June 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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A Champion for Tinker Creek (Tinker Creek Series #1) by D.C. Robeline

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Master mechanic Lyle James built a successful but lonely life in Tinker Creek after rescuing his dad’s auto repair shop until an international development firm conspires with local officials to condemn the shop and steal his land.

Jose “Manny” Porter has come home to take a reporting job at the South Georgia Record, a regional newspaper where his father is publisher and editor-in-chief. As the son of a driven Anglo father and Cuban exile mother, Manny knows all about how competing parental expectations can chill efforts to even find sex—much less love.

After a night of passion, Lyle and Manny are thrown together in a fight to save Lyle’s business. Their struggles may lead to more than either expected for their community and their lives.

I RECEIVED A COPY FROM THE MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. THANK YOU, DARLING.

My Review: Series mysteries are about the maintenance of what the Egyptian pharaohs called "Ma'at". The serious work of maintiaing the rightness of the world is in the hands of this goddess. The characters are, in the reader's mind, the vehicles for ma'at to act, so we invest in the recurring characters the most thoroughly and readily. Lyle and Manny have good chemistry, are fun to watch as they figure out the boundaries of their relationship.

Plus I agree with the politics in the story. It all adds up to a recommendation for other series-mystery readers, for left-leaning environmentally concerned readers, and those who really like having A Villain in their crime fiction.

The ebook is only $8.99. I think that is a fair price for reading pleasure received.

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Manny Porter and the Yuletide Murder (Tinker Creek Series #2) by D.C. Robeline

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Riding a tide of success after helping his boyfriend, Lyle, save their neighborhood of Tinker Creek from predatory developers, reporter Manny Porter throws himself into his career and community activism. The last thing he expects is to discover the body of prominent research scientist Phillip Nikolaidis during a laboratory tour. Murder can strike anywhere, and all the evidence points toward Tristan DeJesus, Manny’s nineteen-year-old mentee.

Manny only has the holiday season to overcome jealous colleagues, an angry corporation, and a skeptical publisher to discover who killed Nikolaidis before the judicial system condemns an innocent man to lethal injection.

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

My Review: I wasn't surprised about Manny's love, Lyle, being so very supportive of his dangerous determination to solve a tricky, twisty case until I thought about the Rules of Series Mysteries: Conflict with the spouse is supposed to be a given because it gives the writer an extra source of tension. I like this model, loving and supportive, a lot. I'm all over any story that models not accepting the corporate world's actions and excuses as valid. This story met that need and trumped it with use of the offending party's tactics against them.

Also, Christmas. I am a sucker for holiday stories. I loved that Manny and Lyle were shown to be involved in this life event as well as the crime-solving goodness. The series has a fan in me.

Bold Strokes Books wants $8.99 for this one, too, and that is very worth it.

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Devil's Chew Toy (Hayden & Friends #1) by Rob Osler

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Seattle teacher and part-time blogger Hayden McCall wakes up in a stranger's bed alone, half-naked and sporting one hell of a shiner. Then the police come knocking on the door. It seems that Latino dancer Camilo Rodriguez has gone missing and they suspect foul play. What happened the night before? And where is Camilo?

Determined to find answers, Hayden seeks out two of Camilo's friends—Hollister and Burley—both lesbians and both fiercely devoted to their friend. From them, Hayden learns that Camilo is a "Dreamer" whose parents had been deported years earlier, and whose sister, Daniela, is presumed to have returned to Venezuela with them. Convinced that the cops won't take a brown boy's disappearance seriously, the girls join Hayden's hunt for Camilo.

The first clues turn up at Barkingham Palace, a pet store where Camilo had taken a part-time job. The store's owner, Della Rupert, claims ignorance, but Hayden knows something is up. And then there's Camilo's ex-boyfriend, Ryan, who's suddenly grown inexplicably wealthy. When Hayden and Hollister follow Ryan to a secure airport warehouse, they make a shocking connection between him and Della—and uncover the twisted scheme that's made both of them rich.

The trail of clues leads them to the grounds of a magnificent estate on an island in Puget Sound, where they'll finally learn the truth about Camilo's disappearance—and the fate of his family.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: A book about Commander would be great, please and thank you. Quozy mystery that doesn't have loads of smexytimes. As that was exactly what I wanted to read, I got my wish. The story felt more than usually contrived...the way the sleuth gets drawn in to the crime was in no way credible outside a novel...but contained so much verve and energy in its pacing that I simply could not bring myself to care about suchlike silliness.

Again this month I'm kept purring by the presence of social attitudes I share. This time the author takes on anti-queer policing attitudes and the nonsensical attitudes towards immigrants infesting our political landscape. The sleuth finds himself dealing with bullying, unsurprisingly as he's short and queer, so we get that facet of stakes-making, too. None of these are in any way added onto the story being told. Fun reading with good messaging.

Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $13.99...check it out of the library.

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Cirque du Slay (Hayden & Friends #2) by Rob Osler

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this rollicking mystery, perfect for fans of Steven Rowley and Elle Cosimano, the circus becomes the stage for a high-profile murder investigation.

With quirky LGBTQ+ amateur sleuths, Cirque du Slay will delight readers looking for a madcap mystery with high-flying excitement!

Pint-sized Seattle middle school teacher and gay dating blogger Hayden McCall and his best friend Hollister are invited to a fundraiser for Bakers Without Borders. The celebrity performer, Kennedy Osaka, is the artistic director of Mysterium, an upscale circus arts show combining magic, acrobatics, and a Michelin-star dinner. But Kennedy is a no-show—until she’s found dead in her hotel suite.

When frenemy Sarah Lee is discovered in the room with the body, Hayden and Hollister are on the case to find the real culprit before Sarah Lee is charged with the crime.

The suspects for the murder are as unique as Mysterium a Russian trapeze artist, a cowgirl comedian sharp-shooter, an over-cologned operations director, a feisty, green-haired costume manager, and Adrenalin!, a sexy troop of Romanian male acrobats...If Hayden and Hollister are to clear Sarah Lee of suspicion, they’ll have to outsmart a killer for whom trickery is art.

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

My Review: Like the first in the series, it's very unlikely to occur in real life but it doesn't matter. Too much fun was happening to make it at all important in this quozy. I'm sure the jokes about a woman's avoidupois will put off plenty of readers but the fact is she uses them to reclaim unkindness the same way we're using "queer" these days. That's not to say the conversion is perfect...Hayden likening her to a mattress is cringey indeed...as is her being a lesbian named Burley, so be aware of this, more sensitive readers of size.

The Romanian acrobats in the circus setting are played for fun, too, but there's less to interpret in their presentation. I thought Hayden's interpolated blog posts were deployed well. Sometimes that knowing wink actually helps the context get established in the reader's mind. Entertaining fun but not as much in my wheelhouse as the first one.

Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $17.99...definitely check it out of the library.
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Puzzle for Two by Josh Lanyon

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: It was like those crazy detective novels he read as a kid…

Fledging PI Zachariah Davies’s wealthy and eccentric client, toymaker Alton Beacher, wants to hire an investigator who can pose as his boyfriend while figuring out who is behind the recent attempts on his life. And Zach, struggling to save the business his father built, is just desperate enough to set aside his misgivings and take the job.

But it doesn’t take long for Zach to realize all is not as it seems (and, given that it all seems pretty weird…). The only person he can turn to for help is equally struggling, equally desperate–but a whole lot more experienced–rival PI Flint Carey.

Former Marine Flint has been waiting for Zach to throw in the towel and sell whatever’s left of the Davies Detective Agency to him. Still, he’s unwillingly attracted to the game but inexperienced accountant-turned-shamus, and can’t help offering a helping hand when Zach runs into trouble.

Especially when it’s hard to imagine any worse trouble than having your client murdered.

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

My Review: Fake dating, faking coming out as gay...this feels like something from the Aughties being republished a bit after its best-before date.

The men are bisexual. There's a LOT of lying around this subject. I think the banter between the men as they fall in love is what saves the read for me. A lot of time has passed, a lot of progress has been made; the cutesy-coy marketing campaign for Deadpool's 2024 film featuring superheros "playing gay" for laffs hits worse than this book's sexuality shenanigans.

But not a lot.

JustJoshin Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link) asks you for $7.99 for an ebook.

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Come Unto These Yellow Sands by Josh Lanyon

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Once a bad boy, the only lines Professor Sebastian Swift does these days are Browning, Frost and Cummings. When a student he helped to disappear becomes a suspect in a murder, he races to find the boy and convince him to give himself up before his police chief lover figures out he’s involved.

Max likes being lied to even less than he likes sonnets. Yet his instincts—and his heart—tell him his lover is being played. Max can forgive lies and deception, but a dangerous enemy may not stop until Swift is heading up his own dead poet’s society.

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

My Review: Wow. More lies and relationship fakery...the one who allegedly puts up the barriers and resists the relationship deepening is suddenly the first to utter The Big Three? Hm. The idea of these two being together is, uhhh, unlikely; but the reason they get together does support the connection forming. Again, it's the banter that keeps me going in the book. This time the mystery is one I got invested in.

JustJoshin Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants $6.99 for an ebook.

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Fire from the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot (tr. Eva Apelqvist)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ánte’s life has been steeped in Sami tradition. It is indisputable to him that he, an only child, will keep working with the reindeer. But there is something else too, something tugging at him. His feelings for his best friend Erik have changed, grown into something bigger. What would people say if they knew? And how does Erik feel? And Erik’s voice just the push of a button away. Ánte couldn’t answer, could he? But how could he ignore it?

Fire From the Sky is a sharp and intelligent story about heritage, family ties and age-old commitments to the past. But also about expectations, compassion, feelings that course through your body like electricity.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is very much an intelligent story, and one with 15-plus-appropriate explorations of desire (WITHOUT consummation). As one would expect, it's angsty as all get-out. I was very interested in the Sámi people's culture as presented here. I now know more about reindeer than I ever suspected I didn't know before.

I was less convinced about the boys' separate characters. I think something missing in a lot of YA for my reading taste is that very sense of separate *personhood* not simply different dialogue tags. I sometimes lost track of Erik or Ánte being the speaker. That feels like a quibble as I write it...so, on balance, a "yes, but" recommendation for the Elizabeth Acevedo or MT Anderson reader.

Levine Querido asks $19.99 for a hardcover.

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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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Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us by Karen Tongson
PEARL RULED @ 33%

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: An irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This Is Us

After personal loss, political upheaval, and the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us craved a return to business as usual, the mundane, the middlebrow. We turned to TV to find these things. For nearly forty years, network television has produced a constant stream of “cry-along” sentimental-realist dramedies designed to appeal to liberal, heterosexual, white America. But what makes us keep watching, even though these TV series inevitably fail to reflect who we are?

Revisiting soothing network dramedies like Parenthood,Gilmore Girls, This Is Us, and their late-80s precursor, thirtysomething, Normporn mines the nuanced pleasures and attraction-repulsion queer viewers experience watching liberal family-centric shows. Karen Tongson reflects on how queer cultural observers work through repeated declarations of a “new normal” and flash lifestyle trends like “normcore,” even as the absurdity, aberrance, and violence of our culture intensifies. Normporn allows us to process how the intimate traumas of everyday life depicted on certain TV shows―of love, life, death, and loss―are linked to the collective and historical traumas of their contemporary moments, from financial recessions and political crises to the pandemic.

Normporn asks, what are queers to do―what is anyone to do, really―when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained? The fantasies, the utopian impulses, and (paradoxically) the unreality of sentimental realist TV drama creates a productive tension that queer spectators in particular take pleasure in, even as―or precisely because―it lulls us into a sense of boredom and stability that we never thought we could want or have.

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

My Review: By the time I bailed we were still defining terms. Okay, it's an academic book; did it have to be tedious as well? I wish it had been *bad* because I could just ignore it completely.

Not for the distracted or casual reader. I tried three times to get past a third of the way in and could not make it up the hill. I was obviously not the right reader, or did not get to it at the right time. The subject interests me a lot. Well, it will still be on my Kindle if I decide to try again.

NYU Press only wants $9.99 for the Kindlebook.

THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN, first of a duology that could easily be longer (hint, hint)

THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN
KJ CHARLES (The Doomsday Books #1)
Sourcebooks Casablanca (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Abandoned by his father, Gareth Inglis grew up lonely, prickly, and well-used to disappointment. Still, he longs for a connection. When he meets a charming stranger, he falls head over heels—until everything goes wrong and he's left alone again. Then Gareth's father dies, turning the shabby London clerk into Sir Gareth, with a grand house on the remote Romney Marsh and a family he doesn't know.

The Marsh is another world, a strange, empty place notorious for its ruthless gangs of smugglers. And one of them is dangerously familiar...

Joss Doomsday has run the Doomsday smuggling clan since he was a boy. When the new baronet—his old lover—agrees to testify against Joss's sister, Joss acts fast to stop him. Their reunion is anything but happy, yet after the dust settles, neither can stay away. Soon, all Joss and Gareth want is the chance to be together. But the bleak, bare Marsh holds deadly secrets. And when Gareth finds himself threatened from every side, the gentleman and the smuggler must trust one another not just with their hearts, but with their lives.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES OFTEN, THEY NEED US!

My Review: The way I know I'm reading a KJ Charles story is when the men falling in love have their life's work established, are busy doing it, and do not need anything to make life more complicated for them. Then they meet/reconnect when they're just about out of strength. After that, they need the other to be able to do their work because strength supported is powerful in all new ways.

I love this story dynamic.

So I was sure to be a happy old reader, and mirabile dictu in light of recent disappointments, so I was. Joss made me smile with his assumption of the mantle of Head of Household. He clearly was born for the role. The ways in which his Head-ness manifested weren't always clear because he would use them in the interests of everyone, of the family he heads but also the community at large.

Gareth, the baronet "in charge" of the whole community, sees Joss's activities from a high-control perspective. He's expected to enforce The Law. He doesn't much like this burden because he isn't naturally assertive. In the course of doing his duty, he and Joss come into conflict. Nothing makes your feelings clearer than conflict. Gareth and Joss...well...there's a reason Author Charles writes romances. Their bond, as she depicts it, is powerful and undeniable. This cross-class pairing allows each to understand the nature of the social system they live and love within.

As is usual in the genre, the romance succeeds...more believably than a cross-class romance usually does because rhe men are each the head of their world; because the men are each the inadequately trained inheritors of their power; and because they are similarly happy to reform their youthful bond.

I think prospective readers should know going in that the story is told in a regional voice, a dialect of sorts that is rooted in a specific place and its people; others, outsiders within the story, comment on its peculiarity so this is very obviously meant to convey the social bonds that exist in the great mass of the people. I found it effective at that and, for my reader's ear, quite musical and engaging. Others might not. As part of the author's larger purpose of creating a world as a setting for her story, this works very well. As a facet of worldbuilding in general it's very hard to pull off. Author Charles's previous books have made it clear she is a Master of this art. The Marsh, a real place I'm told, is vivid in my mind's eye without feeling overdetailed.

Straight people are strongly cautioned. Not safe for "eww-ick" homophobes. I'd call the steam level moderate, but I can—and have—fallen asleep during a porn film. The sex in the story is not of prurient intent. It is there as an enhancement of the reader's understanding of the development of each man's connection to and acceptance of the other. It is also a clear signal of the characters' increasing awareness of the world outside their Marsh as different, as Other...and this Othering lets them gain space for their Forbidden Love to grow and nurture not only their partner but their fellow Marsh inhabitants.

Since I read these stories for fantasy fulfillment, I got what I wanted. I hope you'll try Author Charles's many terrific tales. Starting here is a good idea.

THE FITFUL SLEEP OF IMMIGRANTS, messy the way life is, real the way fiction needs to be

THE FITFUL SLEEP OF IMMIGRANTS
ORLANDO ORTEGA-MEDINA
Amble Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning author and immigration attorney Orlando Ortega-Medina returns to 1990s San Francisco in The Fitful Sleep of Immigrants, a powerful family drama that plays out within a captivating legal thriller.

Attorney Marc Mendes, the estranged son of a prominent rabbi and a burned-out lawyer with addiction issues, plots his exit from the big city to a more peaceful life in idyllic Napa Valley. But before he can realize his dream, the US government summons his Salvadoran life-partner Isaac Perez to immigration court, threatening him with deportation.

As Marc battles to save Isaac, his world is further upended by a dark and alluring client, who aims to tempt him away from his messy life. Torn between his commitment to Isaac and the pain-numbing escapism offered by his client, Marc is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils while confronting his twin demons of past addiction and guilt over the death of his first lover.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Very interesting take on the insanely vicious US immigration system pre-marriage equality. Add in a battle against the monster of addiction and you have quite a ride of a read.

People driven to action by ever more foreclosed options to achieve their goals are the raw meat whose roast-and-veggies we call fiction. Marc's dark past includes substance abuse and a very troubling death. He's haunted by the way his ability to be there for and give help to Isaac is limited by his past.

So far, so good. The story's got lots of material anyone over, say, 25 or 30 will relate to. What keeps a fifth star off my rating is the sheer idiocy of a lawyer not knowing for sure and certain his own intimate partner's immigration status! He wasn't born in the US, and you never asked? "Honeybunch, let's get you a bank account, so whip out the green card." This is lax in the extreme and no lawyer I've ever known would just not think to check on this even if not formally.

While I had fun reading the book I was never swept into the story. It is all down to me being picky about the thinking-through of characters' reasonable actions and responses.

THE SAVIOR OF 6TH STREET does not earn my praise

THE SAVIOR OF 6TH STREET
ORLANDO ORTEGA-MEDINA
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Urban Magical realism novel for fans of Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison, and Junot Diaz

Deserted by his father at the age of four and raised by his voodoo queen mother on the fringes of Skid Row, Los Angeles street artist Virgilio Santos believes it his mission to save the down-and-outers in his neighborhood. But when he crosses paths with Beatrice Schein, an alluring Westside art collector with an aim to promote him to the international art world, Virgilio is tempted to turn his back on his friends. That is, until he discovers that Beatrice's father is a principal financier of organized crime in his neighborhood with plans to tear it all down for redevelopment.

'Rendered with urgent intensity, The Savior of 6th Street is a literary tour de force that confirms Orlando Ortega-Medina as one of the most original storytellers of our time.' (quote unattributed in the original)

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

My Review: Need I belabor the "Virgilio/Virgil" and "Beatrice" call-backs to The Divine Comedy? There's really all you need to know in this book's defecnse. We're on A Quest, we will be meeting adversaries, we will not feel fully present in the narrative...unless the author puts it in the first person of course! So the author puts it in the first person.

The inclusion of a trans character in Concha gets this book a slot in the #PrideMonth blast. Also, the author's latesr book will be reviews in less than an hour. The fact is, I'm not a fan of this fantasy retelling of Divine Comedy. Santería, the magic system we get in this magical-realist novel, does as little for me as other variations on catholicsm do. Putting it in a first-person retelling of Dante's epically long, epically weird poen, only in prose, got an amused smile at the conceit. The execution doesn't match the ambition for me.

As rhetorical stand-ins for the forces of gentrification as expressions of the rancid neoliberal hellscape of 21st century LA, the author's villains are fine caricatures. The issue of writing an otherwise straightforward story of a talented, impoverished nobody finding his voice and getting the attention he merits as a modern take on a world literarure monadnock is the characters in the former need to be fleshed out. The characters need to command my sympathy and attention in immediate ways. In the latter, the characters are archetypes, are so removed from any need to know more than a liberal-arts course teaches you about them (relegated to the footnotes) that drawing deeper lines around them is akin to touching up Mona Lisa with some pink acrylic to make her skin look more "realistic".

A book equivalent of a pot of pink axrylic gets stars for ambition not achievement.

QUEER AS CAMP: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality, preaching to the choir...but charismatically

QUEER AS CAMP: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality
KENNETH B. KIDD (ed.) & DERRITT MASON (ed.)
Fordham University Press
$33.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of "queer" and "camp," focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time.

Exploring questions of identity, desire, and social formation, Queer as Camp delves into the diverse and queer-enabling dimensions of particular camp/sites, from traditional iterations of camp to camp-like ventures, literary and filmic texts about camp across a range of genres (fantasy, horror, realistic fiction, graphic novels), as well as the notorious appropriation of Indigenous life and the consequences of "playing Indian."

These accessible, engaging essays examine, variously, camp as a queer place and/or the experiences of queers at camp, including Vermont's Indian Brook, a single-sex girls' camp that has struggled with the inclusion of nonbinary and transgender campers and staff; the role of Jewish summer camp as a complicated site of sexuality, social bonding, and citizen-making as well as a potentially if not routinely queer-affirming place. They also attend to cinematic and literary representations of camp, such as the Eisner award-winning comic series Lumberjanes, which revitalizes and revises the century-old Girl Scout story; Disney's Paul Bunyan, a short film that plays up male homosociality and cross-species bonding while inviting queer identification in the process; Sleepaway Camp, a horror film that exposes and deconstructs anxieties about the gendered body; and Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom, which evokes dreams of escape, transformation, and other ways of being in the world.

Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor.

Contributors: Kyle Eveleth, D. Gilson, Charlie Hailey, Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno, Kathryn R. Kent, Mark Lipton, Kerry Mallan, Chris McGee, Roderick McGillis, Tammy Mielke, Alexis Mitchell, Flavia Musinsky, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Annebella Pollen, Andrew J. Trevarrow, Paul Venzo, Joshua Whitehead

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Camp. One set of four letters, widely divergent meanings to different groups. Don't think these essays, from the queer-studies, and mostly queer, people listed above are in any way insensible of this dichotomy. It gets played with a lot.

One note I'll give you before you even think about reading the collection: Read Sontag's Notes on Camp before you get into these weeds. Everyone herein reproduced has, says so, and/or refers to that work. Besides it's well worth reading just because.

Academocs are famous for writing at each other, Essays and articles in their specialist subjects used a shared vocabulary that most of us do not share. That's certainly true of this collection's contents. Yet I've given it four stars. That's all down to the fact that the essayists have all tied their thoughts either to pop-cultural texts like Mielke and Trevarrow's engrossing"Camping with Walt Disney’s Paul Bunyan: An Essay Short" and Kyle Eveleth's "Striking Camp: Empowerment and Re-Presentation in Lumberjanes", which might be my favorite essay in the whole thing; or to experiences of going to summer camp that I could relate to, like D. Gilson's "Notes on Church Camp" which was a tough read for me.

What I got from this assemblage of academic thought about youthful queerness was the striking, clarifying bolt of insight that I was supposed to feel the exclusion and rejection of camp. It was meant to, designed to, cause this Otherness I knew I had to be thrown (verb not chosen lightly) into high relief. I was *intended* to feel the hostility of my peers so I would buckle down and try to be like them.

Fat chance.

The other reason for a boy like me to go to camp, to be a camper, was to show to the other boys that I was fair game. As long as I failed at their tasks, it was okay to be cruel...it was expected. "Letting the kids sort themselves out" was the way the appalling cruelty of ut was sold to parents.

That has never been clearer than after reading these stories of queer camping experiences. I don't know who among the readers of my blog will most likely want to spend the high price of the collection; I hope that, for anyone interested in the subject, their local library will step in and add this to the extant sociology texts, or if you live in an enlightened place, their queer studies collection.

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender, urgently needed explication of a subject most people do not "get"

TRANS MEDICINE: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
stef m. shuster
NYU Press
$28.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A rich examination of the history of trans medicine and current day practice

Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. In Trans Medicine, stef shuster makes an important intervention in how we understand the development of this field and how it is being used to "treat" gender identity today.

Drawing on interviews with medical providers as well as ethnographic and archival research, shuster examines how health professionals approach patients who seek gender-affirming care. From genital reconstructions to hormone injections, the practice of trans medicine charts new medical ground, compelling medical professionals to plan treatments without widescale clinical trials to back them up. Relying on cultural norms and gut instincts to inform their treatment plans, shuster shows how medical providers' lack of clinical experience and scientific research undermines their ability to interact with patients, craft treatment plans, and make medical decisions. This situation defies how providers are trained to work with patients and creates uncertainty. As providers navigate the developing knowledge surrounding the medical care of trans folk, Trans Medicine offers a rare opportunity to understand how providers make decisions while facing challenges to their expertise and, in the process, have acquired authority not only over clinical outcomes, but over gender itself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Gender-affirming care" is a phrase that, to me, ought to be unexceptionable, even anodyne. Instead it causes fury and terror among people who subscribe to high-control religious and social systems.

I've never understood why.

I'm an old, cisqueer, white guy. I participate in several streams of privilege. I have no tiniest sense that my privilege is in any way threatened by the existence and/or acceptance and/or celebration of people not like me. The threats to my privilege come from those who want to deny the legitimacy of any of the founts of the privileges I enjoy. Trans folk aren't among those people as far as I can tell.

And this is despite the long, tragic history of gender-affirming care's resisters. That same kind of control is what we all agree is terrible about anti-Semitism. But it's okay when directed against those transgender...? Why? Because you, o great-hater, aren't yourself trans? Are you Jewish? Does that make hating Jews okay? Difference is not evidence of turpitude, or some kind of curse; spectra are the norm in all systems of what we call (without knowing what it means) the real world. We've barely begun to understand the world as it is. Part of that learning is, of necessity, not knowing, having certainty taken from us.

Somehow this kind of person doesn't ever answer these kinds of questions or address these realities. Their old certainties feel too comfy to give them up.

Most of us who aren't trans have no concept of what it takes to get access to gender-affirming care. I had only an inkling before I read this book. My inkling is still more than most have, and I'm now au fait with a much greater swath of how the concept of affirming the gender of a trans person came about. How it's been debated and designed to exclude, how it's been denied...a human-rights violation if there ever was one...how it's been weaponized and reshaped by the great-haters.

I have never met a trans person who is anything but kind, caring, and decent. Not one trans person I know, or know of, has ever advocated for anything remotely like enforcing their identity on anyone. The canard that education about trans people makes more trans people is a (deliberate, says my inner cynic) misframing of the truth: Education gives trans people access to an identity. to a word, an idea, that they know from the inside describes and delineates them. Had I grown up twenty years before I did, I would never have been aware or brave enough to invent gayness for myself. Education doesn't create difference, it enables the different to define themselves, to discover they are not the first, the only, the freak.

Gender affirmation will never be easy for some, there are trans people who struggle with it, too. This is a huge reason it needs affirming care from trained professionals. "It costs too much" is an absurd sentence coming from anyone in the richest country...the richest culture...there has ever been on the planet. No one should go without in a world of obscene abundance. That most definitely includes rtrans folk.

This book's essay-and-excerpt fabric will keep some readers from fully investing in the concepts. I found the sheer breadth of identities all speaking in support of trans-affirming care to be one of the greatest strengths of the read. I encourage other allies, and those who simply do not understand the idea of transness, to pick the book up. It can, if you decide to allow it to, help you find your empathy for these, our sibling humans.

SELAMLIK, a lovely idea, a word we in the world need

SELAMLIK
KHALED ALSMAEL (tr. Leri Price)
World Editions
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An emotional and unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticism

Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, which serves as a gathering place for gay men from all over the city. He learns about the Hammams, secret meeting places for gays located throughout the old city.

Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Despite society, religion and regime disapproval, Furat finds the love he seeks just before being forced to flee as his world changes. Later on, Furat wakes up in a cold sweat at an asylum in the Swedish forest recalling a terrifying dream in which he was blindfolded and bound. Having seen the horrific clips of what extremists do to gays circulating on the internet, he begins to write about his experience while locked in the toilet.

This is the story of Furat's journey, along with that of other refugees, as they struggle against physical and economic challenges, migration laws, and deep-seated fears of loss, shame, and hatred. However, amid these difficulties also lie moments of passion and pleasure. Despite everything, Furat remains steadfast in his pursuit of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This story felt to me like a roadmap of what the great-haters want gay life to become in the US. Religious nuts are not to be trusted with the well being of those they don't like. Their allgedly holy book allows things well beyond the pale in the modern world. That's where the damn things belong, beyond the pale.

Think I'm being strident again? Read Furat's story, much like the author's own, to see how disfiguringly awful it is to be denied expression of your honest, authentic self.

The book isn't long, under two hundred pages, and covers three countries that create, dislike, or accept refugees. Syria's pre-civil-war accommodation of gay men wasn't acceptance, exactly, more a species of tolerance..."don't make us notice you, stay over there"...and Turkey's is roughly similar. Furat's deep discomfort dealing with the straight men (and "straight" men) who surrpund him comes vibrating off the page. The author clearly drew this from his own lived experience. It's a revelation of self that would likely get him beaten or worse in most macho cultures.

The way the novel is structured is likely going to put some people off. I hope you'll think of the structure as a way of communicating Furat's lived experience of fragmentation and alienation; as a deliberate and careful evocation of the world as it appears to someone who has no home, never felt at home, never had more than toleration offered to him. The jagged edges of severed relationships...what happened to Ali?...are the price exacted by the great-haters for one's being alive in "their" world.

"Their" world definitely includes the world of Sweden. This paragon of accepting refugees hasn't told its people that kindness and acceptance might be better for all concerned than rejection and intolerance. That's rich coming from an American, I agree, but the fact is that my majority-immigrant country has its head up its religious-nut ass. I would hope for better from the Swedes. I would, it seems, be wrong. Furat's life is better. It's not in danger anymore. His Life is. This Life, this wonderful world of lovingkindness and acceptance, of deep connection and relationship, is still beyond his reach.

The title's a word that describes and defines the concept gay men, all that I've known in my nearing-seventy years on earth, want: a place of intimate connection of men's bodies and minds.

The story has its challenges for the reader. It's not going to make the eww-ick homophobes blench. It's not going to make the linear-story reader into a fan of stream of consciousness. It's not the book's job. It is going to give its readers a personal intimate view of the way a man of multiple marginalizations navigates becoming his authentic self.

That, for this reader, is a beautiful gift.

A FAMILY, MAYBE: Two Dads, Two Babies, and the Court Cases That Brought Us Together makes a #PrideMonth point: happiness takes work; is everywhere you plant it

A FAMILY, MAYBE: Two Dads, Two Babies, and the Court Cases That Brought Us Together
LANE IGOUDIN
Ooligan Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A gay couple's quest to adopt their foster kids in the early 2000s becomes a spiral of legal, political, and personal challenges.

In his candid and emotional memoir, Lane Igoudin shows the human side of public adoption as he and his partner Jonathan seek to adopt their foster daughters from the Los Angeles County child welfare system. Desperately wanting to be fathers, they enter into a complicated legal process that soon becomes a tangle of drama-filled birth parent visits and children's court hearings.

Lane and Jon spend years not knowing whether they will be able to officially adopt the girls, or if the county will reunite the sisters with their birth mother, Jenna, a teenager in the state's custody herself. The stress of the foster-to-adopt process, compounded with the mounting, nationwide struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, erodes the sense of peace in Lane and Jon's home.

Still, the girls attach themselves deeply to their adoptive parents, while their dads do all they can to give them the best lives possible. Heartwarming moments with the kids and relatable first-time-parent woes become bittersweet as Lane realizes how much he and Jon have built—and how much they could lose. A Family, Maybe is a moving story about dedication, heartache, and love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Two gay dads chronicle the formation and formalization of their family. The men made a deeply responsible, generous choice to enter the foster-to-adopt system, thus ensuring they'd be in the toils of bureaucracy the rest of their lives. I expect there are many who quail before this prospect and, if a family is as much of a priority for them as it was for Lane and Jon, go the surrogacy route.

Massive kidos to you, gents, for staying the course. The bureaucracy, the sisters's biomom, the darkening clouds of great-haters' rage at gay men making strides towards having all their rights...all keep the emotional pot merrily boiling away as we read on. That was not, in any way, guaranteed. We know from the start that the family is intact. I think the ups and downs of building that family is nothing short of amazing as a survival story. These two have my mad respect for surviving their ordeal while being solid, loving, involved dads to their two daughters. I don't envy those young womens' future partners because the models for commitment they carry in their minds are going to be very hard for others to reach.

The one thing the whole family can count on is that they will be loved and supported from within, come what may.

A story of the power of commitment and caring that belongs on your shelf/Kindle. It is not some sort of revelation of beautiful writing but it is a tale not to be ignored. I feel energized by hope and happiness after this read.

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain, elegy for a life spent without

PRIVATE WORLDS: Growing Up Gay in Post-War Britain
JEREMY SEABROOK
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1950s suburban England, a friendship bloomed between Jeremy Seabrook and Michael O’Neill—two gay men coming of age at a time when homosexuality was still a crime. Their relationship was inflected by secrecy and fear; the shadows that had distorted their adolescent years were never wholly dispelled, long into their adult life. Lyrical, candid and poignant, this is a tale of sexual identity, working-class history and family drama. A memoir of unparalleled authenticity, Private Worlds is an elegy for a doomed friendship.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US class system impacted me far less than the UK version did young Seabrook, thank all the nonexistent gods. The possession or absence of a "posh" accent is greatly deterministic of one's future; the comparable thing here is the Southern twang, which (no matter where the business is centered) will keep one in the lower ranks. I, being gay and really unwilling to pretend otherwise, felt the sting of exclusion, so that reality was shared by the author and me. His eventual success has been built on being a self not supported by the world he came from; escape by jettisoning the weight of his class identity. Seabrook and O'Neill each accomplished this by being bolshie leftists in an England that was convulsing from the wounds of Empire, birthing today's hideous US-style fascist plutocratic class system.

That doomed, deep love, found and lost early, was part of my life as well. The friendship blighted by the need to dissemble; the deeper connection denied by the caustic effects of powerlessness, of the absence of role models for doing the open and honest thing by each other, was all too painfully relatable to me. It's shocking to me, looking back, that my life was not more blighted by this distorting pressure to be someone I was not and, moreover, did not ever want to be...his life, from my outsider point of view, was more so than mine.

That story is not mine to tell. Author Seabrook and O'Neill have a longstanding public connection, and have each analyzed the way their milieu had them jointly "fail{ing} to grow up together"...a phrase, and an idea behind it, I'd like to pay honor to by saying I wish to hell I'd said that first. The class system's role in this failure was, probably because I'm from the US, not as real as was the way the precocious thwarted-single-mother-raised boy was forced to dissemble. His friendship with O'Neill, ostensibly the focus of this book, feels more like a well-polished lens for him to examine himself and his failed world-beating dreams.

Seabrook and O'Neill (born and raised a Londoner, a key component of his identity as an outsider in the English North) affected a caustic ironical distance from their neighbors. An intellectual pose of studying these Others, who in their turn Othered these bumptious boys for being queer, froze into an outsider identity, an observer stance, that would enable them to "overcome" their background only by treating it as fodder, material for their real life's work in sociological study. Dealing with this really unappealing trait now, Author Seabrook seems paralyzed by his recognition of its cruelty. That this is cruelty returned for cruelty given is not, to my surprise, part of his path to self-forgviness. The ironic separation has an inevitable distancing effect between the friends...how could it not...and that gets his focus. I was surprised by how bitterly he seems to regret the dark space left by O'Neill's separate personhood, and how little kindness he seems to extend to that early Seabrook boy. Judging one's earlier self is easy. Forgiving them is, apparently, not.

A fascinating dive into an intelligent man's past love for his intellectual equal and emotional opposite. I'm sure anyone who's read and liked Édouard Louis or Jon Fosse as tellers of personal and immutable truth will batten on this book.

PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path, where "We" = adult gay men

PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
MARCUS McCANN
House of Anansi Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers.

Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The book takes a "pro" position on this fraught topic, and uses rgetorical flourishes to distract from the difficulty of the central issue having no easy solution. Had he made his argument solely about entrapment I'd be all over it; but I do not, in the most intense possible terms, want to encounter straight people or lesbians in the throes of passion.

No.

YEEECCCHHH

So why should they want to see what I'll avidly watch? The book's strength is its weakness; complaining that they do it, why shouldn't we, is very much an adolescent attitude. Confine yourself to the cruising, and I'm supportive; but the minute someone's genitals come into public view for sexual use, and that's a hard (!) no from me.

Nudity doesn't seem to me to be shocking, so public nudity, while *I* ain't doin' it...sunburned balls sound horrifying to me, and the peeling process is too grisly to contemplate...I agree that the laws around it are clearly designed to make purseylipped prudes safe from the vapors, and should be repealed. Body shame is a major source of social control. Best to jettison it, and the case for this bit is a good one. Unlikely to succeed, though, because the Vaporous Vanguard will screech about their little no-neck monsters being corrupted and that ends any and all discussion. Otherwise you who oppose them are A Pedophile, and once those screeches start, you are toast. Does not matter in the slightest if they are true or not, these screeches are stickier than blood, and utterly indelible.

The book is an interesting read but not a how-to manual or even an advocacy guide. It will shift no one's position. It's good for starting conversations about how society enforces a standard of conduct that is inherently judgmental, and unfairlt enforced, and clearly the laws are written to give gay men nightmares about their sex lives being judged and punished in a way y'all straight people's are not.

Useful, then; just not effective as a tool for short-term attitude change.

FOUR SQUARES: A Novel, fun and games among the elderqueers

FOUR SQUARES: A Novel
BOBBY FINGER
GP Putnam's Sons
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel spanning the 1990s and present day, about a young writer and the community he builds in New York City, and his lonely life 30 years later when an unexpected injury lands him at the local queer senior center.

Artie Anderson wouldn’t call himself lonely, not exactly. He has a beautiful apartment in the West Village, a steady career as a ghostwriter, and he has Halle and Vanessa, who—as the daughter and ex-wife of his former partner—are the closest thing he can call family. But when the women announce a move across the country, on Artie’s 60th birthday no less, Artie realizes that his seemingly full life isn’t quite as full as he imagined. To make matters worse, a surprising injury strips Artie of the independent lifestyle he’s used to and pushes him into the hands of GALS, the local LGBTQ senior center down the street.

Since the death of his ex-boyfriend, Abe decades ago, Artie’s intentionally avoided big crowds and close friends. So, he’s woefully unprepared for the other patrons of GALS, a group of larger-than-life seniors who insist on celebrating each and every day. They refuse to dwell in the past, but Artie, who has never quite recovered from Abe’s death and the loss of his dearest friends, can’t shake the memories of his youth, and of the chances he did, and didn’t, take.

Stretching across the 1990s and the present day, Four Squares is an intimate and profound look at what it means to create community and the lasting impressions even the most fleeting of relationships can leave. With Bobby Finger’s signature warmth, humor, and wit, it is touching reminder that it’s never too late for a second chance at truly living.

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

My Review: Well! Was this ever an exercise in feeling seen! I *am* Artie. I though this would be a bubbly and effervescent flute full of story-champagne. More closely resembled a mug of authentic, bean-based xocolatl as opposed to, say, Swiss Miss.

Artie did what I've done with this life, cocooned himself in search of safety in a world he does not like interacting with all that much. He's been lucky, relate to that, he's got a solid basis for his existence at last, relate to that, and the family he's made takes the place of the non-family of origin, relate to that. All of this is balanced on a knife-edge, of course...all of life is, we just don't think about it until the balance is upset. Way big relate to that! So I vibrate like Annie Dillard's struck bell to all of these story points...what could possibly keep this from being a five-star read?

GALS.

I did not love these big, loud people anywhere near as much as I'd need to for me to rate the book five stars. I think the reason I don't adore them is that I felt unable to buy into them as people. They're perfect *characters, of the sort we see actors create for film or stage roles; they're the kind of characters I'd love to see a film about, in fact. I was expecting to be given a more nuanced and investment-able character in a novel, where there is so much more room to develop them. Artie, as a superb example, is developed to a solidity and dimensionality that demonstrates the author's considerable command of the skills needed. His found-family gals were also briefly but memorably limned...I understood they felt deeply their effect on Artie, and still had reasons for the action they took that hurt him.

So it wasn't lack of skill, then; what happened? I don't know. I also don't think I've seen any other reviewer bring this up as an issue, so permaybehaps it's just me being crotchety...? A very real possibility, not to be discounted or dismissed. I don't know how to test for it, or I would.

None of which is meant to be a warn-off, or even much of a caution. Bobby Finger writes good, solid stories, told in deft, enjoyable prose. I think the book belongs on your TBR if you liked his previous book, or of you liked The Guncle, or Nearlywed, or...does it need saying out loud that the world we live in is so immensely superior to the world we grew up in, fellow oldsters? We're able to choose from a huge variety of ways to feel seen and entertained that were, simply put, impossible to find in our youths.

Which is why the great haters so badly want to gain control of society's levers. If you see yourself as you could be, you'll try to become that; this means you won't be like them, and that is an existential threat.

Good. I've said it often, will say it often in future: Whatever it takes to make the great haters feel threatened and unhappy deserves our support.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, support for good stories never felt easier or more fun

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
SALLY MALCOLM & JOANNA CHAMBERS Creative Types #3
Kindle edition
$5.99 available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Lights, camera…attraction!

When Tag O’Rourke, struggling actor-slash-barista, meets Jay Warren, son of acting royalty, it’s loathing at first sight. Loathing…and lust. Tag’s dream is to act, but it’s a dream that’s crumbling beneath the weight of student debt and his family’s financial problems. If his career doesn’t take off soon, he’s going to have to get a real job. After all, feeding his family is more important than feeding his soul. Luckily, Tag’s about to get his big break…

Jay never had to dream about acting; he was always destined to follow in his famous mother’s footsteps. But fame has its price and a traumatic experience early in Jay’s career has left him with paralysing stage fright, which is why he sticks to the safety of TV work—and avoids relationships with co-stars at all costs. Unfortunately, Jay’s safe world is about to be rocked…

After an ill-judged yet mind-blowing night together, Jay and Tag part acrimoniously. So it’s a nasty shock when they discover that they’ve been cast in a two-man play that could launch Tag’s career and finally get Jay back onto the stage where he belongs. Sure, it’s not ideal, but how bad can working with your arch-nemesis be? All they have to do is survive six weeks rehearsing together and navigate a cast of smarmy festival directors, terrible landladies, and vengeful journalists. Oh, and try not to fall in love before the curtain rises… Break a leg!

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHORS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well, whatever one expects from a romace novel, this book hands it over...enemies-to-lovers, second chance at love, soulmates discovering each other, all here. And all as much fun to read as fun gets.

Authors Sally and Jo don't exactly waste one's time with silly obfuscations. The story's pacing is neither rushed nor dilatory. The main duo are not in any danger of being relegated to juicy side characters...though Jay's mother could be a fun broad to follow around for a few hundred pages, hint hint...and the Others on the page still manage to make their presences felt. The playwright-cum-pal is another really good character I felt I knew enough about to get the story in gear, yet could also fill up her own book.

So there's absolutely every reason to go buy one. Go on! Go get a copy.

But you're only giving it four stars! I need a fifth one to autobuy!

Having heard this kind of statement on multiple occasions, I'll say this: The series is wonderful and fun, and funny, and endearingly honest about its characters' icky bits. All of those are good things. Tag irks me. He's a whiny little pisher whose chip is so big it needs both his shoulders to carry it so blocks his view straight ahead of him. Jay is quieter in his overplayed self-doubt but still manages not to hook me. Them together? I wanted to reach into the book and crack their heads tpgether, tell 'em to STFU and get back to having the kind of sex most of us don't dare believe exists because we ain't gettin' it.

So yeah. Four's where the star train stops.

It gets all those stars for the way I'm dragged into the story, the way my emotional investment is picked out of my readerly pocket. They mugged me in my own back alley, that pair of author/attackers! I encourage anyone with a taste for contemporary romances, for second-chance, artist-centered, and enemies-to-lovers romances, to get this entire three-book series.

DEAR CIS(GENDER) PEOPLE: A Guide to Trans Allyship and Empathy, when you wonder "what do They want" best ask Them

DEAR CIS(GENDER) PEOPLE: A Guide to Trans Allyship and Empathy
KENNY ETHAN JONES
DK Books
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful call to arms to empower cisgender people to be better allies, blending memoir, detailed research, and interviews.

The trans experience is all too often the subject of fierce debate in the media and online. While we’re having more and more conversations about the trans experience, the stark reality is that hate crimes against the trans community have quadrupled over the past five years and that two in five trans young people have attempted suicide.

But behind the shock headlines and the distressing statistics, what does it really mean to be trans?

In this powerful, extensively researched, and deeply personal book, Kenny Ethan Jones, a trans activist and writer, offers an authentic and in-depth insight into the trans experience. From gender dysphoria to surgery, from being outed to finding love and considering parenthood, Kenny Ethan Jones draws on his own life and the stories of others from the trans and nonbinary communities to create discussion around the complexities and reality of the trans experiences in today’s society.

Dear Cis(Gender) People is a powerful call to arms, equipping people of every gender with the tools to step forward as allies in order to bring about meaningful change. Through acting and speaking out, we can create a safer, fairer world for trans people—a world in which all of us can exist as our most authentic selves and celebrate who we are without fear.

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

My Review: I can not say this loudly, often, or long enough: PAY.

ATTENTION.

TO.

WHAT.

THEY SAY THEY WILL DO.

You can start here, with this book made up of trans peoples' words. It's addressed at all cis people, a group I am very much part of. I needed to hear these trans voices. These voices are not heard in any systemic way even in the QUILTBAG community. Trans people can and should speak up...and all too often, risk the direst imaginable consequences for doing so. I think the best way to learn is to ask, and if the silence imposed on trans people in F2F reality is blocking that avenue, then we can read! This book marries asking with reading because Author Kenny Ethan Jones has spoken to his fellow trans folk and used their own words to address us cis people, regardless of our sexual identities, about the nature of being trans.

The ball is in our court, cis folk. We possess the information, now we need to listen to what trans people want us to know. There is no more fig-leaf for our ignorance. Now it is a choice to remain ignorant. I think almost everyone who reads this blog, being readers themselves, will take this chance to lift the veil of unknowing and see what the most Othered people in the QUILTBAG rainbow of identities want to get in the way of support and acceptance.

I hope this compact, unchallenging read will make its way into your reading this #PrideMonth. There are so many ways to offer the gift of acknowledgment. The price is, honestly, negligble to the giver; the gift is precious to the receiver, as the stories told here will show you. Please do the whole angry, shouting world this favor:

Sit and listen to what your Othered siblings would appreciate you offering to them.

SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT, refrains all "what might have been"...saddening indeed

SONGS ON ENDLESS REPEAT
ANTHONY VEASNA SO
Ecco
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: By the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning AFTERPARTIES comes a collection like none other: sharply funny, emotionally expansive essays and linked short fiction exploring family, queer desire, pop culture, and race

The late Anthony Veasna So’s debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a “bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon” (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker, and The Millions.

Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture, and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt’s illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief, and longing with inimitable humor and depth.

Following “one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years” (Vulture), Songs on Endless Repeat is an astonishing final expression by a writer of “extraordinary achievement and immense promise” (The New Yorker).

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are very few things I am more moved, saddened, and affected by than the early death of a promising artist. Basquiat, Heath Ledger, Anthony Veasna So, all dead from random bad luck. All gay guys (yeah, I said it about Legder, my gaydar goes DEFCON-5 every time I see him) who didn't get to finish their rough-edged bumptious growing processes. That is very much the feeling I had reading this collection of the gone-too-soon Author So's bits and bobs.

There's a kind of youthful arrogance, a judgment-passing superior smirk that shades into a sneer, in all the essays. It's to be expected, he was lionized early and often. He wasn't wrong, or wrong-headed; he was cocksure and unaware, in his youth, that being unsympathetic in your judgments doesn't make them stronger. In time perhaps that would've worn off, and he'd've reserved the sharpness of his eyes for more worthy opponents.

His fiction fragments in here point to an idea for a novel that could have turned into something interesting had he had time and some very good guidance. The fact is there was raw talent here, there was a Voice, and that loss is horrible. That it was down to self-destructive behaviors makes me think that the work we have now might have been all we ever got, living or dead. Many many addicted folk with powerful talents lose the war in themselves.

Not really recommended on its own; the reason to read it is that it feels like an act of mourning for what we all lost when he died of an overdose.

I NEVER LIKED YOU ANYWAY, I feel like Colin Clive should be shouting "IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!"

I NEVER LIKED YOU ANYWAY
JORDAN KURELLA
Lethe Press
$11.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eurydice is dead, and hell is a school. She has to learn Hauntings, Baking Disasters, Threads of Fate, and all the other classes a newly dead soul needs to master before they're ready for what comes next. Eurydice is still processing the disastrous relationship that sent her into the land of the dead almost as soon as she was married to the brilliant love of her life, Orpheus.

She'll tell you how he swept her off her feet, and how their polyamorous group swept each other up in music and art and art theory and a life of creation from destruction, but mostly just destruction. But, this isn't their story. Eurydice is dead, and failing all her classes, and she knows Orpheus is coming to get her out. Not that he cares, but that's not what she wants. And, she's the only one who truly knows how Orpheus and Eurydice's story ends.

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

My Review: The term "disaster bisexual" gets a lot of airplay in this retelling og Orpheus and Eurydice. It very much fits. Everyone.

That's it. That's the review. In spirit, anyway.

I've heard many times over the years, "why can't They just leave {cultural shibboleth} alone? Why do They need to make it about Them?" Because it is about them, and if changing skin colors, genders, clothes, languages makes it more about them in ways they want it to, so be it. The only They who want things to be "left alone" are the "They" who want closet doors swung shut, schools to lead prayer circles, and women to admit they liked it.

This wildly 21st-century setting for the timeless myth of complicated love and its pangs, pains, and consequences, suits the spirit of the Archaic original in exploring the ways communication and courage fail in tandem. It brings the idea of The Grand Passion, The Noble Sacrifice, The Fame of Great and Good Men into sharp, pitiless relief when it's shorn of its togas and chitons, vivified out of its marmoreal bloodless heft into lively, real banter and passionate, full-throated desire.

Is this the best example of a queer myth retelling I've ever read? That would be Patroclus retelling the Iliad. But it is very funny, fun to read, and more like the way I suspect the mythcrafters intended the entire enterprise to play out in the original Bronze-Age dialect. Thev fussy, sexually neutered Myth we're accustomed to, the one They want us to leave alone, was...I promise you this...not the way it was first told.

So revel in this big, bold, bawdy recovery, this excavation of the graveyard of Literature, and drink the cold refreshment of a real, honest, genuinely felt myth for the first time in millennia.

365 GAYS OF THE YEAR (Plus 1 for a Leap Year): Discover LGBTQ+ history one day at a time, and enjoy the art on the trip!

365 GAYS OF THE YEAR (Plus 1 for a Leap Year): Discover LGBTQ+ history one day at a time
LEWIS LANEY (illus. Charlotte MacMillan-Scott)
White Lion Publishing
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH BOOK DESIGN AND PRODUCTION AWARDS 2023

A fun and fascinating compendium of LGBTQ+ icons, one for every day of the year, and a celebration of queer history—or as RuPaul would say; Herstory!

Discover your queer hero and learn something new every day with 365 Gays of the Year, an accessible and fun introduction to LGBTQ+ history through the people that made it.

Carefully curated and thoughtfully researched, author Lewis Laney assigns a person or group of note to each day of the year to form the ultimate LGBTQ+ hall of fame.

Legendary queer icons such as Marsha P Johnson and Freddie Mercury sit alongside lesser known but equally important names such as activist Renée Cafiero, blood donor Barbara Vick, and Sappho the lesbian poet (who was doing her thing in 570BC).

All have contributed amazing achievements to the LGBTQ+ story. Each month also features one ally—inspiring heterosexual people who have all contributed something significant to the lives of the LGBTQ+ community. People like Elizabeth Taylor who “brought AIDS out of the closet and into the ballroom—where there was money to be raised”.

Each entry comprises a short biography plus a brief explanation about why that celebratory date represents an important milestone.

Lewis brings international figures to life (famous and lesser-known) with his witty and uplifting prose which are peppered with little-known facts and accompanied by bright illustrative portraits from the hugely talented Charlotte MacMillan-Scott.

This witty, unique celebration of queer history promises to inspire and empower readers with its wealth of bright stars.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a wonderful time this really is. This book, celebrating the existence of, success within, and growth of the great haters' favorite shibboleth: Them Disgustin' Queers, exists and so proves their point for them. We, the queers, are everywhere!

How awful for their ugly little selves. The book tells anyone interested about the success of:

...at bringing stories about us, and stories we are major parts of, into the world;

...at making the stories real to millions;

...at bravely, and without a map to success or even a hint of what success would look like, bearing witness to intolerance's horrible consequences;

...at living the awful truth of talent denied Because You Are You;

...at embodying the immutable truth the great haters know and eagerly desire to enforce: SILENCE = DEATH

So. To anyone who's been made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, unheard, unfocued-on, unvalued during my #PrideMonth blogging about QUILTBAGgery: Good. Now you know what your (in)action costs me and my QUILTBAG brethren and sistern. Take it in. Feel it.

And then reach out and do better, now that you know better. People you Other aren't obligated to meet you more than halfway; even at all. In my time trying to shed my vast, unconsidered racism and the jaw-dropping privilege I derive from it, I've learned some people will choose not to see me as the one making an effort but one battening on privilege. Those people have a valid point and an unassailable position. This effort I'm making isn't about me.

It's about changing one part of a whole that badly needs to change, and permaybehaps convince one or two others to join my effort. Consider this your altar call, religious christians; your summons in faith, all religious folk of all traditions, to live the Golden Rule.

Happy Pride Month!