger issues. Every character will be snarky or sarcastic to every other; narrators will arrive with chips on their shoulder. This isn't my sort of thing -- but I acknowledge I'm not the target audience here, and haven't been for about twenty years. For the most part, Thorns handles this fairly well, justifying the walls our narrator has built around herself. Perhaps the fey beings she encounters could have been more august and freighted with the centuries they have seen, and perhaps major plot contrivances happen solely through our narrator's stubbornness two too many times, but it works. There were glimpses of delightful fey strangeness here and there, and I enjoyed how horny everyone became maybe halfway through.

I can't decide how I feel about the main faery dude being named Tamlin. Given the name, and the mask magically stuck to his face, I naturally assumed that a particular twist would be coming -- and then it never came. I'm glad I didn't guess a major twist, but then I have to ask, why was he even named Tamlin in the first place? Enough of the book loosely aligned with the titular ballad that I guess I can see the connection between the two, but it was a bit distracting in the early chapters all the same.

2019 read #5: Dunleary by Monica Heath.

Dunleary by Monica Heath
143 pages
Published 1967
Read from February 8 to February 13
Rating: 1 out of 5

The other day I found this in a random thrift store in rural Ohio and picked it up because it sounded like some tawdry, trashy fun. A Gothic romance set on a remote Irish island haunted by a curse, where not even the heroine's husband is what he seems! Romance as a genre is ridiculed and devalued in our culture out of pure misogyny; having internalized that misogyny myself, I've read fewer romance novels than I have mysteries, and I despise mysteries. I've been meaning to remedy that deficit for a while now, and when I found this book, I followed an impulse to begin making up for that lack here and now.

This was a mistake.

Dunleary is a document shaped and fashioned out of misogyny. The lurid curse hinted at on the back cover dooms the women of Inish Laoghaire to "wantonness," which is the 1967 word for "having control over their own sexuality." Our heroine, "Deirdre the virgin" (as her future husband the Count O'Leary insists on calling her), meekly submits to her husband and holds fast to her "virtue," while the "curse" of the island is revealed to be the mad machinations of a "whore" who has been murdering women for decades in her frustrated desire to marry the Count O'Leary's father. On multiple occasions, the Count casually threatens to murder Deirdre with his bare hands if she proves unfaithful—and she goes and marries him anyway. It's a horrifying vision rendered yet more appalling by the realization that substantial numbers of people in our culture still view the world this way. 

As a work of fiction, Dunleary feels like reading with training wheels on. Every twist and question and revelation is underlined repeatedly in the text. At one point a character sneers at a born-out-of-wedlock boy that Maeve, the aforementioned "whore" at the center of the web of murder and disgrace, is his mother; on the very next page our narrator Deirdre wonders, "Could Maeve be the boy's mother?" It reminds me a lot of pulp fantasy from the 1970s, or pulp sci-fi from the 1940s.

Next time I try to read some romance, I shall learn from this error and find me some more recent books that aren't so appallingly regressive.

2016 read #86: A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson.

A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson
159 pages
Published 2016
Read from November 11 to November 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The previous Wilson novella set in this story universe, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, was a modern take on some old sword-and-sorcery cliches. A Taste of Honey moves closer to the science-fantasy of Butler's Xenogenesis series or Le Guin's Hainish books, full of godlike aliens mingling their genetic patterns and psionic powers with a human race seemingly reverted to an Iron Age existence. In both cases Wilson fans new life into the respective subgenres but nonetheless seems bound by their limitations, at least to some extent.

In its structure, plotting, and pacing, Honey is a more assured undertaking, slipping forward and backward through Aqib's life exactly as needed to pull the story along, without the occasional wobble Sorcerer suffered. The characters are richer here, the tragedy more compelling, yet to be honest, I preferred the fantasy elements of Sorcerer (dated as they were) to the rote technobabble here. A better balance between the two influences would be superb, though for me, that balance would rest closer to the fantasy side of things.

2016 read #81: Carry On by Rainbow Rowell.

Carry On: The Rise and Fall of Simon Snow by Rainbow Rowell
522 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 14 to October 24
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Simon Snow began his literary life as a Harry Potter pastiche in Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl. Carry On was the title of the Simon Snow slashfic written by the eponymous fangirl, but Rowell (as she says in the closing author's note) wanted to try her hand at writing a Snow novel -- "What would I do with Simon Snow?" It's all a delightfully tangled question of literary ontology and ontogeny.

What matters here is that this is a cracking good tale that begins as the same Harry Potter pastiche we all expected -- the equivalents of Harry and Draco are roommates! there's a brilliant and powerful witch who fills Hermione's shoes! there's an eccentric and vaguely fatherly headmaster who keeps throwing our hero directly into trouble! there's a clique of powerful old wizarding families who don't like the inclusive reforms of the forward-thinking headmaster! -- but quickly carves out its own space in the crowded "magical school" subgenre, and establishes its own tone. As my friend Marlene pointed out, after flipping through the first few pages, the narrative voice is a bit manic -- breathless, rushing along in clipped sentences and fragments and exclamation marks, making only a token effort to distinguish between wildly different perspectives. But once you're into it, and provided you don't lose interest at any point, the writing is swift and engaging. (I must confess, I kinda did lose interest for a bit, after -- spoilers -- Simon and Baz consummate their romantic tension with a kiss in the midst of a literal firestorm of angst, which seems like it should have been the climax of the book, but wasn't.) The romance is well-handled, particularly the aforementioned kissy-facing in the firey woods, and while the magical elements aren't particularly fresh, I feel Rowell held her own with them. And the actual climax, while predictable, was satisfying, and the epilogue was miles better than Harry Potter's.

I did wonder whether Simon's musings on whether he was now "gay" constituted bi erasure or not: Is this an oversight by the author (going from dating the prettiest girl in the school to dating the dangerously sexy vampire boy doesn't necessarily mean you're no longer interested in girls, after all)? Or is this an oversight on the part of the character, who may not have ever been exposed to the concept of bisexuality? I'm leaning toward the former, which is kind of a shame.