February 2024's Burgoine and Pearl-Rule reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A steamy, opposites-attract romance with undeniable chemistry between a grumpy retired footballer and his fabulous and very sunshine-y ghostwriter.

When grumpy ex-footballer Alfie Harding gets badgered into selling his memoirs, he knows he’s never going to be able to write them. He hates revealing a single thing about himself, is allergic to most emotions, and can’t imagine doing a good job of putting pen to paper.

And so in walks curvy, cheery, cute as heck ghostwriter Mabel Willicker, who knows just how to sunshine and sass her way into getting every little detail out of Alfie. They banter and bicker their way to writing his life story, both of them sure they’ll never be anything other than at odds.

But after their business arrangement is mistaken for a budding romance, the pair have to pretend to be an item for a public who’s ravenous for more of this Cinderella story. Or at least, it feels like it’s pretend―until each slow burn step in their fake relationship sparks a heat neither can control. Now they just have to is this sizzling chemistry just for show? Or something so real it might just give them their fairytale ending?

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

My Review: Mabel and Alfie, whose names sound like an English music-hall duo, also sound like an English music-hall duo while they bicker and banter. This is an uncomplicated, pleasant iteration of the evergreen romance trope, executed without unnecessary fuss and with the panache one expects from an experienced practitioner of the Art of Romance. The only minor whinge I have is that the pace of this story is not as snappy as the copious dialogue...really more like exchanged monologues, if I am in full-disclosure mode.

If you like your romance reading without male knuckle-dragging, female high-horsing, or mutual sexist disrespect...as I do...you will very likely enjoy this read.

Our friends at St. Martin's Griffin want $18.00 for a trade paper edition, and it is worth it.

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The Bastard Prince Of Versailles: A Novel Inspired by True Events by Will Bashor

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A historical novel inspired by real events, The Bastard Prince of Versailles narrates the escapades of a misborn "prince" during the reign of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France.

Louis de Bourbon wasn't a real prince—even though his father was King Louis XIV. The illegitimate son of the King and his mistress, Louise de La Vallière, young Louis has been kept far from the court's eyes until summoned to bid adieu to his mother. To atone for her adultery, she joins a convent, abandoning Louis to an uncertain future.

When Louis is humiliated by his father for his role in a secret gay society, he struggles to redeem himself through heroism and self-sacrifice in the king's army on the battlefield.

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

My Review: What surprised me most about this read was that it is based on fact. I was unaware of the existence of the bastard son of the Sun King. I was more surprised still that there was a gay demimonde at this intolerant, aggressively cishet jerk's court. The last jaw-dropper for me was the way the author treated the subject of "gayness" in a time when that identity had not been invented. While being honest and true to the historical record, Author Bashor allows us twenty-first century snowflakes to feel connected to, and hopeful for, the sodomitical young bastard prince.

History buffs, as much as historical-fiction fans, will find much to enjoy in this evocation of a brutal, glamourous past. The gay themes should be a draw, not a bar, as the light the author sheds on the subject is welcome indeed...even if the life it illuminates is very, very saddening to modern eyes.

A Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link) is a mere $4.95 and worth every dime.

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Sea Fever by Elsie Sze

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mystery and Suspense in Kazakhstan!

Sea Fever is a mystery thriller surrounding clandestine activities on Voz Island in the desiccating Aral Sea of Kazakhstan, when Ayan Kazbekov was growing up in a fishing village by the Aral in Soviet time. When two locals are murdered while taking a couple of strangers to the now-abandoned Voz Island in the post-Soviet era, Ayan and his friend Grace, the wife of an American expatriate, are incited to decipher a coded note secretly passed to Ayan before the fall of the Soviet Union by Victor, his Russian scientist friend from their university days in Moscow.

Victor is not heard from again, but his note may hold clues not only to solving the locals’ murders but also thwarting life-threatening dangers to humankind.

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

My Review: I strongly doubt most of us have heard of the Aral Sea, or its impending disappearance. I will bet my life that not more than one or two of my readers have heard of Voz Island...at the most. Kazakhstan, very likely to be likewise. So there are the exotic locale, effectively limned, boxes ticked...the stakes have to be high to get the uninformed interested in the subject of such a setting.

How does environmental catastrophe causing multiple disease outbreaks ring your bell? Unfolding over decades, including huge world-changing events like the fall of the USSR, the discovery and possible exposure of its ugliest secrets puts lives at risk decades later.

I won't say this is the fastest-paced thriller I have read, but I will encourage anyone who likes Robert Ludlum's geopolitical plots to give this one a whirl. It is more than engrossing enough on its merits to deserve our attention just for its factual basis.

The trade paper edition is $17.95, available from the publishers website.

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Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A bold and brilliant revisionist take on the history of psychedelics in the twentieth century, illuminating how a culture of experimental drugs shaped the Cold War and the birth of Silicon Valley.

"It was not the Baby Boomers who ushered in the first era of widespread drug experimentation. It was their parents." Far from the repressed traditionalists they are often painted as, the generation that survived the second World War emerged with a profoundly ambitious sense of social experimentation. In the '40s and '50s, transformative drugs rapidly entered mainstream culture, where they were not only legal, but openly celebrated.

American physician John C. Lilly infamously dosed dolphins (and himself) with LSD in a NASA-funded effort to teach dolphins to talk. A tripping Cary Grant mumbled into a Dictaphone about Hegel as astronaut John Glenn returned to Earth. At the center of this revolution were the pioneering anthropologists—and star-crossed lovers—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Convinced the world was headed toward certain disaster, Mead and Bateson made it their life’s mission to reshape humanity through a new science of consciousness expansion, but soon found themselves at odds with the government bodies who funded their work, whose intentions were less than pure. Mead and Bateson's partnership unlocks an untold chapter in the history of the twentieth century, linking drug researchers with CIA agents, outsider sexologists, and the founders of the Information Age.

As we follow Mead and Bateson’s fractured love affair from the malarial jungles of New Guinea to the temples of Bali, from the espionage of WWII to the scientific revolutions of the Cold War, a new origin story for psychedelic science emerges.

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

My Review: What a complete clusterfuck the right wingnuts made of the 20th century. There were glimmers of a better, more open world that could have been...then the generals and religious nuts got hold of it, and choked it into the pale, selfish idiocy of the New Age.

What did not work for me was the sense that Mead and Bateson were ciphers...what about them made them worth setting at the center of a book, I do not know, because it felt like they were not there. The research, and its aims, are very interesting. The opponents to the use of this research are more carefully, and luckily damningly, limned than the people whose names are on the jacket.

Interesting story with a weird hollow at its core, yet still worth reading for the facts you are very likely not to have known before regarding the US attitudes towards psychedelic drugs and their theraputic uses. A story steeped in tragedy for cures and benefits lost.


A hardcover is $30 and a Kindle edition is half that.


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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.

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The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

PEARL RULED @ p38

The Publisher Says: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy steals a time machine that’s low on batteries and attempts to save girl from impending annihilation. ...You know how this goes.

Tak O’Leary is a Japanese-American television host who vanished off the grid after a failed suicide attempt. Samira Moheb is an Iranian-American military translator suffering from PTSD as a result of her time in the Iraq War. They have been in love from the moment they met, and because they never told each other, they are destined to be apart forever. But thanks to a mysterious invention buried deep in the Australian Outback, they now have one more chance to get it right.

Of course, it won’t be easy. Love never is. First they have to avoid being captured by a powerful and mysterious corporation. Then they must take down a deranged scientist who is trying to unleash a monstrous creature upon the world. Finally, there’s the matter of the invention—an impossible machine with the ability to destroy time itself. If Tak and Samira hope to reunite and save the world, they must use this machine to find a theoretical reality constructed by the thoughts of whoever is inside it. They must find the Beautiful Land.

Skillfully blending non-stop action with compassionate characters and a sharp sense of humor, The Beautiful Land is a novel unique in style and scope. It’s a love story with time machines. A science-fiction novel for people who don’t read science fiction. And an elegantly timeless tale about the nature of memory, heartache, and redemption.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ten years ago, I’d’ve lapped this up...strange timeline shenanigans, portentous foreshadowing, and so on...but now, this manic pixie girl as love object of depressed dudebro makes me want to scream. I would probably not *love* the same basics with two men in the leads, but in the intervening time, that has become something I can actually find.

Off to the Little Free Library with you, tedious cishet stereotypes-from-the-1990s. Bring me the SFF with men in love, lust, or even just a defining partnership with each other. Maybe I only need queer SF now, and for sure I need SF for people who DO read SF.