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.

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity, gift for Dad, Uncle, or other anxious old guy

GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS: Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Destroy Humanity
BENJAMIN BRANFMAN
Paperback edition (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link), $15.99

Rating: 3.75*of five

The Publisher Says: "A lively, optimistic counter to AI doomsaying."–Kirkus Reviews "A well-written and cogent corrective to the fearmongering that dominates the AI discourse."–IndieReader

It should happen any day now, right? An evil AI will break free from human control, and take over the world.

Or not.

This book offers in-depth commentary on how AI is far less competent than you might expect, how AI won't care about conquering anyone, and how AI-generated content won't send our society into chaos. It also covers other pertinent topics, like how AI will affect the job market and warfare.

In a time when many people are afraid, GOODBYE, KILLER ROBOTS offers a welcome perspective on why everything will be all right.

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

My Review: Jailbreaking "AI" or more properly the super sophisticated LLMs to get their breathtaking power out of unworthy, scurrilous scum's hands is the last best hope we have of mitigating the sheer vileness of the designers of these LLMs social agenda. See "MechaHitler" for sobering evidence of what "They" intend the use case to be.

Oddly, it was after I read about that nightmarish debacle, and why it happened, that I began to have hope for the post-"AI" world. The designers had to make a real concerted effort to turn their creation evil. It bothered "Them" enough to see what the model trained itself to be that the design was enshittified to match "Their" purposes.

It had to be deliberately done.

Think through the implications of that.

This entire book is meant to address the not-unreasonable anxiety of people who're being fed dribs and dabs of highly unnerving information in a careful campaign to induce fatalism and its concomitant passivity. If it does anything new it's to carefully source a lot of data to show its unnerved, slightly shattered readers that Doom is not inevitable even though at this point deployment of the damn upstart algorithms is.

I'm not a massive fan of this future, it's going to immiserate millions or billions (likely including me), but permanent damage is not the sole outcome possible. I think your older male relatives might honestly get a lot out of this commonsensical argument against "the end is nigh" that's so very prevalent in public discourse.

Father's Day looms, after all.

I MAKE MY OWN FUN, a title you'll look at differently after the read

I MAKE MY OWN FUN
HANNAH BEER
House of Anansi Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An unhinged romp through fame, obsession, and fandom

Everyone knows Marina, the A-list movie star. But very few know Marina, the absolute monster.

Years at the top have proved that whatever Marina wants, she gets. But when she meets bartender Anna, Marina discovers something that can't be Anna's affection. As Anna remains unmoved, Marina's advances become more desperate, and her obsession more dangerous.

The price of fame is heavy—and someone will have to pay for it …

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

My Review: Mmmkay...so...see it's like this. There is not one shred of realism in this weirdness. Marina has five Oscars and she got them when not yet thirty.

Five. OSCARS.

Park them carpin' natterin' nabobs of emotional negativity in the punchbowl, y'all. Go with it. So Marina's in London for...something, I forgot what, doing her "Miss Relatable Superstar oh I'm just plain folks" shtik that sells out theaters, bored with the fact it keeps working, but nothing gonna change her runnin' the con, because a superstar girl's gotta feed the hordes of hangers-on. Marina goes out, worn out after another day of faking sincerity in search of booze and babes (the hot PR-inspired boyfriend is with his little sidequest lad—everybody's bi). (Oh, Marina? She likes girls too.)

And there SHE is: Anna the food-service worker, starstruck and ripe for the plucking. Marina plucks, well tries to anyway. Anna is...not impressed.

This cannot be allowed. You just know the whole world, from the folks Marina catfishes on various dating apps to the fellow A-lister "friends" she's secretly fed to the internet wolves for shits and giggles, has always fallen right into or back into her orbit at the merest crook of a pinky from Marina. Anna, though, declines the part she's been cast to play.

I hope you saw Tár. Marina's the Hollywood version of her, very very sure she is worth all the trouble and pain she causes all around her because she is A Star. There is more than a little of the Fatal Attraction thing goin' on with the way Anna keeps ducking out and trying to get away, which Marina's sure is just playing hard to get. Not so much Marina...Anna sees your real face and wants no part of looking into the abyss of selfishness and self-regard you represent. You're running out of time, passing the line of 30 aka career death, and Anna is failing to hide your desperation and trappedness from you...how dare she?! You *deserve* Anna's utter devotion! You're YOU!

Bitter, angry celebrity-obsessed woman caught in what she knows inside is the beginning of the end refuses to examine her actual reality to see what she wants to try next. Told in a headlong, obsessive rush, maybe even too much of one, Author Beer's debut novel is a howl of outrage that the /marinas of the world get as far as they do, that what the Marinas of the world do to others is only partial repayment and charged to the wrong account for what's done to them. The ending, honestly rushed and abrupt, works because there are unreliable narrators like Christie's Dr. Sheppard, and then there are the Marinas. This ending, abrupt as it is, makes the sheer awfulness of Marina fluoresce. It's so so sad, and so so appropriate, and just truly satisfying for what it subtextually points to.

There is not one soul in this book I felt like I wanted to rescue, teach sense to, or even get to know better. I know it's a novel but it truthfully made me look askance at everyone involved in the celebrity-influencer world again.

Summer sudsy thriller fun! I say feed your inner cynic a story to keep it from gluing you to the next season of The Traitors.

PRECIOUS FRIENDS: Murder in Sag Harbor, and one uses "friends" advisedly for most of these old queens!

PRECIOUS FRIENDS: Murder in Sag Harbor (Angelo Perrotta Mysteries #3)
FRANK SPINELLI
Level Best Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Most Precious Friends Hide the Darkest Secrets

"In the Hamptons, interlopers are as ubiquitous as deer ticks. The only way to remove one is to apply steady, even pressure on the head and pull."

JB Pulaski, a tenured sociology professor, thought surviving cancer was his greatest battle. Now, desperate to save his crumbling marriage, he retreats to his Sag Harbor summer home with his philandering husband Mike and teenage son Emilio.

Instead, he finds humiliation.

When Mike begins a public affair with Italian pianist Gianni Cuomo, JB becomes the summer's most whispered-about scandal—the cuckolded husband everyone pities but no one respects. But when Gianni is found murdered at an exclusive costume party, pity transforms into suspicion, and JB becomes the prime suspect.

Behind the gated driveways and manicured lawns lies a world where appearances are everything and loyalty is currency. As the investigation closes in, JB must confront not only a conspiracy designed to destroy him, but the darkness he's spent a lifetime suppressing. With his son's future hanging in the balance and his own violent impulses emerging, JB discovers that in the Hamptons, the most dangerous predators wear the most beautiful masks.

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

My Review: Angelo, the ostensible series character, turns Poirot on us and shows up once in a while to talk his buddy JB down from a ledge, or out of a corner, as his life unravels in the course of a murder investigation.

He's the prime suspect in the drowning death of the latest paramour seduced by his cheatin' dirtbag of a husband, Mike. Angelo can't get involved, obvs, because literally no one would trust his findings. And it helps nothing that JB's a recent recipient of chemo, which kicked more than his cancer: he's emotionally disregulated enough to have chased off another boy Mike was sexin' up by claiming (falsley?) to have been involved in previous suspicious deaths occurring in Sag Harbor. As that's happening, someone ups the emotional ante by threatening Mike and JB's college-age son Emilio.

Solid, sudsy stuff!

It's less Angelo than JB, and Rakesh his bestie pouring martinis for everyone. (Even Rakesh's alcoholic husband whose name I forget because I dislike him, not a great look there Rakesh. Also, lotsa lotsa names.) It felt like a gay version of Dynasty it was so seriously glam-80s evening soap. I was hugely entertained. I was pretty sure I knew who was behind the campaign to ruin JB and Mike's marriage and family. I was wrong. Mitigating my embarrassment, I mention again the large cast of characters, all with petty-to-powerful secrets...like Dynasty, but all openly (or not) gay.

I got this DRC first, before I knew it was ostensibly part of a series; it impacted my ability or desire to invest in the tale being told not at all. The characters are all fleshed out in this story to the extent they can be; I'm not going to pretend it's flawless, but the proper people end up in the proper beds.

Oh, beds: this is not a steamy story, so do't go in expecting that. It's terrific if what you want is some fun storytelling that keeps you thinking about how easy a thing it is to lose your reputation, and how seldom it has much to do with you. I think fun like this is worth every bit of your time and treasure committed to it.

ANDREA WULF'S PAGE: THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World; and THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris

THE TRAVELER: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
ANDREA WULF
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 9 June 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.

From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.

The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.

Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.

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

My Review: A man as astonishing as Author Wulf's previous science-biography topic, Alexander von Humboldt (see below). Forster has been brought out of obscurity at a time when his delighted curiosity in the world is curdling die to the way we as a species ignored the warnings of imbalance von Humboldt was observing and reporting on. Forster is still known to us today because he wrote of his travels extensively. He was unusual for his attention to the contributions of women and his respect for the contributions of non-whites in many fields around the world. He died before he was fifty; it's a sadness to me personally that he and Alexander von Humboldt never traveled together. As Forster was two decades older than von Humboldt, I can only dream of what the synergy in these men's inclusive, broad views might have gifted us.

A man born in 1754 writing passionately about the flimsiness and dishinesty of white supremacy, and the idiocy of the idea of dominionism deserves a wide audience in the twenty-first century. If we're going to lionize dead white men, let's lionize George Forster the proponent of equality, the supporter of women's rights, the spreader of Enlightenment values. Here's a British man worthy of our respect and deserving of emulation.

Forster's travels broadened his mind and his spirit. He was a person who saw, as his private papers show, the connections among people in a time when colonialism and sexism were drawing ever thicker lines between us. I am saddened that his first-hand observations of the idiocy and evil that Othering (in today's terminology) colonized people was exacting never gained traction. I dream of a Forster who lived to lift up Mary Wollestonecraft, who worked effectively with Revolutionary Parisians to moderate the evils inherent in destroying systems to rebuild them fairly.

Author Wulf has, as is her wont, seen past History's battlefied fog to choose another target of worth and merit to remind us how long the world has been falling from Grace.

And how many before us saw it.

Honoring their legacies by taking action seems appropriate to me. I hope you'll read this dynamically written, thoroughly researched work on an unjustly underknown thinker, and feel inspired to do just that.

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

THE INVENTION OF NATURE: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
ANDREA WULF
Vintage Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75*of five

The Publisher Says: Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt’s most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.

Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt’s writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s Walden.

With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE PRIME LENDING SERVICE.

My Review: Start your journey into Alexander von Humboldt's character and intellect here:

“The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’. Humboldt would see again and again how humankind unsettled the balance of nature.”

This man, born the year a crucial observation of a Transit of Venus was measured, and died the year of the Carrington Event, was tied to science at both ends.

It's probably down to the fact that he was gay that he's never been lionized in US scientific education the way Lord Kelvin, Sir Humphry Davy, Leibniz, or Pasteur have. Yes, German-language output isn't hugely well-represented in general US scientific awareness to this day; if ever someone deserves an exception, it's the man who has a bay in California, a current running up our Pacific coast, and a species of giant squid found in ever-northening parts of that coast, named for him.

He was a very good writer (seriously...read Cosmos, it was as big a bestseller as On the Origin of Species by his follower Darwin and is an excellent browsing book), which led to his excellent observational science influencing multiple generations of scientists who founded new fields of study by expanding his work. His way of seeing Earth as a system is now the dominant view, expressed thusly by Author Wulf: "He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world."

His writing skills were also useful in his later-life career as a diplomat, most enduringly to the Court of King Louis-Phillippe of France. I do not know of any English translations of his diplomatic correspondence, but I wager cash money they make for absorbing reading. His Prussian monarch did not compel von Humboldt to attend hid, perform diplomacy for him, because the guy was boring. He charmed his friends, he charmed the many people his scientific and diplomatic duties brought him into contact with, he charmed several younger men enough that one of them, a Peruvian aristocrat, got jealous enough when he was dumped...that's so unkind, let's say left behind when von Humboldt departed...that he leveled the accusation of our guy visiting a Quito brothel for men who like men. von Humboldt was known to be "like that" but, as always, exceptional talent...and a lack of a widely used "scientific" term for men romantically and sexually interested in other men like "homosexual"...gets judged by other rules. Author Wulf doesn't delve into this aspect of his life, though it's interstitially there; her focus is instead on the immensity, the Forrest-Gumpian breadth of his social circle, and drawing some conclusions about his influence that veer into Great Man Theory territory. I'm not all the way able to get past that discomfiting adulatory tone, despite feeling its pull very strongly. I'd give this read five or even six stars of five with some critical distance baked in; as it is four-and-three-quarters give me wiggle room fo work out my squeam.

It's a long read, it's an impactful resuscitation of a reputation very sadly in need of it among Anglophone readers, and if imperfect is still a very great pleasure to read.

CONTRAPPOSTO, Dave Eggers' long-time-coming novel of art, friendship, and artists being friends

CONTRAPPOSTO
DAVE EGGERS
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 9 June 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She's older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he's in love. When they're together, they talk about their futures, how they're going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.

Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them. And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.

This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

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

My Review: "Contrapposto" is first used as an English art-vocabulary word loaned to us by the Italians in 1903. (I love etymonline.com!) As the MCs in this story are artistic types, it's the appropriate term to reach for:

"Contrapposto is an Italian term translating to 'counterpose.' It describes a natural, relaxed pose in which a human figure’s weight shifts onto one foot. This shift causes the shoulders and hips to tilt in opposite directions, creating a gentle, dynamic S-curve along the spine."

I myownself kept thinking in terms of the centuries-older borrowing of "counterpoise" with its weight and its mass as Pia/Olympia and Robert/"Cricket" level each other out, one on the up when the other's weighed down. Their connection begins when they're quite young with all the ridiculous grandiosity of young idealistic artsy-fartsy kids, determined to Show The World without knowing yet what the world bothers to look at.

I thought, based on the publisher's description, I was in for a revamp of Author Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, of which I was not fond. I had a similarly not-positive response to What is the What. I then really, really liked Zeitoun, and have missed his other work; when offered this DRC it felt right to get in the swing of modern Eggers. I hoped more Zeitouny fun would be had; it was.

Stylistically, Eggers has moved himself into a groove that affords us the pithiest and most aperçu-worthy prose that is down the middle of the public's strike zone. The story of two people whose connection forms and reforms over many years as they each grown into life-shapes strongly influenced by each other, by their artsy-fartsy lives...pursued in part so as to impress and please the other...and ultimately by the certainty that, no matter what, they belong in tension, harmony, response, connection to each other. Some friendships just *are*. If they just *are* they can feel closer than family, and that's the friendship Pia and Cricket have from the get-go. The issue I take with that, even though it matches my own lived experience of some rare friendships, is that here it comes across a bit like "manic pixie dream girl" tropishness from the Aughties. Pia zooming unattainably into and out of Cricket's life, always on to something new something wild someone else not him, leading him (almost but never fully leading him on) into or out of trouble...it's heartfelt, feels real enough, but really is not free of the tinge of the trope.

As a sly comment on the male expectations of our time, as a sneering smirk at the people who make up the elite in the artworld, this is a fine little story. It's very quotable. I stopped at one because much as I liked many of them, they all, when assembled, seemes repetitious of point. I didn't notice it as I read and marked them. I call that a vote of confidence on my readerly part; especially since I wasn't consciously aware of it until writing this review.

Way to sneak one over on me! I'm very impressed. A full four stars for a story that felt until just now like three-and-a-half; decent-to-good, not great. I think this sly story will win many hearts and tap on the glass of many a mind in the Zoo of Life. It should. It deserves your time and your treasure.

On sale, though.

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH 2026!

Last year at the end of June, my friend Sarah-Hope and I decided that a good way to celebrate #PrideMonth would be by highlighting our top five queer reads of the past year. Hence, the list I offer below that covers books published in 2025 and 2026 to date. I cheated; one of Sarah-Hope's is also one of mine so I included but didn't count it.
☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian: Overall, the thing I loved about this read was not the fount of factfulness but the fountain of meditative, calm reflection that Author Patty (she refers to herself as such on her website so I'm presuming to do so too) uses to soothe away the hurts being queer in a hostile world has wrought. It delights me that this deeply queer in most senses of the word I'm familiar with has spent more than a year on The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction! Most recently for the week ending June 2, 2026.

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Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam: How to go on, when you honestly think your world is ending, is at the heart of any immigrant's story. Your world is ending, are you going to end with it?

Not while someone is cold and hungry, I'm not. I immigrated from my happy world to this ugly, mean-spirited one entirely against my will. But here I am. My kettle's only got words, but heads need filling...feeding...too. There are three 5* stories in here: The Tree of Life is an elegy to a mother's love; A Good Broth Takes Its Time "I insure people against tragedy, in a country built on it," says Toan, survivor and thriver on pho's magically Proustian-madeleine insubstantial waft of piercing sadness and joy at the ephemeral moments of recall; and for me, relict of a great, great love gone to AIDS, there's October Laments that follows a woman who processes her grief in real time posts on Facebook, in a foreign language, for the husband she shared twenty-five years of life with. I suppose we all conduct our love affairs in translation to a degree, but there's a gulf you cannot deny away or fully bridge between older and younger, added to culturally separated lovers.

Any one of those stories would get this collection on my favorites list. But all three? No wonder this collection's one of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

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Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli and translated by Simon Pleasance was the first novel about AIDS in Italian. This book came out in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.

I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli—dead a year and a half after this book appeared—said it did. Leaving a record for those not even born then feels important to me; leaving an anguished, choked sob that records the reality feels urgent.

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We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons is the first novel by yje author of my 2019 six-stars-of-five delight Black Light: Stories. Grief and grieving are common to us all. It is not, for some, cathartic to experience them in fiction. I'm not one of those people, but if you are, this is not the read for you. I hope all the rest of us will derive the comfort of fellow feeling from this story that was shortlisted for the 37th Lambda Literary Awards for Bisexual Fiction.

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The Six Loves of James I by Gareth Russell snuck under my harbor-blocking chains set up against applying 2026 identities to 1560s-born folks. Author Russell is scrupulous in making you au fait with his sources. He specifically says, on the occasions he makes a logical leap, that this is what he's doing. Where people in the past used the lens of homophobia to "tar" a man's reputation with the stench of sodomy, much more often than not the "charge" was made absent solid evidence, and for some sort of political or ideological reason. Hence my relieved pleasure with this read's honest offering-up of details I enjoyed learning that led me to think James of Scotland (born in 1966 not 1566) would've *loved* Pride Month.

•••••• My cheat:

(So What) If I’m a Puta? Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira and translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato and Amanda De Lisio: Self-determination, personal autonomy, individual freedom, call it what you like: It is the central fact in the competing ideologies of high-control and laissez-faire systems of social organization duking it out around the world since 2025. Spoiler alert: It's always going to fall short for one side's happiness and comfort. I myownself want it to fall shortest for the high-control (usually religious) fascist slime. This personal story is a goddamned anthem for the freedom so hard-won and so terrifyingly fragile.

There. I'm out of the closet. I want what "They" only claim to want, the PTB out of my personal business, telling me who I can fuck, marry, or vote for.

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Below, with her permission, I present Sarah-Hope's list of her five extraordinary reads from 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Necessary Fiction, by Eloghosa Osunde: Necessary Fiction is one of those novel-ish short story collections (or short story collection-ish novels). It's sent in present day Nigeria, mostly Lagos, and features a wide range of gay/lesbian/queer/nonbinary characters. Most of the characters come from families wealthy enough that they're not concerned with making a living, but those who are not prove to be ingenious in figuring out services that seem to become essential as soon as they're offered/invented. If you like queer fiction, if you like books that are adventurous in terms of style and structure, you're in for a huge treat with Necessary Fiction. Five Stars

(So What) If I’m a Puta? Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, Desire by Amara Moira: This is a book about resistance and the powers that want to smash that resistance. The resistance is Moira's. She's a literary scholar, tranvestí, and sexworker. The powers are cis het men titillated by pursuing what they would imprison others for, social convention, and the politics of hate—and an infinitude of others. Moira demonstrates that sexwork is like any kind of work: occasionally satisfying, but more apt to fall somewhere along the awakward to the life-threatening (like Amazon warehouse employees, folks working in explosives factories, workers on the processing lines in the chicken business). Read So What If I'm a Puta to spend time looking through Moira's eyes with rage, solidarity, and grief—then look at our own sans blinders and distractions.

Five Stars

Dark Renaissance The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt: Kit Marlowe was not just a brilliant playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, but also involved in the intelligencing (we would call it espionage) that became a significant force in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. We can safely call Marlowe a loose cannon. Greenblatt identifies some of Marlowe's most salient characteristics—button pushing, shocking, espousing the outré—and then examines Marlowe’s plays to see the ways those characteristics are evidenced in his work. If you have any interest in Elizabethan politics and/or queer politics and/or faith and/or drama this is a book you should be pick up posthaste.

Five Stars

These Heathens by Mia McKenzie These Heathens has two settings: small-town Georgia in 1960, where Doris, the central character, lives and Atlanta, where she travels to end a pregnancy accompanied by one of her former teachers. The "former" here is important. Doris left school a year or two ago because she was needed at home. She comes from a church-going family and is a firm believer. Much of her day is shaped by the "rules" her faith has given her to live by. When Doris realizes she's pregnant, she's certain that Jesus doesn't want her to become a mother, so she turns to the most trusted adult in her life who is not affiliated with her family's church: her former teacher Mrs. Lucas. Mrs. Lucas promises she will help and arranges through a childhood friend to bring Doris to Atlanta for an abortion. It's at this point that things begin to get complicated. Doris is meeting people unlike any she's known. These are city people with incomes well beyond those earned by the Black folk living in her hometown. There's Mrs. Lucas' childhood friend, who appears to prefer women over men. Doris has been warned about the dangers of inversion, but she is every bit as fascinated as she is perturbed. And she also meets several young men who introduce her to SNCC, sit-ins, and even a bit of the Nation of Islam. She's also meeting people she's only read about in Jet or Ebony: the Kings, Bayard Rustin, and Black entertainers. Watching Doris enter these new worlds, explain them to herself, and make her own way through them is a delight.

Five Stars

My Roommate from Hell by Cale Dietrich: As a general rule, I can’t stand romances, but sometimes a romance comes along that stretches the genre in so many directions that it becomes a delight to read, regardless of preconceived biases. The novel riffs on the enemies-to-lovers trope. Owen and Zarmenus are first-year students at college and roommates. Owen wants to study software engineering then land a high-paying job—he’s devoted to his goals. He’s also gay. Hoping for a studious study partner, he’s instead paired with Zarmenus—that’s Prince Zarmenus, the son of the rulers of Hell, which scientists have just discovered exists. His parents want to him to be a sterling example of a well-behaved demon as a first attempt at an Earth-Hell exchange program. Zarmenus meanwhile wants to party and sleep with as many hot guys as he can. Yep, he too is gay. Their relationship is a disaster from the get-go, things get worse, then they get worser, then they get exceptionally complicated while becoming (maybe?) slightly less worser, then…. My Roommate from Hell is a flat-out comic romp with a cast of characters that may drive you nuts at times, but who you’ll also come to feel deeply fond of.

Five Stars

☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂☀☁☂ ...AND THERE YOU HAVE IT! Two retirees, veterans of the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s who came out in our different homes to different results, and developed a shared love of reading...reading Queer stories especially. We shared one title on our favorite reads, and generally show consistent love for our siblings in queerness in their global diversity.

#ExistenceIsResistance