LEV A.C. ROSEN'S PAGE: THE DISASTER GAY DETECTIVE AGENCY & EVANDER MILLS P.I. SERIES #1, #4

THE DISASTER GAY DETECTIVE AGENCY
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From award—winning, critically acclaimed crime writer Lev Rosen comes a punchy, hilarious mystery—thriller. Meet the disaster gays: They're messy. They're queer. And they're about to solve a murder… Or die trying.

Brandon is a hopeless romantic. So when a handsome stranger named Jon checks in at the hotel he works at and invites Brandon to his room, Brandon ignores the advice of his crew—a group of loveable and messy queer twenty—somethings—and accepts. What follows is a tale as old as time: they hook up, Jon promises to text, Brandon falls in love, and Jon ghosts. Case closed—or is it?

When Jon checks out early, leaving behind a bag of belongings and his cellphone, Brandon takes the phone and sets out to find him, thinking that this must at last be his Cinderella story.

But he gets more than he bargained for when he witnesses a murder—and sees Jon fleeing the scene.

Determined (and not in over their heads whatsoever), Brandon, Ollie, Nicole, and Ian decide to solve the mystery of the murder and uncover Jon's true identity…they just have to figure it out before a target falls on their own backs.

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My Review: Those heady first friendships, the ones you really learn how to adult by forming and inhabiting...they're deep and they're still important to older you because you are formed by them for better and worse.

Here we are among Brandon, Ollie, Nicole, and Ian as they navigate the first changes in the structures that supported them. It's usually a significant other arriving or one departing. Most of us have been through that.

Few of us have had a potential love discovered in what looks like a guilty act at what certainly is a murder scene, like Brandon.

What ensues is the scoobygroup all pitching in to resolve Brandon's maybeboyfriend's involvement (if any) in the murder he was seen running away from the scene of. Naturally this means they need to solve the murder. A lot like Dame Agatha's Five Little Pigs we're treated to the scoobygroup's individual PoVs on the investigation and on the unfolding issue of who it is Brandon's found himself to fall for. I think the technique is one that works or fails on your readerly taste for the writing style. Author Lev uses a solidly comedic register throughout the story, giving the different scoobygoupers reasonably distinctive voices and just enough difference in what they see to keep me focused.

I don't want to tell you there's a rom-com vibe to the proceedings because that suggests the group will be all matched up by the end of the story. It's not like that, though the bantering suggests it will be in the formula of rom-com. I was partly glad that it didn't end up in the predictable couplings. It certainly would've been...forced...unless they found partners outside the scoobygroup.

All said, I was pretty convinced this was really a screenplay made novel-like because Author Lev's a well-established force at Poisoned Pen Press. It was almost obtrusive how filmable, how designed for visual scenes, this story is. I'm not saying that as a knock, I found myself reading happily along with the movie playing in my mental Grauman's Egyptian Theater in 70mm CinemaScope. It was a hoot!

I can't quite attach a full fifth star. I felt the reality, the full gravity, of the events the scoobygroup uncovered really sat uneasily with the narrative technique. Still, four and a quarter stars for the chaotic energy of the story, the sheer verve of the cast for their different roles and discoveries as the truth and the facts begin to converge...it was immersive to me, will feel like the spin cycle of your washing machine for others.

I expect we'll see more from the Disaster Gays. I'll be there.

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LAVENDER HOUSE (Evander Mills #1)
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Forge Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist.

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in.

Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept—his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.

Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He's seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn't extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy—and Irene’s death is only the beginning.

When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.

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My Review: First in a new series of gay-led private-eye mysteries. Set in 1952 San Francisco, borning and burgeoning gay Mecca on the cusp of the Lavender Scare that was the less-famous shadow of McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, the story concerns a murder within the quiet confines of rich queers. Queerness has always been more or less tolerated among the wealthy...Peter Thiel and Sam Altman aren't being shouted about on the screamy white guys channel, faggots though they are...whereas guys like our sleuth have to live with police harassment and the possibility of ghastly consequences for one's life if outed.

As is always the case in a mystery series, I recommend starting here at book one to get the foundational ethos of the sleuth...in this case Evander Mills, called Andy, a private investigator whose specialty will become among the queer community he once helped to oppress. These are taxpayers who cannot expect helpful, effective action on their problems from the police. Andy becomes a discreet and effective investigator. This time his talents are required by the wealthy and privileged, who *still* can't reliably command the services of police without facing ugliness. Andy's never been in that world before. He's dazzled by it...he's coming to terms with how people like he once was have perpetuated a cruelty they've inflicted as much as received.

Andy's learning how much his skills are needed among those who he honed them against. The emotional heart of the novel is his coming to terms with his own awful past, his awful actions, and what he can do as an adult (emotionally speaking) to help people who can't expect it if they're honest and truthful about themselves.

It's a story I thoroughly enjoyed, told in a voice I resonated well with, about people who belonged to a generation I had family among. I'll pursue the series with the zeal of a vice cop.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

MIRAGE CITY (Evander Mills #4)
LEV A.C. ROSEN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Lev AC Rosen delivers a new and captivating 1950s mystery in this dazzling, award-winning series

Private Investigator Evander “Andy” Mills’ next case takes him out of his comfort zone in San Francisco—and much to his dismay, back home to Los Angeles. After a secretive queer rights organization called the Mattachine Society enlists Andy to find some missing members, he must dodge not only motorcycle gangs and mysterious forces, but his own mother, too.

Avoiding her proves to be a challenge when the case leads Andy to the psychological clinic she works at. Worlds collide, buried secrets are dug up, and Andy realizes he’s going to have to burn it all down this time if he wants to pull off a rescue. With secret societies, drugs, and doctors swirling around him, time is running out for Andy to locate the missing and get them to safety. And for him to make it back to San Francisco in one piece.

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My Review: In the time of the Lavender Scare, there was an equal and opposite reaction from the Mattachine Society among mostly gay men and the Daughters of Bilitis among lesbians. These brave souls were fighting for recognition that is now under threat...queers are just plain ol' people, entitled by their basic common humanity to equal access to civilization's resources. Laws are applied unequally in most of the world but aggressively so among queer folk. These early rights-seekers were incredibly brave, very effective, and thus targeted.

Enter Andy Mills to a missing persons case among these pioneering souls. Investigating the possible crime(s) Andy discovers things most extraordinarily awful happening to queer people simply because they were guilty of being Other. It was a time where moral panic among high-control lunatics was at fever pitch. At this same moment the Comics Code Authority was established along the lines of the Hays Code for the movies to forestall the government imposing censorship. This also neatly sidestepped the remedy of suing the government for unconstitutional infringement of free-speech rights, ensuring the abusive restrictions on representing queer people positively could continue.

Andy's case takes him deep into the consequences of this system's probably intended consequences. It was tough to read at times. It was worse to live, as is always the case in rougher-edged fiction. Shifting Andy's field of action, however reluctant he was to do so, to LA from San Francisco, allowed me to see him wrong-footed, still determined, and ultimately successful in resolving the case. How, I won't say because the Spoiler Stasi always lurk in readiness to shout their unhappiness at your disobedience to their iron whims.

It's book four in a series I've only read book one of, yet I got the development of Andy's character that's continued on the trajectory set in the first book. It would've been an even richer experience had I read two and three, but I'll get back to them soon enough. This series combines gay history's dark corners and one man's coming into his queerness more and more in an effective mélange of meddlesome meanness combatively counteracted.

A MURDER MOST CAMP, cozy amateur-sleuth mystery with added queerness!

A MURDER MOST CAMP
NICOLAS DiDOMIZIO
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The Guncle meets Every Time I Go On Vacation Someone Dies in this fun, twisty mystery following a spoiled nepo baby forced to work at a struggling summer camp who stumbles into a real-life murder mystery he has no choice but to solve.

Rustic cabins. Lakefront bonfires. A painfully hot lifeguard. And a murder? Summer has never been this camp.

Mikey Hartford IV has coasted through his twenties in a distracted blur of yachts and sex and partying. But when his father discovers his latest million-dollar impulse buy and changes the terms of his trust, the party's finally over. Now, unless Mikey can make a positive contribution to the world before his thirtieth birthday—one that doesn't involve throwing cash at his problems—he'll never see another yacht again. (Or even so much as a canoe.)

Enter: Camp Lore, a struggling summer camp in upstate New York where Mikey has to work as the oldest, least-qualified staffer to prove that he can "do good" alongside his twelve-year-old aunt. (Yes, aunt.) But Mikey isn't sure he'll be able to survive the camp's ramshackle living conditions, let alone the gaggle of preteens who won't leave his side. And when his campers become obsessed with a local legend set at an abandoned cabin on the grounds, Mikey's chances of not making it through the summer become dangerously real—because it turns out there's a murder hidden beneath Camp Lore. And someone there will stop at nothing to keep it that way.

Solving a decade-old cold case will surely be enough "good" for Mikey to earn his inheritance. He just has to stay alive long enough to do it…

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My Review: What a hoot! This is one of those reads you, as a member of a group being threatened with ever-worsening life outcomes by the very government holding power over you, really, really can use right about now. I was completely prepared to roll my eyes and smile. I needed the hit of "it will be okay, smile more" energy I expected from the description.

I got that. I also got a fun mystery to solve. (Which...well...I've been readin' mysteries since 1967, hard to pull the wool over my eyes.) And a grossly overprivileged trust-fund workshy queenie-queen gets thrown into existential panic as my whipped cream topping on the sundae of this story.

I deliberately avoided using the "cherry" metaphor for reasons I hope are obvious.

What happens is kinda not the point of the story, it's what Mikey becomes in dealing...for the first time...with what happens when his woefully unprepared self is the one in charge of handling what happens. A pillow princess by avocation, Mikey is not at all accustomed to using the space in his brain around his movie trivia and his taste for hot gold-diggers for much of anything. It's "cute" in a young guy. (I don't think so, but that's conventional wisdom.) Mikey's dad isn't havin' it as a life for his soon-to-be-thirty son. Mikey gets a job as his aunt's kind-of carer. The twist is his aunt is twelve. (Go Gramps!) And the job's at a summer camp for her.

He, the laziest human imaginable, is about to be responsible for everything a camp counselor does. Without having been to camp.

*gleeful hand rubbing*

It goes like you'd expect: Poorly.Except, of course, not really. Lurching from crisis to problem to rebellion, Mikey finds the way out of leading teens by example is following his own teen passion for filmmaking. Telling people the story of a long-ago counselor who vanished without a trace and is rumored to have been murdered...his aunt's a true-crime nut, no one in the 2020s has not encountered the genre pervading our culture, and really honestly in our heartiest of hearts are any of us utterly immune to the appeal? Real people fall into awful circumstances and never receive justice because there are so many who need it and so few who know how to deliver it.

Opportunity practically uses a tactical battering ram on Mikey's door. He's now leading by example, helping his aunt find purpose, and attracting the kind of man who's more than physiologically a man...a strong, capable, grounded person with a man's anatomy.

So here's my reservation, and the lost fifth star's explanation. Jackson is a hottie with a heart. Sofar so good. He's way out of Mikey's league, but people cross those lines all the time because "the heart wants what it wants or else it doesn't care." (Bless you, Emily Dickinson!) It's the...unearned-ness...of Jackson's love for Mikey, it's the way Mikey really doesn't set out to become Jackson's man but kinda selfishly just accepts it is happening, that sticks in my craw. It's consistent and fully supported in the storyline, it's clearly how Mikey would have to receive the loving attention of a man like Jackson as a gift, but theres something off about that dynamic for me.

But that's what reviews are about, right? I'm here to say "the story worked but..." so you'll have a picture of how you think you'll respond not just what events you can expect to occur. If you want a book report ask a chatbot for one.

Only real people have opinions.

LEE WIND'S PAGE: The Different Kind series, A DIFFERENT KIND OF BRAVE & A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENEMY

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ENEMY (Different Kind series: Book Two)
LEE WIND
Interlude Press - Duet Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: An anomaly in space has stopped in Earth’s path in a way not accounted for by astronomical physics. Is it aliens? With only six days before inevitable contact, newly married teen spies Nicolas “Nico” Hall and Samuel “Sam” Solomon are enlisted to investigate—each young man sworn to secrecy even from the other.

Nico is in the field looking for answers and tracking a mysterious Person of Interest. Sam is working first contact scenarios on the thirteenth floor of a Manhattan building that doesn’t officially have a thirteenth floor. And they're both wondering if the rules of love change if it’s the end of the world.

As humanity slips into the grip of alien invasion panic, Nico and Sam realize they're going to have to work together to save the world—and their marriage.

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My Review: Oh boy.

SF plots really, really do not work this way in 2026. If I suggested fifteen as the target reader for book one, this one's maybe thirteen, and only if not a reader of SF. The number of ways I could think of for a mildly motivated fifteen-year-old to circumvent the ridiculous rules keeping the boys artificially apart...! Plus, how'd they get MARRIED? And why? And how'd they embed themselves in these inredibly high-stakes shenanigans?

Middle grade readers are most likely to roll with the incongruities. Even there I slightly hesitate because married teenagers? Who use worty dirds? Who have intimate talks? I don't know a lot of parents likely to be too terribly comfortable with that idea! Still...the right thirteen-year-old, maybe.

More accurately the right parent of a middle-grader. Or an older teen who's not interested in SF?

For me the read was never going to reach great heights of esteem because I've been reading SF for decades and this ignores realities of science at every turn. Yes, it's a fantastical premise from giddy-up to whoa but...well, you see how badly mismatched to the read I was.

I was glad to see Nico and Sam in something that felt more like a close relationship because they're each so deeply lonely. They come across as real, genuine friends, people I could imagine had things to talk about and thoughts to share.

There's a message I can solidly back sending to young gay lads and lesbian lasses.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BRAVE (Different Kind series: Book One)
LEE WIND
Interlude Press - Duet Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Nicolas “Nico” Hall is sixteen when he escapes from Dr. H’s religious gay reprogramming institute in California. On his own, he assumes one identity after another to avoid recapture as he flees south to Peru and then to Mexico.

Seven days older than Nico, Samuel “Sam” Jonas Solomon is a privileged Upper West Side only child who idolizes James Bond. When his heart is broken, he vows that, like Bond, he’s never going to trust in love again. Then he meets Nico, and his heart won’t listen to any logic.

Nico’s survived by living only for himself—until his love for Sam has him risking his freedom for others. And as much as Sam wants to be like 007, he discovers that James Bond is a terrible role model.

Together, Nico and Sam set out to free the other teens trapped in Dr. H’s Institute, plunging readers into perils, drama, and a long-shot chance at love. To succeed, they’ll both have to be A Different Kind of Brave.

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My Review: First in a YA coming-of-age series dealing with the horrors of conversion "therapy," which one of our young heroes escapes from in a very high-stakes way. Nico is forced into conversion "therapy" as he is kicked out of the foster family he's lived with in the care system. His running away from the horrors of the place puts him in the path of James Bond-obsessed Sam on a Mexican beach. The two create major sparks, though this being aimed at YA readers you know there's no steamy stuff happenin'. I didn't miss it...the boys are sixteen, how interesting can their sex be?...but I enjoyed Nico's PoV because he was so driven by the need to stay the hell out of the conversion "therapy" at all costs. He comes to fully understand how urgent it is for him to rescue the others left behind in the clutches of the monstrous religious nuts hell-bent on torturing kids into "straightness" through his deeply touching connection to a sexually-safe, neutered by ALS, man called Warren whose bucket list Nico makes possible for Warren to enjoy by being a gelping, caring friend. Nico *gets* how urgently he needs to get the inmates of conversion therapy out of their doul-destroying captivity; he also hatches the (utterly implausible) plan for how.

Sam isn't quite so deeply shaded a portrait. We lean heavily on his fixated adniration for 007 as his major affect on his surroundings. We know he's struggling with his wealthy parents' failures to, well, parent, and the awful void of identity that leaves in Sam. He fills it with the borrowed bravado of 007 from the film franchise. He's constantly name-checking the particular film that inspired him to acquire a specific item. It's a great way to show how very badly young people need connections and models to become functional adults. As a privileged kid with essentially unlimited money, he's well-placed to help Nico complete his rescue plans. The time these boys spend together in the course of the book was less than I myownself had expected. I'd rate it more highly had I not felt a bit misled by their parallel narrative strands, when they're billed as a duo.

Setting aside the literally not-credible way the teens are able to pull off a complex rescue operation tat's well beyond the present Administration's War Department's capacity, we have one other big issue: sticking the landing. Does the result feel as though it could've happened IRL? No. Does it feel as though the two guys really worked it out, thought it through? Here, I can't be quite so dismissive. It honestly surprised me how often I thought Nico had concerns I can only wish our US politicos could factor into their hare-brained actions. A pair of queer teens acting the parts of Bond heroes, pulling off a major humanitarian coup...well, that's excellent fun, so I let go of my desire yo have it all make sense on a practical level.

It was way more fun to watch Tom Ripley play spycraft games with 007. Your fifteen-year-old bored-by-summer gay nibling might get a chuckle and find a lot to chew over too.

MUÑECA, sapphic gothic tale in 1960s Oakland

MUÑECA
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts—ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

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My Review: Oakland, California, gets very little love in the literary world. From Gertrude Stein's famous "there is no there there" quip to this very day, Oakland is mostly just the place that's across the bay from San Francisco. This novella/short novel (under 200pp) is set there in 1968, a fraught time before Stonewall ignited the gay-rights movement but after the Black Panther Party was founded there. Oakland was bubbling and seething with the energy of change that so spectacularly fizzled out in the malaise of the 1970s.

Nati is the perfect PoV for a supernatural suspense novel set in 1968 Oakland: she's a closeted lesbian with a hidden extraordinary ability, heir to a line of women who work outside the norms of their society...their white society, the Overculture whose very definition creates or at least delineates repressive, controlling, often authoritarian conformity. Nati does not live within the Overculture's rules though she largely disappears into its strictures by hiding in plain sight. She takes her revenge on those who keep her down because she's a brown-skinned woman by nibbling at the edges, by not accepting what she must obey, by taking a bit here and there. Her chance to exact serious revenge on her late mother's former employers is her cue to grab more for herself.

Only that more proves to be the love and the essence of the family, Violeta. A trapped woman subject to a greedy man's whims, an heiress and a pawn, Violeta is the path for Nati's revenge to manifest itself in the world. Gothic hero stuff ensues as Violeta is the gothic heroine all helpless and needing rescue from a lingering death. Nati does everything she can to break Violeta out of her helplessness, using her not-ordinary familial talents and learning in a 1968 that dismisses suchlike goins-on.

The novellaness of the story shows to disadvantage here. In the rush to resolve Violeta's disability, Nati is kept very busy indeed. She's actively working her magic, she's taking responsibilities in Violeta's life, she's even willing to do the dark work of self-healing. It means I felt knackered by the end of the read, there was so much happening in a tight window of time.

It's a four-star read because I was too tired to press the button for a fifth star. I was delighted by Nati, by her craft and her craftiness. I really wanted to spend more time with her, maybe just hang out while learning about her childhood in and around the Miramontes clan when her mama worked for them, learning about her earlier life with the class divide rigidly in place.

Still and finally a solidly fun sapphic gothic tale of revenge and vengeance and avenging wrongs all happening at once.

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO, latest feminist redemption of a Classical-mythology woman's character

MEDEA SANG ME A CORRIDO
DAHLIA DE LA CERDA (tr. Heather Cleary & Julia Sanches)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A punk revival of Medea as a Mexican anti-angel of birth and death, from the International Booker Prize–nominated author of Reservoir Bitches

In Northern Mexico, Paulina, Perla, Antonia, Reina, and Jordan are striving to survive the barrio—hustling on the edge of a cartel-run economy, nursing the wounds made normal in a world that eats its own. Hovering over their trials is a spirit with gothic flair, dressed in black and crowned with braids: Medea, a mythic mother of the Chihuahuan desert, ancient as the Aztecs but never too old to be petty.

From aiding a trophy girlfriend’s abortion, to accompanying a mother in her search for her lost child in the desert, to embracing those taken too soon in the narco’s brutal proxy wars, Medea fights for justice for her chosen mortals—her divine wrath the only power that could rival the corrupt, violent web spun by the cartel, the government, and the military. Dahlia de la Cerda’s magnetic prose draws readers right into the heart of that web—and links all our fates to the missions of Medea, equal parts midwife and gravedigger, a femme fatale god in a femicidal world.

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My Review: Repurposing classical myths for the twenty-first century is a...subgenre? full genre? literary storytelling technique?...an effort I enjoy a great deal. Medea repurposed as avenging goddess, destroying angel, wrathful righter of women's victimization, has double appeal for me. It corrects what I've always seen as the calumniation of a powerful healer-semidivinity with the accusation of insane jealousy over a man who has abandoned her for another woman. She is accused in classical sources of murdering her children, born of her body, to exact revenge on a faithless fucker she literally enabled, by using her skills and knowledge, to come to power and riches.

A healer-spirit so skilled she is regarded as divine.

Male anxiety much, Euripides?

So I've never found the famous version of Medea at all convincing. It smacks of an attempt to invalidate a powerful and skilled woman by making her hyperfocused on a man; by accusing a mother of murdering her children born of her body because a man hurt her feelings by betraying her with another woman.

Hogwash.

No better mythological figure, then, to be repurposed into a guardian of women in a seriously patriarchal, femicidal culture like that of the narcotraficantes. Setting these interconnected stories...more like very well-defined chapters than actual stories, what I myownself have always referred to as "braided stories" because, like a braid, the separate strands are evident while making together a whole effect not possible for the strands separately (see Celeste Mohammed's works)...in what she calls "Aztlán," the narcostate existing in Northern Mexico where femicide is appallingly rampant offers Author Dahlia wide scope for Medea's redemption. As an avenger, Medea appears here with clear markers of supernatural power: "Then she kissed me on the forehead and shot through the sky in a snake-drawn carriage," is not a description of an everyday person. Six women in dire trouble are visited and assisted by Medea in barely over a hundred pages.

None of them are spotless, sweet little fembots, which is a relief. Messy, horny, misguided people are innumerable across the globe and occur in every ray of the rainbow of identities humans so love to pretend are Ordained and Immutable. Medea ignores these ideologically driven cultural fripperies to effect redress for the wronged.

It's satisfying to me because I like Ma'at being served by Justice (very different in my observation from mere "justice" such as the travesty being perpetrated by the US government department using that name). Medea, in Author Dahlia's hands, serves and renders Justice even in the face of "justice."

I have only one critique to offer in support of my just-off-perfect rating of the work: sometimes speed is not your friend when offering tendentious and muckraking narratives. I felt, by the end of the read, I was not in possession of enough facets of each woman's life experience to grasp the motivation for Medea coming to the rescue. It's not necessary for the story of Medea as avenger to be formed and shaped. That is done, and the shape is one I found enrichingly sharp. I was not utterly enthralled where that was *easily* within Author Dahlia's reach.

It's a braid of great beauty. It stops short of Divine Grace. And it is so urgently necessary for all of us to get our heads around the reason it exists I'm here pushing it at you. Please pick one up soonest.

THE OPEN ERA, romantic fiction with tennis players in the lead roles

THE OPEN ERA
EDWARD SCHMIT
Berkley Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Love evens the score between two tennis players in this stunning debut romance.

Recently-turned-pro tennis player Austin Hardy has been out since high school and it's never been a big deal. That is, until he becomes the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam. Suddenly, being gay is a huge deal, with headlines to prove it.

Unprepared for this new spotlight, Austin’s anxiety disorder hits a breaking point, and he trips and falls at practice. Right next to the very attractive, very talented, and probably straight Diego Cruz, ranked World #2.

The two players start a friendship off the court. But between their flirty banter, mixed signals, and brewing rivalry, Austin is thrown further off his game by Diego.

With the eyes of the world on Austin, the weight of history on his shoulders, and Diego across the net—he must decide if love means nothing or if love means everything as he battles for the trophy during an electric two weeks at the US Open.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm guiltily reminded of this DRC by Marisa Tandon's hour-long interview with the author. It was on my Pride Month agenda, but wasn't moving up the stack very quickly because the book-review traffic is seriously backed up this unnerving politically charged year.

If you haven't encountered Marisa Tandon yet, she's the LA sports nut who believes romance and sports go together like sugar and spice. Better together, fine apart...and her channel's the reason I got interested enough to watch Off Campus, which she praised. (Not for me, straight people having romances involves and interests me not at all. Well done to Ms. Tandon for even getting me over to Prime.)

I'm glad I read this book over the past twelve days. It's not a tropey romance, in my view, but a contemporary novel about two athletes who fall in love as they compete in the sport each of them truly loves but which, in its basics, is designed in queer-unfriendly ways. Maybe homophobia is inherent in sports because it's so very physical, so centered on what bodies do and can do, that it breeds anxiety in the breeders (slur used intentionally in this context) lest their precious hold on superiority in our culture be threatened by success in Others' hands. Think white supremacist nonsense over Black athletic accomplishments.

As Austin copes with his sudden rise to parity in standing with Diego, tennis's second-seed star, he is prone to panic attacks. How that works as an aspiring professional athlete, well, I'm not all the way convinced it would. It's the source of much of the young men's emotional energy as they discover they're falling in love. Diego's the second lead, a young man of many sterling qualities. One of them is not really empathy or he wouldn't more or less ghost Austin after being really supportive. There's definitely no HEA and barely the minimum-standard HFN ending. I'd enjoy seeing the young men do more in another book, one that either brings them firmly together or separates them for good.

I don't think the anti-romance crowd, of whom I once was a part, will cringe at this story's very light dusting of men falling in love. It's not going to trigger the lighter eww-ick homophobes. It's a story about finding love, finding out about how the line between love and friendship is always squiggly, while existing in the full glare of the public gaze.

What's left undone, unsaid, unresolved is always fertile ground for storytellers with the itch to make their readers or viewers sit with uncomfortable realizations and hard truths of emotional life. Not everyone who deserves the HEA gets it. Not everyone who falls in love knows what the heck to do about it, or how to make it work. Sometimes the right one comes along before they're properly prepared.

Which is why there's a whole category called "second chance romance."

I hope Austin and Diego don't need that label, but am always glad to see them if/when they return.

THE BEASTS OF THE EAST: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness, positive stories from the frontlines of ecological recovery

THE BEASTS OF THE EAST: The Fall and Rise of America's Eastern Wilderness
ANDREW MOORE
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S.—once the center of American wildness before its despoliation—and a lively tour through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves, and other creatures to their verdant native landscapes.

Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden—towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.

Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina’s coastal marshes, and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster—but not without controversy.

In Beasts in the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists, and nature lovers as they confront herculean How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As Fathers' Day looms, the eternal conundrum of what to get Dad or father-figure that is nit some wearable or technological frippery he'll forget he owns is pressing. If your Dad's like me, he reads or watches news and frets about you, your kids, or the world going directly to hell in his lifetime.

He/we ain't all the way wrong.

BUT! There is hope to be found. It's true we've screwed up the planet pretty hard and done too little to fix it. Some people have done more than most to ameliorate some of the worst, stupidest damage our (well my anyway) generation, the Boomers, have done. Their successes are underdiscussed generally, and likely do not reach far enough into awareness to combat the gloom that's so paralyzing.

Author Moore, whose delightful book Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in 2016, writes capably and informatively about the successes and the failures of the US scientific and govermental bodies charged with mitigating disasters their predecessors either caused or failed to prevent. It's a chonky boi, weighing in at almost 450 pages, but that's how much room is needed to really do justice to the good and the bad news.

I don't know about the men in your gifting circle but I don't trust the happy-clappy "this is fine" dawgs who tell us good things and chirp relentlessly cheery stuff from their high perches. I guess they see different landscapes from up there, whereas I see and smell sewage while they're making noise meant to distract me. I trust Author Moore's presentation of the significant environmental gains all over the highly urbanized Eastern US *because* the failures aren't ignored or hurried past; they're not lingered over, either, which is the other untrustworthy pole: sticking into gloom and doom.

There are copious notes, sources that held up everywhere I stress-tested them, and a tone of honest and truthful pleasure in the impressive successes won. The battles going well, eg red wolves rewilded in North Carolina, truly heartened me. I was astonished to learn there were populations of bison as far East as Pennsylvania! Imagine looking out of your sod hut in Pittsburgh and seeing a six-foot tall bison wandering the streets! Less surprising was the story of the reclaimed tall-grass prairies of Illinois that now sustain smallish herds of bison, but keep expanding.

The many people Author Moore consulted in preparing the book all come across as guardedly optimistic...I've mentioned the absence of chirpiness...which, given their various fields of knowledge and work, makes me believe we're not Doomed!...Doooomed!...just yet.

Given how little celebratory noise I hear daily and how assiduously I seek it out, I think a book like this is a good gift idea for Dad, Uncle, father-figure who also gets tired of treading sewage not water, and still can't believe or trust the sunshine enema people to be fully truthful. It's evidently expertise-laden author does an admirable tightrope walk with his tone of delivery. Including so many sources is helpful too.

It's good to offer a counter-narrative to doom and gloom that's grounded in facts and data. A very good gift for anxious science nerds of every gender.