THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY, an entry in the loose Eidolonia series

THE QUICKSAND THEATRE COMPANY (Eidolonia series)
MOLLY RINGLE
Central Avenue Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A runaway witch, a cursed actor, and a magical theatre troupe full of sequins and secrets—this cozy, queer fantasy takes the stage with romance, rebellion, and fae-fueled drama.

When Vai Delvecchio leaves their home in the night, fleeing a family scandal, they knock on the door of the least likely but most alluring of sanctuaries: the traveling Quicksand Theatre Company. Actor Leo Takahashi—a.k.a. Leonidas the Obstreperous—grants Vai a bed in his caravan in exchange for Vai’s magical assistance in theatrical productions. Vai finds their respectable, dignified life transformed into a whimsical world of sequins, makeup, and irreverent comedy sketches.

In the caravan’s close quarters, it’s inevitable that Leo and Vai grow curious about each other, a feeling that blossoms into mutual desire. But trouble waits in the wings. Vai has to face the fallout of their family’s mistakes, and Leo guards a somber secret: soon, an unbreakable deal he made with a malevolent faery will take effect, destroying his freedom and potentially his life.

Yet it may be in the darkest lairs of the fae realm, and in the painful longing of separation, that Vai and Leo each find the truth that makes them whole again.

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

My Review: Nonbinary magic-practicing person in an ocean of really hot water falls for queer performer guy with a *major* secret that keeps him from showing how reciprocal their interest in him is. Set, as so many stories seem to be, in a theater company, a world of playacting, dissembling, and self-invention, it takes its time getting Vai the enby character and Leo our queer hero together.

Too long. It's dragged out to explore the world, the fae's roles in human events, Vai's terrible choices vis-à-vis their family, Leo's errrmmm, uhhh, equally terrible decisions of a very different sort. It's a found-family narrative that one spends the entire read dreading the end of because every single one of the Quicksand Theatre Company's participants very, very badly needs the protection as well as the support of the whole company.

It's hard to relax, honestly, with the Sword of Damocles hanging by a fraying strand from a horse-hair wig. It was a good narrative choice, in other words; but it went on that small fraction too long and wore out my readerly patience. I was quite happy pnce the pace picked up in about the last third of the narrative. I was reading the last 10% at two in the morning; exhausted when I got up, was pretty pleased with the resolution presented.

I'm told this story shares a storyverse with other tales by the author. I never felt that level of mildly bewildered exclusion. I intend this as a compliment. Too often the shared background of a series obtrudes with major points feeling obscure if one is not already acquainted with the rest of the world that's already built. I didn't feel that reading this story...yes, I could tell some characters must've been from somewhere else by their introduction or the responses to them, but what they did in the moment was complete and logical in the context of *this* story. It's a tough feat, and Author Ringle pulls it off.

Normalizing all facets of queerdom earns the book its fractional fifth star. I was utterly gruntled as I ran into characters from everywhere on my peoples' spectrum; this is something I will always round up on the curve for. I couldn't offer a full fifth star because "fae" is a four-letter word in my vocabulary and rhymes in my mind with "feh."

I ain't helpin' y'all with that one, do your own research. My word was this fun. I'm so very happy I got to read it!

THE DISAPPOINTMENT, debut novel of queer loving and grieving and connecting

THE DISAPPOINTMENT
SCOTT BROKER
Catapult (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly-dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’'s own life.

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

My Review: Why do we accept the cultural pressure to seek only peak experiences? Why accept that added burden on mere humans who are not capable of providing The Pinnacle all the time? Even most of the time. Often any of the time. But they're what we got, they're flawed and imperfect and a lot of trouble.

And so, being human, are we.

Among the smartest things my stepmother ever said to me was "romance is sweet and fun, but relationships are about farts and morning breath." Yuh-huh. If somene's not farting or blowing morning breath at you, they're dying. And I don't mean metaphorically.

Longing for perfection is a curse that takes us out of the tangible and plentiful joys of the moments of our lives. I'm a little salty about the chatbot illusion of intelligence and emotional personhood because it's a complete and utter lie. It reinforces the same thing Jack and Randy are battling in this story. They plan a "getaway" from their lives, a chance to decompress and reconnect with themselves and each other...but that assumes they're not connected and not always compressed, a fallacy that modern culture just *loooves* to sell you.

Verb selected very much advisedly.

It's discovering that feat of misdirection and manipulation that I found in the core of this read. Jack and Randy have bought the cultural crap. They're drifting apart because they've fallen for the illusion and can't find each other in the haze of it. Their griefs...Randy's mother's death, Jack's sense of himself as a failure...aren't the kind you can choose not to process. What The Disappointment does is set the stage for a wacky road trip to nowhere, delivers just that, and has its men lead us into themselves...without miring us in Interiority, in Reflection, in Contemplation. All those are terrific when those emotional registers are the ones you're in the mood for. That was not me at the moment I read this story. As a result I battened on the absurdism of these two in their shared moment of crises (plural deliberate, as is the separateness it implies) being enacted before me. Author Broker invokes Samuel Beckett in the text, appropriate as Jack is mourning his failed life as a playwright and who else would he invoke without lèse-majesté; he's making you think in absurd, if not surreal, terms as love molds itself around their griefs.

Because they share a grief: "My skin hugs closer to my bones, then shivers like a sheet of aluminum when he speaks," can not be spoken of someone one does not have a powerful connection to. Even when the World is doing its usual indifferent thing, even when you're gripped by desire (for someone else), even when you're wild with jealousy over trifles, this kind of connection isn't escapable. You can choose to sever it in practice but it survives, it mutates into...I don't know the word, is there one for a state of interconnection deeper than friendship but tinged with the sadness of dead lust?

Randy and Jack are looking into that nameless abyss. It's led them to a flowering of sexual awareness of each other. Is that going to last? (Scruff might play a big role in this.) I don't think I've read a more surprising, more enlivening, more vigorously honestly grounded, story of the insanely complex world of long-term couplehood.

What I loved was tinged with a little sense of déja-vu, as a lot of the story is assembled from the stuff of life. It can't be avoided and remain an honest tale of how we navigate life. The very end of the book is an "incantation with no resolve"—a resolutionless invitation to go on when you can't go on.

I'll go on.

TWO LEFT FEET, gay Premier League football...soccer in the US...version of the trendy gay romance series we all love

TWO LEFT FEET
KALLIE EMBLIDGE
Dell Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Premier League football star must defend his roster spot—and his heart—when a threateningly talented and handsome midfielder joins his team in this utterly charming debut romance, a profound love letter to the world’s most popular sport.

Oliver Harris is football royalty in London. Ordinarily the star of the Camden Roses is calm, cool, and collected, keeping his club relevant with his prowess in the midfield and mighty left foot. But this season, the threats There’s Camden’s management to contend with—complete with a new, prickly Dutch coach, eager for better results—and a mid-season injury, which sidelines him when his team needs him most. When a recruit is called up to fill in, Oliver fears he’ll be replaced. If he can mentor this younger talent, then they might just have a chance at winning, together.

After a string of lackluster performances in his native Spain, Leonardo Davis-Villanueva is looking for one last shot at the club he always dreamed of, where he once played in the youth academy. Oliver immediately finds confident, eager Leo irritating. He can barely go through the motions, let alone coach him, without outright hostility. When he comes to admire Leo’s skill and warms to his humor and energy, though, he begins to see Leo as a friend—and then, to his mounting horror, as something more.

Leo craves Oliver’s attention and partnership; Oliver can’t afford to fall in love with his teammate. He’s always kept a tight lid on his sexuality in a league that’s never had a player come out. As the season heats up, a lot more than football hangs in the balance. Can Oliver—and Leo—win when it counts most?

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

My Review: Oliver, our MC, is a shitty guy: self-obsessed, entirely focused on what's happened *to* him in his life; he's basically a straight man. Except he really wants sex with other guys. Like lots of straight victimvictimvictim men I've known, he thinks he ought to be able to do what he wants to who he wants and be left alone about it. There I agree with him, within consensual boundaries. He's got thhe social awareness to stay on the DL in the Premier League. It's as homophobic a culture as the NHL of Heated Rivalry (in)fame.

So meeting Leo, a hottie with skills equal to his own before his playing career temporarily ended in injury, and slowly, reluctantly falling in love with him follows the grumpy/sunshine, enemies-to-lovers trope nexus. Leo is boundlessly enthusiastic, willing to get in the big fat middle of anything because he's sure it will come out right. As Oliver moves from injured mentor to teammate and partner in an amazing player collaboration with Leo, he realizes he's never been so happy, the team's come out of their scoring slump, and if this beautiful amazing man will have him he wants to be the partner he deserves.

All at once we're in the press-conference-having, coming-out-to-mom part of the story. After the first third-plus of having to put up with his B.S. of pity-poor-me he's healed by Luuuv. Then...finis.

This is a debut novel or I'd have the marshmallow fork out and the logs a-flamin'. I'm going with three stars for what feels like the usual rookie error of not giving the reader intimacy building between the men...even the sex scenes were, well, infrequent and lacking urgency...and an extra half-star for realizing there's a gap in the market that can be filled with a bit of effort. I'd like to see this further honed, fined down into a dart to pierce my wall of ignorance about football; the author doesn't demonstrate a lot of knowledge I can't glean from Wikipedia. I'd call it a competent job of work that could, if seriously expanded on, become a series I'd read.

At the very least it would need to give me more connection and interconnection between the guys, even if it does slow-burn as slowly as this story does; less inner-gaze tediousness..nothing gets resolved until everything gets resolved all at once!...and more of the men exploring their borning connection.

Not for football addicts.

EXQUISITE THINGS, time-travel immortality and True Love your thing? Here 'tis!

EXQUISITE THINGS
ABDI NAZEMIAN
HarperCollins (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From Stonewall Award–winning author Abdi Nazemian (Only This Beautiful Moment) comes the epic queer love story of a lifetime. Perfect for fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Shahriar believes he was born in the wrong time. All he’s ever wanted is to love and be loved, but 1895 London doesn’t offer him the freedom to be his true self, and Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency has only reaffirmed that. But one night—and one writer—will grant Shahriar what he’s always wished for: the opportunity to live in a time and place where he can love freely. Rechristened as Shams and then as Bram, he finds what feels like eternal happiness. But can anything truly be eternal?

Oliver doesn’t feel that 1920s Boston gives him a lot of options to be his full self. He knows he could only ever love another boy, but that would break his beloved mother’s heart. Oliver finds freedom and acceptance in the secret queer community at Harvard that his cousin introduces him to. When he meets a mysterious boy with eyes as warm as a flame, his life is irrevocably changed, forever.

Spanning one hundred and thirty years of love and longing, this tale of immortal beloveds searching for their perfect place and time is a vibrant hymn to the beauty of being alive, a celebration of queer love and community, and a reminder that behind every tragic thing that ever existed, there is something exquisite.

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

My Review: It's a tale as old as time: boy longs for True Love; the gods hear him, and grant his wish, with the catch that he can't have him; something, no specific Power attached, says "...but you will live to meet him," and Oscar's your uncle you're living out Dorian Gray's life!

Immortality seems a terrible curse to me, when plodding through another Thursday can feel like Hell or at least Purgatory. In this case, at least poor Shahriyar (I went to high school with a queer guy named Shahriyar, wonder whatever became of him?)...going by Shams makes a lot of sense to me with a name like that in Anglophone, Victorian London, better still Bram...gets rewarded by living through very, very interesting times indeed.

The central thesis of the immortality...thing...seemed to me to have a sharp cutting edge in freezing the boys at seventeen. How awful to have adult-strength emotions, unmitigated by adult perspective! The angsty solipsism of eternal youth sounds horrifying to my closer-to-70-than-50 self. We follow them through three timelines in their immortal journey, and spend enough time in each to know they *are* seventeen in them all. It presents the expected problems...remember your dating life at seventeen? *shudder*...but the basic truth of Bram/Shahriyar and Oliver's lives is that they are in love with each other. Men come, men go, but these boys come back into orbit around each other because they're each made the way the other needs a man to be.

It takes forever, it seems, but they own up to their own nonsense and discuss their love of each others' essence, so a lot of the silly acting out does get dealt with. It's thus not purely the angsty nonsense of trying to figure out what works. A lot of time spent doing it, though....

I had procedural questions like I always do in immortality stories...how'd they survive the 1980s with databases and licenses and passports and birth certificates? how'd they get bank accounts? credit cards?...but mostly this book is for the reader to enjoy True Love that withstands the fallibility and failings of human beings. The supporting cast is a hoot and a holler. I think any one of 'em would tentpole a novella at least! Still, my niggles lost a half-star off the read. I wasn't swept up enough not to notice them until I thought about it after the read; these were in-the-moment grumbles.

My reason for dropping the majority of fifth star, though, was the ending...cramming way too much into way too little space made me feel like the author saw someone over my shoulder he'd rather talk to and just dropped me. Either adding 50-60 more pages onto this book or splitting the story and make it two volumes would address that rushed, inelegant ending.

Good fun was had, a very satisfying evening of smiling nodding shouting at the pages...not perfect, but what is?

THE SOUTH, Booker-Prize longlisted first queer love in Malaysia

THE SOUTH
TASH AW
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of The Guardian's The best fiction of 2025 list!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A luminous and intimate novel about the weight of inheritance, the bonds of loyalty, and the awakening of love, set against the backdrop of a changing Malaysia.

The South unfolds during a visit by the Lim family to their rural clan estate after a long absence. Jay, in his mid-teens, and his two older sisters are less than thrilled to leave their city for the remote house in the south, but their parents, Sui Ching and Jack, are adamant.

Jay finds he's expected to share a room with Chuan, the son of the estate's overseer, a bit older than Jay but seemingly much more mature and capable in the world. The two soon form an intense bond, but with their very different backgrounds, and even more disparate expectations for the future, the course of their relationship is always an unspoken question.

Meanwhile, change presses in, including the destruction of the farm's beloved orchards, and the sale of the estate is mooted. The relationships between Chuan's father and Jack and Sui Ching go deep, but pressures both internal and external threaten to sever old bonds and upend an entire way of life. The South, at once sweeping and intimate, is a masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great transformation.

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

My Review: Farms feed us. At the vast, unceasing exaction of labor, they feed us. Do they feed farmers? That is, do farmers get fulfillment and satisfaction from the labor they do? (Are there people being farmers in 2025?) And the cost of that labor, the relationships it bends to exigencies city-dwelling consumers don't worry their pretty heads about, how is it borne? Never equally...Nature seems to forbid anything like ease in farming, droughts, excesses of rain, it is literally always something on the socially elite Lim family's inherited land.

Author Tash Aw has done that thinking in this story. He observes and occasionally examines the workings of a family with a farm in Malaya (as it was at the beginning of the narrative) as they farm, live, love, doubt, together and apart. It's a book of calm, eerie stillness as the characters live lives they begin to question...is this necessary? am I necessary to it? am I doing good for the world?...and analyze how things are and aren't making them happy. Love is in the air between boys whose families have known each other most all their lives; loves slides out of mom Sui and dad Jack's grasp; love, true to its reputation, ruins everything with its exquisite torturous promises of pleasure, happiness, belonging that are so elusive to the Lim siblings. “We feel as though our entire world changes when we get older, every object, every person, has been rearranged into some strange new configuration, but in fact nothing at all has changed.” Nor will it ever. That realization stymies and disheartens many. I find it exhilarating in its challenge to redistribute attention, wisdom, knowledge within the unchanging reality of Life.

Maybe Jay Lim won't get Chuan, the boy he loves (In that moment, forever seems like a comforting notion. But at that age, what does either of them really know about time?), maybe Jack Lim will stop him as his culture demands despite his own complicated past, maybe Sui Lim won't be able to move past regrets for things undone. Maybe Malaysia's long tradition of relative harmony among its constituent groups is about to blow up into full-on Sinophobia. What will the Lims do then? We can't call it an orchard if it no longer bears fruits pretty much sums up the dilemmas in the whole book.

Family drama is evergreen because family is universal. Jay's older sisters are plumping for connection in the form of religious nuttery, the other in the embrace of rejection. (Parents believe this, so she rejects it; a stance adolescence damn near demands.) Jay's struggles with finding queerness in his world, knowing it's there and just out of his reach, is how I know the author understands me across generations and cultures: "This emptiness feels like hunger but Jay thinks that it is really a longing, though he doesn't know what he is longing for."

I was delighted to read this story of queer self-discovery against a backdrop of cultural and economic shifts that both enable and inhibit the journey. It is not a negative, but an observation, that hearing from so many points of view does not center queerness in the story quite the way I'd thought it would based on how it's marketed. It wasn't enough Jay to make the queer angle the only one in the telling, so I took three-quarters of a star back.

But how very beautiful and quietly profound and enfolding this read was! I recommend it to all including the "eww-ick" homophobes.

NO BODY NO CRIME, interesting exploration of the old saw's veracity

NO BODY NO CRIME
TESS SHARPE
MCD Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Murder either bonds you or breaks you.

Rural PI Mel Tillman knows this well. She's seen her fair share of bloody cases and botched cover-ups. But killing with someone? That is a different kind of mess all together, and Mel's got real experience with it.

No one's heard from Toby Dunne since Chloe Harper's sweet sixteen party—because the birthday girl and sixteen-year-old Mel buried him so deep in the backwoods, no one's ever finding him. Mel loses little sleep over it—Toby had been terrorizing them.

What she does lose sleep over is Chloe, the girl with whom she survived that horrible night in the woods. Chloe, the girl she fell in love with. Chloe, the girl who disappeared and hasn't been seen in more than six years.

Tasked with locating Chloe by her family, Mel can't resist the call of a good chase, or finding the one who got away with her heart (and with murder). When Mel finds an armed and vigilant Chloe living off-grid in a highly booby-trapped patch of Canadian wilderness, she realizes that Chloe had been expecting someone other than her ex to come looking for her. The thing that's kept Chloe going for years is that she's kept Mel safe by running. Now, the truth must come out as they run for their lives once again.

Because when they buried Toby Dunne in the backwoods, they buried something else, too. Something Toby took. And the powerful family he stole it from? They'll do anything to get it back.

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

My Review: Crimes are sticky. Like blood, though obviously not all crimes are bloody, but if you've ever cleaned up after a nosebleed you know the phenomenon. The crime here is...complicated. Some people deserve to be unalived. Sometimes a crime is simply balancing the scales.

Those are the best stories to read. They ask us to distinguish among shades of grey. I prefer this to black-and-white stories more often than not. In this case, Mel and Chloe commit a crime. It's not murder, because the killing was richly deserved self-defense. It was what they did afterwards that was the crime: They tried to conceal the body. This is where stuff gets sticky. *gleeful hand-rubbing*

As a work of fiction, then, we've got seriously good stuff to work with. What works the best for me, an old cisqueer white guy, is the soul-searching the young women do together. It feels like the sorts of conversations I had with the boys I wanted to...be with...when I was that age. It's part of a narrative strategy that shifts PoVs to tell parts of the story without an omniscient narrator taking us out of the immediacy of the action...which the soulful chats stop dead. So, well, where's your personal balance point? Do you want the action before the bonding talks? I don't, so this worked for me.

What I didn't really connect with as well was the overly specific conflict between Mel and Chloe. They debate extremely small points and so I get uninvested. It's in character for people this age, but it just gets so tiresome to someone who can think "in three months this will not matter." But more importantly there are just too many voices competing for attention, which gives me a headache. Shaving it down to just Mel and Chloe, I cared more about their actions and their thoughts. Rick is funny, and a fun character, but could easily and profitably been limited to appearances within the women's PoVs.

I'd say this read is solidly executed, though not perfectly for my reading tastes. If you've watched Yellowjackets and resonate with its flow, this book will delight you. It was a solid "A" in my reading.

HE'S TO DIE FOR, fun, entertaining gay rom-com/mystery with good opposites attract energy

HE'S TO DIE FOR
ERIN DUNN
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Brooklyn 99 meets The Charm Offensive in this sparkling romantic murder it's murder cute in the first degree when a detective finds himself falling for the lead suspect in a career-making case.

At 29, Detective Rav Trivedi is the youngest member of the NYPD’s homicide squad, and his future looks bright. He may be a bit of an outsider in the department—an ivy-league educated gay Brit with a weakness for designer suits—but his meteoric rise and solve rate prove he belongs.

So when his CO assigns him lead on the high-profile murder of a record executive, Rav is ready for action. He won’t be distracted by TV crews, tabloids, or what’s trending on social media, nor by the ridiculously hot rock star with a clear motive and no alibi.

This is it, his shot, and he is not going to screw it up—certainly not by falling in love with his number one suspect…

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

My Review: Told in third person from Rav's PoV, this story of opposites attracting is the exact kind of cuteness booster-shot of a story I've been needing as my world darkens. You'll note the link above to my review of The Charm Offensive, which was a good story well-told, much the way this one is.

What makes it a half-star less of a good read than that one is really simple: Switching the PoV from the anxiety-suffering character to the neurotypical character lessens the impact of anxiety into the (ironically) anxiety-inducing "this is a burden" feeling that all anxiety-suffering people I've ever known dread.

I'll also mention the mystery plot was...underwhelming...though not in any way substandard. Given how much time it took up, it was as thorough as it could be in being a mystery; it's akin to a mystery short story, though, and those are never top of the heap for me. I'll also bring up the low-steam aspect of the romance, to be fully informative. It was fine for me because it was one strand of the story among several.

It sounds as though I didn't like the story, and I promise I did! I loved the way these two really different men learned to talk to, not at or past, each other. I liked the moments of sweet sharing, bringing each other into the other man's thought processes and history. I battened on the sense that they were building something for each other, out of themselves, as a loving demonstration of need. That it was done using both humor and flirtatious silliness was the way it made me invest in it not simply roll my eyes.

It's in that context that Rav and Jack connected most deeply...their struggles to be able/allowed to exercise their strengths to really satisfying degrees. Rav's very pretty, very posh, and very much expected to glide through his job while making the department look good. Doing actual detective work? Not really in the cards. Like Jack, he's supposed to do and keep doing what others want. Unlike Jack, Rav doesn't get panic attacks that are used against him.

All told a really enjoyable summer's afternoon of reading. I hope to see more from Author Dunn, and might even pick up a book two of these men if one appeared.

MISS VEAL AND MISS HAM, touching, moving story of lesbian life and love in 1950s England

MISS VEAL AND MISS HAM
VIKKI HEYWOOD
Muswell Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Public companions, private lovers.

1951: behind the counter of a modest post office in a Buckinghamshire village Miss Dora Ham and Miss Beatrix Veal maintain their careful facade as respected local spinsters. But their true story is one of passion, and together they have built a life of quiet dignity and service in rural England.

Their true story is one of suffragist activists who fell in love at a rally in the 1900s, danced in London's secret gay clubs between the wars, and comforted one another during the first night of the Blitz. Now over the course of one pivotal day their carefully constructed world begins to fracture. Through Beatrix's wry perspective we witness the severe impact of post-war changes on their peaceful existence. Changes that will lead to heart-breaking decisions for Miss Veal and Miss Ham.

At the heart of this intimate, moving and witty novel is a story of resilience, the dignity of love that cannot be spoken, and the challenges that come when the future no longer feels safe.

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

My Review: The antique dramatic structure of setting the action of your tale over the course of one day is antique for a reason: Focus. Audience focus, author focus, character focus, are all enhanced...even compelled...by setting all the action in one day. Author Heywood does that very well in Veal and Ham's life-challenging day.

These women are, very quietly, living as open a queer life as is possible in most of the world even today. Keep your head down, do your job, and people will mostly ignore you. Best you can hope for is that it will be a benign form of ignoring, not one of silent sneering. Veal and Ham, since they do work that's useful and even pleasant to the villagers they serve, get a big dose of selective attention on their service not on their behind-the-scenes lives; their dishonesty, though, in not being open does create mild ill-will instead of quiet acceptance. It's the last piece of even qualified good luck the ladies have on this terrible day.

Losing one's home ia an absolute emotional tornado. Veal and Ham, after moving out of London to escapr the Blitz, have lived the quiet village life...with excursions back to London for lesbian companionship...for a decade. In fact, the world around them is not the world they know, and still less the world they knew as suffragettes. The economic realities of the 1950s are austere and unforgiving, they are focused on survival as the people adjust their lives to being one among many markets not The British Empire. The main income Veal and Ham have had, expensive candy, is drying up in this new world so they can no longer make a go of it as they have been earning steadily less.

Does any of this ring any bells?

In the story we're told, no plan is in place for their future. They are...numb...at the overwhelming nature of losing home, livelihood, and status all at the same time. The one intention they had formed, a very permanent one, is for several reasons not carried out. But what are they to do? A mild enough venting of feelings against their odious landlord isn't a plan for a future.

Does there need to be a future? Are we...am I...so deeply conditioned as to find an ambiguous ending intolerable? No; not at all. I'm only giving this book four stars because it is a solid piece of plotting and a lovely job of writing about one day in a long life together. It is a complete story, as is the later-published (1973) original ending of Mrs. Dalloway called Mrs. Dalloway's Party. It was excised for a reason; where the novel ends is exactly where it should. Likewise, in this book, there are things as missing that should not be. Or, if a truly satisfying one-day novel was to come to being here, a different ending point (at 97%, if you're a curious Kindle reader) should have been chosen. As it stands, this is a marvelous story only a bit away from being excellent.

It is still a story I hope you will find and read.

THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE, good plot, better idea, decent execution

THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE
A.J. WEST
Orenda Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It is the year 1710, and Thomas True has arrived on old London Bridge with a dangerous secret. One night, lost amongst the squalor of London's hidden back streets, he finds himself drawn into the outrageous underworld of the molly houses.

Meanwhile, carpenter Gabriel Griffin struggles to hide his double life as Lotty, the molly's silent guard. When the queen of all 'he-harlots', Mother Clap, confides in him about a deadly threat, he realises his friends are facing imminent execution.

To the horror of all mollies, there is a rat amongst them, betraying their secrets to a pair of murderous Justices, hell-bent on punishing sinners with the noose.

Can Gabriel unmask the traitor before it's too late? Can he save hapless Thomas from peril, and their own impossible love?

Set amidst the hidden world of Georgian London’s gay scene, The Betrayal of Thomas True is a brutal and devastating thriller, where love must overcome evil, and the only true sin is betrayal…

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

My Review: I came out of my seat when I read "...love must overcome evil, and the only true sin is betrayal..." in the book's synopsis. It could not have been more directly aimed at my sweet spot, and timed more exactly as needed.

I still think that. I'm not one bit taking away from the author's acumen or clarity of vision. I only wish I'd had more...fun. It's a good plot, it's executed competently, but there is a lack of that indefinable *something* in the characterizations that gets me to invest in them and their plight.

After thinking and thinking about this issue, after probing my experience of the read for a solid while, I've come to the only logical conclusion. I was introduced to the stakes before I'd invested in the people. I knew what was going on but did not yet care that it was going to happen to these men. This same issue arose for me in the Shardlake historical mysteries.

I'm delighted by the evocative insults...discover them yourselves, they are priceless nuggets of invective...and engrossed in the setting of London's "molly houses" as reconstructed here. Honestly, having been immersed in this story's world, I think I'd know how to comport myself unobtrusively in this arcane, hidden world's manners and speech.

Because the stakes, the heinous betrayal of men like me by one of our own to the vile, revolting scum enforcing their distorted "morality" on pain of death, were instantly relatable to me, I found myself unwilling to put the book down. I think it was a single five-hour session that finished it off for me. That's pretty good going for three-hundred-ish pages! And blessings on the publisher for opening the proceedings with a Dramatis Personae list of real and molly-names!

I hope that makes clear the real pleasure of the story for me. I did not just slog through the pages. I finished the book because it was not one I could imagine leaving unfinished. That's praise indeed from a seasoned old campaigner like me. I think anyone who would like to see just what it costs to live your own truth in a way that satisfies your human need to give and receive love, amid a world full of messages threatening you with harm up to and including death for doing it, would like it.

History buffs eagerly flagged down to come into this authorial spiderweb of facts and research gems. Gay men over fifty sought especially vigorously...you'll see why. Believe me...learning the dreadful fate of our kind in a time only slightly less hateful than now will energize your resistance.

SEVEN DAYS IN TOKYO, emotionally intense yet affectively distanced

SEVEN DAYS IN TOKYO
JOSÉ DANIEL ALVIOR
Unbound Firsts (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.90 trade paper, pre-order for 1 July 2025 shipping

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Two strangers meet in Manhattan and spend a perfect night together. In Tokyo, they have seven days to see if that one night might mean something more.

Landon’s living alone in Tokyo as a British ‘expat’, Louie’s visiting while he anxiously waits for approval on his US visa. Against the backdrop of a misty Tokyo Spring, their precious time together is spent wandering into side streets and coffee shops, sharing unmade beds and plates of food. But as the days tick by, Louie’s expectations start to overtake reality and he falls too deeply for a life that’s not yet his.

Breathtakingly tender, Seven Days in Tokyo is an astonishing debut about the intricacies of desire and a search for belonging. It is a lyrical, immersive portrait of how some things, however beautiful and profound, are destined to be as short-lived as the cherry blossoms.

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

My Review: There are some moments in life that are perfect: sounds, colors, smells, companions...everything is perfect. They live forever in one's mind. They have in mine anyway, and I hope they do in yours as well.

Problems are created, then multiplied, when one or more of those involved stay in that moment long past the time it has ceased to exist. Clinging to a beautiful bygone image of something that, for whatever concatenation of causes, could not be. I've done that; it's a greedy response to a cosmic gift, but I'm pretty sure if one's never tried it the futility and the stunning destructive energy of it simply don't become part of one's usable experience.

This is the story of that one Perfect Moment℠ and of how horribly the effort to cling to it, to summon it back, hurts all involved and all who are around those involved.

The story is indeed tender, and it (at times) took my breath away with the mannered, distanced-from-disaster way it told the hard parts. I can only say that every story beat, every emotional trigger, every exhausted introspection, matched exactly what I'm familiar with. “How many lives are we allowed in a lifetime? I’m given a peek of this other world and feel a great sense of gratitude.” Gratitude without common sense, I fear, is what sets the painful reckoning with the incalculably precious gift of A Perfect Moment℠. Falling in love with a one-night stand? A bad misuse of the enormous gift of perspective the event gave you.

Details aren't mine to reveal, the Spoiler Stasi has agents in each and every nook of the bookish world. I'll say that Louie is more than a little spoiled as the (stochastic) trip through his past shows. I might've preferred a very slightly more linear look into his past, but that would be a different book, one less immersive in its ease of scansion, used in its archaic climbing sense. There is effort required to get this story into your head. It's rich and evocative, but not the way ice cream is rich and cloying; more like the way lobster is rich and evokes its home the sea.

I suspect many hoping for salaciousness will leave the read not fully satisfied. Intimacy is the focus here: accidental; granted; withheld; refused. One important note is the Japanese trait of wearing masks in public strikes Louie pretty forcefully, as he mentions it though without ever bringing up COVID. I think, in the absence of explicit dating, that places the action in 2019 or before, or else the editor was uncharacteristically sloppy with that detail. I doubt this because the masks were so perfectly symbolic.

You'll see. Or I hope you will. I can't offer all five stars but that's because I wanted more Landon in Louie's book. It's not instantly obvious to me that Landon remaining more or less a screen to project onto was an enriching authorial choice. I was aware that I knew little enough about Landon as a man to get where Louie's fantasies mapped onto the real man.

They're not fatal flaws to me, just points where I expected a more polished performance from a writer with these chops. And what chops! I was transported to Tokyo. I don't mean a native's Tokyo. I mean the one a man truly and deeply in love would notice from the ten million things bombarding his senses. Louie is Christopher Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Evoking that state of utterly aware passivity is a huge feat. It's a deeply moving story told well...but perfection is wihin Author Alvior's grasp. I want him to reach it.

A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1, debut mystery in a queer-centered 1920s series

A QUEER CASE: The Selby Bigge Mysteries #1
ROBERT HOLTOM
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping 1920s-set whodunnit, this debut features a queer sleuth who must solve a murder in a mansion on London’s Hampstead Heath without revealing his sexuality, lest he be arrested as a criminal.

The Selby Bigge mysteries series debut, it will leave readers eager for the next installment. Perfect for fans of Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey novels.

London, 1929.

Selby Bigge is a bank clerk by day and a denizen of the capital’s queer underworld by night, but he yearns for a life that will take him away from his ledgers, loveless trysts and dreary bedsit in in which his every move is scrutinised by a nosy landlady. So when he meets Patrick, son of knight of the realm and banking millionaire Sir Lionel Duker, he is delighted to find himself catapulted into a world of dinners at The Ritz and birthday parties at his new friend’s family mansion on Hampstead Heath.

But money, it seems, can’t buy happiness. Sir Lionel is being slandered in the press, his new young wife Lucinda is being harassed by an embittered journalist and Patrick is worried he’ll lose his inheritance to his gold-digging stepmother. And when someone is found strangled on the billiards room floor after a party it doesn’t take long for Selby to realise everyone has a motive for murder.

Can Selby uncover the truth while keeping his own secrets buried?

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

My Review: Snobbery is its own worst enemy. Think Saltburn or The Line of Beauty. It never works for long, this charade. You inevitably out yourself one way or another, just like trying to pass as straight when you're not.

"Perverts are prone to all sorts of criminality, especially homicidal mania."
Quite right, I didn't say. There was nothing I enjoyed more after a nice bit of sodomy than a spot of killing.

I felt very squicked out by the period-appropriate homophobia. I expect I was supposed to; but I never quite cottoned on to whether the story was aware of its snobbery in a positive or negative social light. I can see a young gay man delighting in his beauty's ability to open doors of privilege, but few enough are the cases where that works out to the long-term benefit of the youth...think of Jed Johnson and Joe Dallesandro versus Scott Thorson and (for a straight example) Kato Kaelin. Is Selby one of the former two, or among the legions represented by the latter two?

I don't know, but more to the point I don't think Author Holtom knows. If I was meant to pick up on intentional ambiguity, I didn't; it felt more like simple not having thought it through. (A very snobby side note: "me" and "I" are not interchangeable unless the point is to make the character misusing them sound...out of their depth.)

So, kudos for research: the atmo is great, and very much matches what I, a seasoned reader of "Golden Age" (how fraught is that term!) mysteries expect; the snarky little cameo by Dame Agatha in her best self-puncturing Ariadne Oliver vein; Theo/Theodora's delightfully spiky trans rep in this Magnus Hirschfeld-informed era and milieu.

Fewer plaudits for not deciding, then going all in on, an idea of Selby's aims by trying to join this bunch of dreadful snobs, he said snobbishly. There are pacing decisions I didn't entirely vibe with, some scenes of country-house life that overstayed my patience; that's just my taste, though, as others might batten on it. I want to be very clear with modern M/M readers: no joy for y'all here. Period-appropriate zipper-welded-shut longing.

And if Theo/dora does not feature more prominently in the next one, I am firing up my voodoo-dolly creation skills and coming after all y'all who made this series. Individually.

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN, a story I love but a novel I don't

GIVE MY LOVE TO BERLIN
KATHERINE BRYANT
Walrus Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1927, the beautiful city of Berlin is the gay capitol of the world. Ruth, a performer at one of the nightclubs in the city, and her girlfriend, Tillie, are living their lives and enjoying the freedom of the Weimar Republic. They are surrounded by a chosen family that includes drag performers, transgender women, and the prominent physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Ruth, Tillie, and their best friends, James and Ernesto spend much of their time at the Institute for Sexual Science, the hub of the queer community in the twenties and early thirties.

As the '20s come to a close, Tillie watches her father, a prominent lawyer, as he becomes more entrenched with the Nazi Party. Working in his law office as his secretary, she meets prominent figures in the Nazi Party, including Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and becomes increasingly concerned as time passes that there is much more at stake than just her relationship with Ruth, who is also Jewish.

Tillie becomes privy to the planning of rallies, the plans the Nazi party is making in order to ensure Nazi victories in major elections, and how the Nazis are taking over Germany one neighborhood at a time. The novel jumps between the twenties and thirties and the early nineties and a young woman named Thea. Thea is dealing with the onset of her grandmother's dementia, and discovers secrets hidden away that her grandmother never intended for her to uncover.

Alternating between Tillie's perspective during the '20s and '30s as the Weimar Republic slowly gives way to a dictatorship and Thea's perspective in the '90s as the secrets of her grandmother's history come to light, Give My Love to Berlin follows the lives of two gay couples—Tillie and Ruth, and their best friends, James and Ernesto—trying to navigate falling in love, thriving in their community, and coming to terms with the danger they are in just by being who they are.

The author wrote this book for several reasons, mainly because she had never heard of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, or his work and she did not know that Berlin had been such a huge part of gay culture. After the 2016 election, the author could see parallels between the vitriol for the queer community in many parts of the United States and the way queer people were being treated as the Nazis gained power, particularly in Berlin. Now, with all the anti-drag and anti-transgender legislation, it is more important than ever to tell these stories so we can keep them from repeating in the future.

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

My Review: The reviews of this book on Goodreads are very divided. Many apparently Jewish reviewers seem to take exception to the author's inclusion of queer people as victims of the Holocaust. Many others seem to dislike the wooden prose. I'm in the latter camp. (Pardon the wordplay.)

It's a great idea for a book, one that would've come across better had it felt less like research notes made to fit...poorly...around fictional standards. It's not clear to me that all the plot points were thought through...why would a woman working for literal Nazis ever question a trans person feeling threatened anywhere at all?...so I was left with the idea that this story seized the author's imagination but didn't get the mulling time, or followed editorial guidance, to smooth some of the burrs on its edge.

I was utterly repelled by the amount of sexual violence, as I know I was expected to be; the response to it from every character seemed...off. One does not just seamlessly drop the horror of sexual violence. It's ordinary to mask the trauma as a survival mechanism, but this felt more like just being okay with it. Again, I think this is more about the author not taking enough time to think these issues through, or not having (or heeding) editorial feedback.

If the author ever revisits the story with a strong editorial eye, this could be a good, interesting, involving novel. As it is, this is not a great read. I'm disappointed and saddened to say it.

SPEAK EZ, clever, endearingly endowed with dog energy, paranormal lesbian romantic suspense

SPEAK EZ
ELLE E. IRE
Bywater Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When a mysterious dog shows up during the renovation of the Big City Little Theatre, one woman falls in love with the victim of a century-old homicide who might not be as dead as she seems. And now it's a race against time to ensure she stays that way.


On New Year's Eve, in 1923, someone walked into Michelle "Mickey" McFadden's queer speakeasy hidden beneath the Big City Little Theater and shot her and her dog, EZ, dead. Or . . . sort of, mostly, kind of dead, maybe? Because instead of crossing over, they become trapped within the bar's cinderblock walls. And though EZ eventually manages to wriggle his way free, Mickey remains, her spirit frozen in time.

In 2022, employees of the Big City Little Theater begin encountering a stray dog sneaking in and around the premises. When Ciara, the theater's bookkeeper, saves the dog from being hit by a truck, she begins to suspect there's something odd about the mysterious canine and makes it her mission to catch him and either return him to his owners or keep him as her own.

That is until Ciara and her friends happen upon the sealed-up speakeasy in the theater's subbasement --and find the dog inside. But how did he get in there when the door was locked? And why are there bullet holes in the otherwise beautifully preserved bar? Their discovery launches them on the investigation of a lifetime, complete with an ancient murder to solve, strange occurrences to explain, and a missing person to find.

When Mickey's spirit, which has been trapped in the mysterious in-between for the past hundred years, begins to find her way out, she and Ciara finally come face-to-face. And it's more than the speakeasy's old wiring that makes sparks fly. Ciara's falling hard for Mickey and Mickey for her. Can they solve the murder and figure out how EZ returned to the world of the living before the clock strikes midnight on the next New Year's Eve?

Because if they don't, they're pretty certain Mickey's time will finally be up—this time for good.

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

My Review: EZ the dog better be coming back. The women, well...if that's how I get EZ back, okay.

I had a lot of fun with this read because I'm all about ghostly love, and even lovin'. It's very clear these women would smoke up a train station with their chemistry. Any author who can get me to invest in the love of two women is an author whose chops as a storyteller are superior. Developing Mickey into someone I was interested in seeing get justice for her century-old murder took some doing. Her post-death time in the walled-up speakeasy in the basement of the theater where Ciara works isn't detailed...in fact the way Mickey's existence gets handled is mostly with believable "I don't know"s and much pondering without a lot of resolution, which is fine by me.

All the characters are fun to listen to. Mickey's not all that different from the others, something I'd usually frown over, but the four in the group are witty enough that I let it go. What counts in a crime novel is solving the crime, right? Not to me, though I'll admit the pleasure of reading a series mystery is a satisfying solution to the crime and the crew around the sleuth. I don't know the author's plans, but it seems to me that, after this story, she's likely to stop. As long as she brings back EZ somehow, okay by me.

So the murder does have a solution that we are given adequate means to think through. I won't talk about it because the Spoiler Stasi is ever-vigilant, but it makes sense and it works. It's also part of the reason I think this could be a satisfying standalone story. I like the idea of this story existing in and for itself, not needing to carry forward baggage.

What cost a half-star off perfect-fivedom was my sense that Ciara needed too little time to adjust to Mickey's...unorthodox...existence. How does Ciara just buy into this decidedly offbeat mode of being? No obvious anxiety around any of it, which I'm not really prepared to accept all the way; so a measly half-star off instead of a whole one, because once they get to bantering, well, it's just utterly clear why they love one another.

Very much a story to keep the #PrideMonth reader involved, entertained, amused, and invested.

DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told does so very much for illuminating the reality of empathy

DEEP HOUSE: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told
JEREMY ATHERTON LIN
Little, Brown and Company (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2025!

One of Electric Literature’s Best Non-fiction Books of 2025!

The Publisher Says: From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Gay Bar comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.

It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams—a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit—just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”

With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before—smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Following Gay Bar—called “a rich tapestry” by Vanity Fair and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson—Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

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

My Review: A story whose timeliness could not possibly be greater. Author Jeremy takes us through a moment, thirty years ago, when the political landscape looked a lot like today's. He had just fallen in love with "Famous Blue Raincoat," an undocumented Brit, which is presenting practical problems of residence and life together. How do you rent an apartment, earn a living, make couple-friends? You're carrying the usual relationship stuff but on top of that is the need to be discreet, even secretive, about big pieces of your life.

What Author Jeremy chooses as his narrative strategy is lighter on the deeply personal details in favor of a potted history of the topic of marriage equality in the US from DOMA in 1996 through twists an turns of bi-national queer couples litigating their basic human rights (which is not how rights are supposed to work except here in looney-religious-land) through to the now-imperiled Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015.

It's a lot to take in. The personal parts pertaining to Author Jeremy and "Famous Blue Raincoat" are sprinkled on like powdered sugar to make the wodges of information go down easier. There are so many facts that impinge on the love story he's telling that there's really no other way to tell the whole story. Author Jeremy was threading needle after needle after needle, trying not to be preachy while advocating equality, trying not to be confessional while honestly depicting the cost of a life defined by struggle to access simple equality, trying not to chirp triumphantly about battles won while they're being refought, yet leaving his readers with real hope in a world that does not do much to support it.

The amount of focused effort in these four-hundred-plus pages is humbling. It's a gift to receive this kind of careful craft on such a personal topic. I'd've given a full fifth star had I had citations, not simply end-notes; it's a "me" thing, it likely won't bother a lot of y'all, but when you're relying on sources to make factual cases and points within cases, I'd like to be pointed at those sources in the text not simply as end notes. I feel a bit unkind bringing it up in a time where even the inclusion of end notes is increasingly rare, but, well, I'm pedantic and grouchy and old.

Surprise!

Don't wait...get yourself a copy fast as you can for your #PrideMonth reading. It's a pleasurable way to appreciate fully and personally what is at stake in the current political crisis.

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, scholarly work needed to read for queer-identity students

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750
NOEL MALCOLM
Oxford University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$24.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A landmark study of the history of male-male sex in early modern Europe, including the European colonies and the Ottoman world.

Until quite recently, the history of male-male sexual relations was a taboo topic. But when historians eventually explored the archives of Florence, Venice and elsewhere, they brought to light an extraordinary world of early modern sexual activity, extending from city streets and gardens to taverns, monasteries and Mediterranean galleys. Typically, the sodomites (as they were called) were adult men seeking sex with teenage boys. This was something intriguingly different from modern the boys ceased to be desired when they became fully masculine. And the desire for them was seen as natural; no special sexual orientation was assumed.

The rich evidence from Southern Europe in the Renaissance period was not matched in the Northern lands; historians struggled to apply this new knowledge to countries such as England or its North American colonies. And when good Northern evidence did appear, from after 1700, it presented a very different picture. So the theory was formed—and it has dominated most standard accounts until now—that the 'emergence of modern homosexuality' happened suddenly, but inexplicably, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Noel Malcolm's masterly study solves this and many other problems, by doing something which no previous scholar has giving a truly pan-European account of the whole phenomenon of male-male sexual relations in the early modern period. It includes the Ottoman Empire, as well as the European colonies in the Americas and Asia; it describes the religious and legal norms, both Christian and Muslim; it discusses the literary representations in both Western Europe and the Ottoman world; and it presents a mass of individual human stories, from New England to North Africa, from Scandinavia to Peru. Original, critical, lucidly written and deeply researched, this work will change the way we think about the history of homosexuality in early modern Europe.

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

My Review: Deeply researched, plentifully sourced and attributed...and as that would lead you to understand, it's an academic work. It isn't a browsing book, it's a studying book. I took over a year to read it. I wanted to do it justice, to focus on its theses, so I took my time.

I ended up surprised at some of Malcolm's conclusions, as one would hope to be the case in a scholarly work. His firm opinion that English buggery was simply not as common as the Mediterranean practice was specifically stated to include James I of England. He contends that the social conventions of male friendship then prevailing adequately explain His Majesty's somewhat fervent correspondence with his favorites. This is carefully hedged by explaining that, absent proof, it's reasonable to accept that we simply do not know with certainty what occurred at this distance in time.

How useful is it to go looking for ancestors of modern queer identities in the past? Where there are records, they are almost always legal ones, of prosecutions for offenses. Can that in any useful way be extrapolated to indicate broader trends of sexual activity? Is sexual activity actually a useful measure of a person's emotional inner life? What do we mean by "queer" or "gay" or "bisexual?" I know of my own personal knowledge men who have sex with other men exclusively, who reject any "queer" identity.

It's the identity, you'll note, that's being rejected. Malcolm contends that it's "the Mediterranean model" of pederastic sodomy that was absent in northern climes, not men having sex with other men. It's a contention that I think bears very serious consideration. If many men in the Mediterranean committed sodomy as their legitimate access to sexual release, given how late (compared to more northerly climes) they married, are they in any meaningful way "queer?" Or just horny, and unwilling to risk syphilis (fatal then) by using a female sex worker?

A book that treats its topic with bracing and refreshing unwillingness to bow to fashion while still refusing to stray far from its evidentiary base is a rare thing indeed. One that is carefully analytical of the terms used in the past and their intersection, or lack of intersection, with modern understandings of identity, is rare and precious.

Not a casual read but a profoundly informative and essential one for gay men, or those who wish to comprehend history's limits in identity politics.

DISCO WITCHES OF FIRE ISLAND, fun urban fantasy *gay men only*

DISCO WITCHES OF FIRE ISLAND
BLAIR FELL
Alcove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In the late 1980s, a coven of queer witches on New York's Fire Island strives to protect a young man facing a devastating tragedy.

A gripping novel of magic, romance, and hope—perfect for fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea, the Tales of the City series, and Red, White, and Royal Blue.

It’s 1989, and Joe Agabian and his best friend Ronnie set out to spend their first summer working in the hedonistic gay paradise of Fire Island Pines. Joe is desperate to let loose and finally move beyond the heartbreak of having lost his boyfriend to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The two friends are quickly taken in by a pair of quirky, older house cleaners. But something seems off, and Joe starts to suspect the two older men of being up to something otherworldly. In truth, Howie and Lenny are members of a secret disco witch coven tasked with protecting the island—and young men like Joe—from the relentless tragedies ravaging their community. The only problem is, having lost too many of their fellow witches to the epidemic, the coven’s protective powers have been seriously damaged.

Unaware of all the mystical shenanigans going on, Joe starts to fall for the super-cute bisexual ferryman who just happens to have webbed feet and an unusual ability to hold his breath underwater. But Joe’s longing to find love is tripped up by his own troublesome past as well as the lure of a mysterious hunk he keeps seeing around the island—a man Howie and Lenny warn may be a harbinger of impending doom.

The Disco Witches need to find help—fast—if they’re to save Joe and the island from the Great Darkness. But how? Fans of queer romances with a dash of fantasy will fall in love with this stunning novel of community, love, sex, magic, and hope in desperate times.

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

My Review: Delightful. In the midst of the devastation of AIDS, there's nothing left to do but laugh, find friends who love and care about you, and go right on with your pursuit of the merman who runs the ferry to your magical home.

We've all been there—don't front.

The kind of matter-of fact tone telling this wildly off-beam from consensus reality story is my jam. The men, reeling from their individual and social losses, are perfectly imperfect in their responses to new stressors while remaining open to changes. Circumstances aren't changing much in 1989, but the Disco Witches are vibrating to brighter days coming...if they can summon them up.

It's not like they're not optimists, all these people. You do not go to Fire Island to end it all from depression...as Joe discovers. They've been bitch-slapped by life as we gay men were all through the first ten or eleven years of that pandemic. It wasn't showing more than glimmers of being solved, so many many blessings went unremarked. I hope y'all can see, based on 2020's broader slap, how tough one had to be to keep it together.

Love did keep us together like the awful Captain and Tenille song smarmed. "There is no friendship without failure," a truism I read here, ran through my mind as Ronnie behaved like a dick to people who accept him as he is; then it really hit me: all the friends I've ever really loved have forgiven me my failings, and I theirs. Howie and Lenny, the titular Disco Witches, embody this ethos as they journey on past their disco heyday into a world they still love, but from the outside now. Protecting these new boys is easiest from the perimeter, guys. It's quite moving seen from my perspective, and will probably not be notable to thirtysomethings.

I'm very sure this book is not remotely heterosafe. There's a lot of just...not for y'all...information and opinion.

Babyqueers encouraged to check what the elders got up to. We weren't always old, my little chickadee. *nostalgic sigh* The read was fun and is a well-aimed summertime/Pride Month/beach read. Well done, and well worth your time and treasure for the fun it gives.

DOUBLE LIFE: Portrait of a Gay Marriage From Broadway to Hollywood, so heartening that these men loved so long and so well

DOUBLE LIFE: Portrait of a Gay Marriage From Broadway to Hollywood
ALAN SHAYNE & NORMAN SUNSHINE (foreword by Mike Nichols)
Open Road Media
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Gay marriage is at the forefront of America’s political battles

The human story at the center of this debate is told in Double Life, a dual memoir by a gay male couple in a fifty-plus year relationship. With high profiles in the entertainment, advertising, and art communities, the authors offer a virtual timeline of how gay relationships have gained acceptance in the last half-century. At the same time, they share inside stories from film, television, and media featuring the likes of Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, Barbra Streisand, Laurence Olivier, Truman Capote, Bette Davis, Robert Redford, Lee Radziwill, and Frances Lear.

Double Life is a trip through the entertainment world and a gay partnership in the latter half of the twentieth century. As more and more same sex couples find it possible to say “I do,” the book serves as an important document of how far we’ve come.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: Do I need to say that this is, by its nature, a cautionary tale about what's at stake if you and I do not resist, now and for the future I can see?

Well worth reading for those interested in the entertainment and art world from 1950 to 2010. Well worth reading for any queer guy who thinks "I can't have a solid committed love when the world is what it is." They did, and it was even more repressive then than it is now.

Well worth reading for anyone who enjoys hearing stories from happy people's lives.

Don't fail to listen to your old gay uncles as they tell you their stories. I promise you, from bitter experience, you will never regret listening anywhere near as sharply and painfully as you'll regret not asking.

A document of a time there are far too many in this vale of tears who want to drag us back into. Why is that bad? Read the book and find out, as well as have yourself a good long laugh...these old guys, they lived them a life. And they did it together. In spite of troubles, in spite of things not ever being perfect, they laughed at it all. Together.

Sixty years of life together. They met and set up home together when I was a toddler. How do people do that? Read the book and find out.

There's nothing for you in the past? Read this book...you'll find yourself everywhere. People in love are grappling with all the same questions of boundaries, appropriate expressions of feelings, what about jealousy, regardless of time and place. We're all very much the same. The variations we all have from one another are less fundamental than the haters will tell you they are.

This is a fun read by two men who, like any longterm couple, finish each others' thoughts, In this case they do it in alternating chapters. I think anyone who likes relationship stories, gossipy memoirs, or carefully non-prescriptive models for relationships will batten on this read.

THE BOOK OF DAVID, powerful evocation of the grief of losing your love

THE BOOK OF DAVID
JEAN-LUKE SWANEPOEL
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gut-punch record of what remains when an imperfect relationship between two men comes to an abrupt and tragic end. A tender exploration of longing, memory, and regret, and ultimately of love at its messiest.

When Leon Jonker meets David Hale, David is naked on a San Francisco beach. Six months later, they meet again and begin a relationship which will end with David’s death.

Leon, unsung novelist, retreats to South Africa and there attempts to write David out of his system. But falling in love with David—loud, vulgar, and uninhibited—was easier than falling out of love is proving to be. The firsts, Leon discovers, come to mind much easier than the resentments, the recriminations—the rest.

There are two sides to the story of every relationship, and somewhere in between lies the truth.

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

My Review: There aren't only two sides of any love relationship, there are multitudes...people who love you, hate you, all the points on the spectrum between those poles all invest in some version of the narrative you're living. I think this slender work of queer relationship fiction operates from that reality.

We spend time with the men as they collide on a nude beach in San Francisco (David's nude, so ipso facto it's a nude beach), Leon there from his native place in queer-unfriendly South Africa after his parents emigrate from there to California, and sparks fly. The lust is immediate; love comes (!) later. Or is it just agreeable sex between lonely men...is it love from Leon to David, from David to Leon, all these things in turn?

A short novel of a turbulent interconnection told by Leon mostly, with bits and bobs from David's journal. It's raw, it's honest, it's complex. I like all of those characteristics in my gay fiction. Us queer men are often flattened in affect to our genitals and organs. Thee guys aren't a standard couple, David being twenty years younger than Leon. This resonated with me. David coming from a very different background to Leon did as well.

Leon processes his grief at David's death...not a spoiler, it's there throughout the story...right in front of us, really truthfully and in the fits and starts I know so well from my own life lived in grief. We don't expect to be sent on a spiral into our past, but *wham* some invisible-to-others Thing happens and it's time to process the loss. Again.

Jean-Luke is a Goodreads connection of mine. This is the first of his three (through May 2025) books I've read. I feel sure I'll enjoy his other work because this slender book made such a good impression on me. I love being able to recommend books by people I've known for a good while; it's fun to say, in honesty, that someone I know (however slightly) has made a fine story out of the pain and loss of Life lived in love.

I will say that the dislikable Leon as the main narrator was not always agreeable, though I understand the choice. Even the spikiest hearts give love, it just looks a little weird sometimes. But a full fifth star was not possible on the back of that minor quibble.

IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN: A Novel, by France's Felice Picano

IN THE ABSENCE OF MEN: A Novel
PHILIPPE BESSON (tr. Frank Wynne)
Scribner (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of the international bestseller Lie with Me comes the tale of an affair between an aristocratic teenager and a soldier, as they discover the possibilities and perils of first love.

Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light. As he’s taken under Marcel’s wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about.

In this stunning portrait of young love, Philippe Besson depicts a young man who plays by his own rules and is not afraid of who he is. In the afternoons, Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city’s opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together. Their affair initiates them into a world of pleasure and shields them from the encroaching war. During this magical week away from the trenches, Vincent shelters Arthur with happiness, reassuring him, “Nothing will happen to you.”

Tender and harrowing, In the Absence of Men captures how exhilarating and heart-crushing it is to fall in love for the first time.

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

My Review: Tragedies hardest to endure, that produce the most emotional stress in me, are stories whose endings we know are coming while the characters do not, and we can do nothing to stop their devastation. This is that story writ tight and tart.

I'll say now that it takes a giant pair to use Marcel Proust...In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust!...as a character guiding and mentoring, in a platonic way, your PoV character. It could, you know from the off, go horribly wrong, end up derailing your story, cause the beau ideal of a reader for your story to scoff, nitpick, judge, and tut his way through it because—well—hubris much?

That was me as I approached the read. I left it without the tutting, but with reservations.

I loved the setting, Paris during the Great War as they knew it, and will always resonate favorably with first gay love stories. I'm glad Author Besson did not make Proust more than a controlling mentor, I think that would've overpowered any positive feelings anyone could've developed for the story. As it was, Marcel's controlling side wasn't foregrounded, but was there in story-appropriate places. It's up to you how you feel about an older man leading a teen through the terrifying, obscure, all-consuming first experience of Love by a man for a man. I know I wish to gawd he'd been there for me to consult and be guided by!

I think most of what takes place in the under two hundred pages of the story is defined by brokenness, by change that can't be slowed or processed therefore controlled, by the absolute certainty of war: nothing survives unscathed. Arthur, Vincent's governess's son, is the love of Vincent's young life. He is sexually attracted to Vincent, he is just enough older...and rougher...to make their love passionate and fulfilling, and he is away to war amid all the changes accumulating in their lives.

Herein my half-star off's origin. The wartime separation means a good deal of what's happening is epistolary. I'm sad to say that, despite the words being lovely and the device being central to the story's core of reality, this shift in mode brought the momentum of the read too far down. It is undeniable that this is a feature not a bug...how could a war-set love story not separate its lovers?...and represents the most natural and logical evolution of this pair's inevitable trajectory, but it still just stopped me in my tracks. Recalibrating my pace cost me some emotional investment in the men's love story.

The twist did not surprise me, but did affect me profoundly. Some sniffling and a modest dampening of my pillow might have occurred. I'll never tell.

I'm very, very glad I read the story; I think Translator Wynne rendered the French he found into seamlessly readable English that feels almost as though it's not translated; but there's that botched downshift from fifth to second that juddered me a hair too much, caused a bit of excessive mental transmission wear, for me to get all the way to five stars.

Definitely a read I recommend all the same.