40: A Novel, more than I expected and as much as I'd hoped for from Heathcock

40: A Novel
ALAN HEATHCOCK
MCD x FSG
$27.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author Alan Heathcock comes an American myth of the future: a vision of civil war, spectacle, and disaster of biblical proportions.

In a future America ravaged by natural disaster, pandemic, and political unrest, a fundamentalist faction emerges. As the Novae Terrae gain power, enticing civilians with bread and circuses, a civil war breaks out between its members and the US government.

Mazzy Goodwin, a young soldier, only wants to find her little sister, Ava Lynn. One day, she wakes in a bomb crater to find wings emerged from her back. Has she died? Been gifted wings by God? Undergone a military experiment?

The world sees a miracle. Mazzy is coaxed into seeing it as an opportunity: to become the angel-like figurehead of the revolution, in return for being reunited with her sister. Her journey leads her to New Los Angeles, where the Novae have set up the headquarters for their propaganda machine—right in the ruins of Hollywood. Aided by friends old and new, she must navigate a web of deceit while staying true to herself.

Told in sharp, haunting prose, as cinematic as it is precise, Alan Heathcock’s 40 is a dizzyingly fantastical novel about the dangers of blind faith, the temptation of spectacle, and the love of family. In a tale by turns mythic and tragic, one heroine must come to terms with the consequences of her decisions—and face the challenges of building a new world.

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

My Review: Regulars to this blog will recognize the name Alan Heathcock from my warbling my fool lungs out about his collection, Volt: Stories. One big reason for that is that Author Heathcock does not mess around when he makes his imagery work your brain:

"...I knew it'd come to this, you say. I knew I was right. The power of knowing the despair you ordered has finally come to pass makes you feel like a god. Let's be honest. It's what you want. You want this world to collapse. Want people to be every awful thing."

–and–

Grief was a demon of possession. When people talked of time healing wounds, they only meant that over time you become accustomed to that demon inside you, and what at first felt like an invasive presence, alien and nefarious, slowly became integrated into your being, the imp of sorrow crouched within you for the remainder of your days.

I don't know how much clearer the man can be than that. I can feel these words, see the world through their gravity lens, perceive the distorted light that comes from every other direction than the original one to form the ghost of the initial thought behind them.

Which is why I, devout atheist and committed anti-religion crusader, read a whole novel about a post-apocalyptic world run by and for evangelical evil-doers with hearts colder than emptiest space. Which is why I'm here telling you to go and get one of these books, these beautifully designed books (that jacket design!), or to pre-order the Kindle version so you'll open the device tomorrow morning and join Mazzy and Ava Lynn in the hellscape that Jo Sam the evangelist of doom designed and brought forth.

Betrayal is only the beginning of Mazzy's journey. It's certainly true that she's not a trusting, sunny-hearted soul for a single second of her life. Her sister Ava Lynn calls out the only tenderness she allows herself to externalize. The child, whose fate is not ever easy, confounds Mazzy in her extremely self-possessed certainty. Mazzy being incapable of a single sustained good mood for more than the absolute minimum of time, she envies Ava Lynn and vows to protect her. Which, this being a novel, means that Mazzy is unable to do so.

The amount of manipulative chicanery Mazzy experiences after she (unexpectedly and without external stimulus) becomes winged is, of course, the bulk of the novel's action. Her bewingèd state makes her very valuable to the evildoers around Jo Sam the evangelist, unsurprisingly, and so they use Ava Lynn to extort obedience out of Mazzy. The sheer outrage I experienced over this...! It's an effective tool, of course, the safety of one's child (dead mother) being hard coded into our protective circle by evolution. That it is never a violent threat, "we will hurt her," made me able to continue to read the story. They keep Mazzy from being with Ava Lynn to keep her working for their vile controlling cause.

The day dawns, of course, when Mazzy is no longer suitable for their use; a series of things occurs that, in several moments, made me think I was being played by Author Heathcock. It's a pleasure to report that he played fair...but the ending of the story is still a major surprise. Yes, I saw the twist coming, but I think that's to be expected. A truly successful twist, in this case, means the expected event occurs but something you-the-reader would've dismissed as improbable happens after. Job done, Author Heathcock.

I'll say that, after reading many, many chosen-one narratives and even more post-apocalyptic religion-used-for-evil tales over the past seven decades, I'm not sorry I read this one. I think it's well-made and well-written, I suspect it's something the author has allowed to simmer for a very long time before committing to words for others to read, and I'm pleased with the results he has achieved.

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS, bisexual love & happiness just beyond reach

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS
DEWAINE FARRIA
Syracuse University Press
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York's fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him.

Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don't often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community's rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it.

At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.

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

My Review: So, what does one do with a story that sets him reeling, causes hours-long meditation breaks, and ultimately makes him want to scream in outrage? How, on each and every page, something just...beats against the inside of his skull? No, not the racism.

I'm used to stories about how hard it is to be Black, but told in the SATANIC SECOND PERSON?! Okay, okay, not *all* of it's in the Satanic Second, but more than the occasional bit it...everything from Simon's PoV. (And why doesn't Michael have a voice? The bisexual and proud of nothing man could be a novel by himself!)

Oh my stars and garters, it took a lot out of me to finish this really well-structured, emotionally resonant as only the most complete and truthful ones are, novel of three brothers. Well, two brothers and a brother-friend who's essentially raised by their father. Quite, quite fraught, these relationships...and it shows in the way the narratives are created: Simon, the outsider, gets the Satanic Second Person narrative voice, which hurts me to see or say; Gabriel (every time I read his name I hear Blow Gabriel Blow, even before...events...transpire) the direct address of first person along with his beguiling love interest the Ukrainian arms dealer; Michael...a ghost, no direct narrative. It's a complicated schema (in the literary sense) that guides the reader's perceptions and responses to each character. It also reinforces the characters' own sense of themselves, with Simon being the perpetual outsider, only addressed never addressing, and Michael the unwanted Other, something he can never forgive the world for. He opts out...bullied bisexual different lad, it's the only way he can see to make himself the center of his own story. He has to vanish himself from the world he came from to present himself in his new milieu of the fashion and beauty industry. And how perfect is that, I ask you....

So the burden of this refrain is that fathering isn't parenting, and mothering can only get a boy so far. The people in your life, all of them, are part of your coming-to-be process for better or worse, and they're there because they could be, chose to be, and chose you. Again, for better or for worse. Simon, whose wildness is more a cosmic scream of agony, never stops, rarely slows, and always disappoints. Hey, it's an identity...and Michael, whose fade-away was so much less theatrical than Simon's, is the one who calls him to account. When their father, their shared father, dies, as we know our elders must, it's bog-standard typical of Simon that he doesn't show for the funeral of this man whose presence in his life was an anchor, a stability that he had to reject to bring into the open the rejection he feels he must deserve. "He was your father too. Closest thing you had. But fatherhood doesn’t mean shit to you, does it?" says Michael, invisible gone-away Michael, to him, hitting the one sore spot that only your real family can reach.

The blow lands; the wound is mortal; but to what, remains the question.

The read is part of the Syracuse University program called the "Veterans Writing Award sponsored by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Syracuse University Press." Longer-term readers will remember my review of Thomas Bardenwerper's Mona Passage, also a winner of this prize, and see the thread that connects them: I like reading about people not like me, and not like me in positive, interesting ways. Author Farria writes as a veteran (as I am not) and about bisexual Black men, absolute hen's teeth in the QUILTBAG representation algorithm. Bisexual when unmodified by "man/male/men" is now meant to be read as "woman." Or so it seems in the marketing done to the QUILTBAGgers. I am all for that changing to include the bisexual men of our various overlapping communities.

What made this novel such a good read for me was that acknowledgment that we, the QUILTBAG folk, exist in all families, take up space that we deserve and we are entitled to, and that goes for every family everywhere. It's telling that Michael's bullying drives him away; it's telling that he is the only one to have the standing to call out Simon, the man mired in a sense of himself as unworthy, because Michael has been sent that message as well. It's the way Author Farria makes all those pieces come together that gives me such a vivid and personal sense of this read's message of inclusiveness. It's a screwed up family that produced Simon, Michael, and Gabriel, but it's a family and it is a powerful one to make men whose monstrous sadness and pain didn't destroy them. Take a minute...think about your own life...what were the before-and-afters there? These three men, brothers, are bound by that before-and-after that came long before the showy, flashy one.

Definitely a talented writer's first novel. May many more follow it.

NIGHTCRAWLING, new voice in fiction from Oakland (!)

NIGHTCRAWLING
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available today

Now an Oprah Magazine Favorite Book Of 2022!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES WRITER TO WATCH - A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--the debut of a blazingly original voice that "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, best-selling author of There There)

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.

One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

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

My Review: Nineteen! NINETEEN!! Author Mottley is all of nineteen, twenty minus one. And she's written this amazing, full-throated roar of defiance in the face of the overwhelming, outrageously powerful white hegemony that controls Oakland and California as a whole. I am revolted that this story flowed as naturally as a river does to the sea out of Leila Mottley, but it did and readers should bear witness with her as Kiara, at a revoltingly early age, learns that men will pay her to use her body for their pleasure.

It's a painful awakening. It's a godsend of money. It's a trap, it's baited with the exact things Kiara needs to walk into the trap, and it's painfully obvious that her world is over. It's a new world entirely, now that she's the one paying the rent.

I will say that, to the sensitive fleurs among us, this story will not go down well. It's honest, it's angry, it takes nothing from you and gives everything to you, and it's a gift so bitter that it makes you wish you hadn't opened it because now you know and can't pretend you don't.

We're always trying to own men we don't got no control of. I'm tired of it. Tired of having to be out here thinking about all these people, all these things to keep me alive, keep them alive. I don't got no air left for none of it. Maybe {her frenemy} is right, it's time to let go, to let one of them take over, take care of me. But I can't stop thinking about {the} call, if {her brother} is alright, if maybe he's got enough money to help us out.

In the middle of a dreary afternoon spent doing something horribly hard, watching her mother as she dies, avoiding a gang of teens who could easily have decided she was a target, riding a bus on a hot afternoon and getting into her rent-due apartment...she wonders how she can help her older brother. Because now, next to making the rent, she's got a much, much bigger problem: How to keep that brother alive. Literally not-room-temperature alive.

That {bad moment from childhood}'s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn't know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I'm looking back and there's a fork on the ground, another way.

That ought to ring a bell in us all. If you're an adult, you most likely found yourself nodding along and recognizing those emotions. You'll likely recognize the others about regrets and about consequences and about prices you can't pay to avoid. This is that kind of a story, it's that kind of a world that Kiara and her wide found family live in. And those who make it out? They change addresses. They can't really change when so much around doesn't. This life is what you make of it, true, but is your inward being as malleable as all that?

What makes me so happy is that Author Mottley is here, is the one telling the story to my white-person eyes. I'm so happy that someone in publishing saw this manuscript, heard this rage-filled, sorrow-drenched scream of pain and said, "there's a proud, fine writer being born here, let me put the privilege and prestige of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., behind it and make people listen." So, listen: If you're wondering if this isn't more misery porn, or worse, disaster tourism, then I'm going to bring it to you fresh, this ain't that. (My Texas bleeds through when I want to make sure y'all're listening.)

When I was in the agenting business many long yars ago, an ancestor of this story came across my desk. I loved it. I loved its vernacular honesty and I loved its visceral reality. I wanted to make people read it...stop them in the halls of our building and say "just this bit right here! you'll love it!" and I was talked out of it. See, I'm white, and male, and even then that meant my privilege wasn't going to sail that beautifully loud sound-cloud out onto the lakes of white-people culture. Publishing might be doing better, but it's still the world where I was told to my face by an editor about a non-fiction book by and about African-Americans (as the polite term was then) I wanted her to buy, "who will buy it? Black people don't read."

Thirty years on I'm still appalled by that memory.

And thus it's extra delightful to me that I'm reading this auspicious debut from a young Black creator with the colophon of a very, very distinguished house that made its cultural capital a century ago by taking just these sorts of chances. (Joseph Hergesheimer won't mean much to most of y'all, but he was quite a noise on the 1917 Knopf list....) I couldn't do it; someone could, though, and that it's taken this long to make the waves it's already making (LitHub loves it, forevermore! That's Establishment imprimatur enough right there!) is, well, for me personally both validating and frustrating. I wish I'd done it; I'm thrilled it's been done.

Don't deny yourself this treat. I can't say I liked Look Homeward, Angel a whole lot, but it was a clarion call, a loud voice in full cry, saying, "there's a new way to do this!" That's what Nightcrawling is, that loud voice. Spend some extra time with her and learn what will make you sad to know.

HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL, trigger warning for laughter, joy, middle finger for toxic masculinity

HIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL
EDGAR GOMEZ
Soft Skull Press
$16.95 trade paper, available now

WINNER OF THE 2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Gomez’s witty memoir follows a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing his gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from his uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who helped him redefine pride.

I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others.

A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.”

With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

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

My Review: What makes a memoir worth reading? This is not an idle question: I don't read many memoirs because, when I ask myself what makes *this* memoir worth expending some of my ever-shrinking supply of eyeblinks on, the answer is "not this" more often than not. Coming-of-age novels get the same call and readerly response. I, too, was a tacky young slut...do I need to know how that felt to you?

Turns out I do. This time.

We meet young Edgar in the back seat of a taxi in Nicaragua, riding along to wave his mother goodbye as she flies back to Orlando, where he is from. He's thirteen. He's clearly figured out he's queer, even if the details are...a bit hazy. But what isn't hazy, at all, is the rage and loathing that "being queer" will subject the young man to, so he does what so many do: He shuts himself, his full authentic real self, into a sealed, invisible space and just powers through whatever bullshit awaits him.

Think about that. Just stop posturing and sit with the reality that you, either through homophobic action or indifferent inaction, are requiring children, teenagers, vulnerable dependents unable to save themselves, to endure the mental-health-destroying reality of sealing away a part of themselves simply in order to survive in this world they did not make. (Yes, you did and do make the world, you adult about to click away, every time you say or silent agree with some asshole's homophobic crap.)

Edgar Gomez survived by making his sealed prison an egg, a seed, where his flamboyantly feathered and exuberantly sexual self could gestate and form. How many whose strength isn't as adamantine as his fail at this? What's the suicide rate among teens? Those are closely linked. And thankfully less often, what are the rates at which the fagbashing culture produces mass murderers? Omar Mateen? He could have, given a different amount of strength, been Edgar Gomez. The similarities between the upbringings of the two disturbs Gomez, he says explicitly.

About explicitness...the title of this memoir probably makes many of y'all wince and cringe. Now...imagine that title is instead A DIAGNOSIS and applies to you when you seek PReP meds like Truvada, potentially life-saving means of not contracting HIV. The way not to die? Be officially sick...this is the world that laughing at fag jokes and failing to challenge laws that don't apply to you because you don't much like the people they *do* apply to leads to. Failing to vote for politicians whose mandate included equal civil rights for all has led us to a place where court-mandated rights are under threat because the scumbags have finally got their pet judges, the ones who let idiotic laws like the Texas Bounty Hunter Enabling one stand, onto the Supreme Court. This is the world that a title like this one, its in-your-face "this is my reality and you no longer get to pretend you didn't know" like some 1930s German, has urgency and necessity multiplying the force of its legitimate demand for your eyeblinks and dollars.

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, a Goodreads group-read that really rang me like a bell

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST
STUART NEVILLE
Soho Crime
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sooner or later, everybody pays.

Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary contract killer, is haunted by the ghosts of the 12 people he has slaughtered. Every night, on the point of losing his mind, he drowns their screams in drink. His solution is to kill those who engineered their deaths.

From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all are called to account. But when Fegan's vendetta threatens to derail a hard-won truce and destabilise the government, old comrades and enemies alike want him dead.

Winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Thriller.

My Review: First, read this:

“Hate's a terrible thing. It's a wasteful, stupid emotion. You can hate someone with all your heart, but it'll never do them a bit of harm. The only person it hurts is you. You can spend your days hating, letting it eat away at you, and the person you hate will go on living just the same. So what's the point?”

That's the logical, and irrefutable, argument against hate. But there's no chance humans will give up hating. It's an addictive drug, a high that can only be bested by the Absolute Assurance that YOU ARE RIGHT, They are Wrong, and therefore they deserve _____. Ireland's been in the toils of both, Hate and Rightness, for centuries. They've made it the basis for their identity as a nation. It ain't goin' nowhere.

That grim prognostication delivered, the story we're told in this (debut!) novel is based around a single person's efforts to mitigate the toll Hate takes on society as a whole. That he's chosen, um, a counter-productive solution to the problem is...kind of the core of the read. The way there's no out for a person whose persona is warped by war, by violent and utterly anti-social normative training, whose core is eaten out to nothingness by hatred. That is who such a one will be always. And Gerry Fegan is a stone-cold killer, a person whose life is without the sense of remorse that a normal person would have for depriving others of their entire futures.

Which is why they haunt him. Their ghosts won't let him sleep, or think, or be normal.

Discussions of Gerry's ghosts' reality are circular. Real? Imaginary? Guilt phantasms? Doesn't matter. Gerry is the person he's been made into. The ghosts demand something be done to balance the scales of their lost futures. And Gerry being their instrument means that something will be murderous.

This is a huge problem for the world. Men and women like Gerry exist all over the globe, and they represent a ticking time-bomb of violence and chaos in every place they exist. Conflicts based on such idiotic things as religion and ethnicity and national identity are going to sink any "peace process" that ever gets past the hot-air stage. People like these need their Hate-hit to feel good. Feeling good, about yourself, about your superior place in the world, is fundamental to humans' ability to thrive. In far too many cases, that represents itself as Hate for Others. Nothing effective has ever been done about that...can anything effective ever be done about it? Don't look at Ireland. It's a pink-skinned Rwanda.

And this novel, this brilliant noir tale of revenge if not exactly redemption, brings that to its...conclusion is the wrong word. "Stopping place" in the sense of "the buck stops here" is permaybehaps closer. The man Gerry, expiating his sins, commits others...but do they count as sins? They're balancing scales, not to say that the choice of method is one I approve of. But he's made some attempt to redress the vile acts he's committed. By committing others.

The Mahatma was correct. The world continues to ignore him, and the cycle of violence continues to spiral ever downward into chaos.

Finally, let me say that this book's the first in a series called "Jack Lennon Investigations." This will bumfuzzle most readers. "Who the hell's Jack Lennon?" I hear you ask. Well...don't worry your pretty little head about it is my response. Read Collusion and don't fuss. It's well worth your eyeblinks, just as this delight of a violent, nihilistic noir read is.

POWER BORN OF DREAMS: My Story is Palestine, a graphic novel of the bitterness of Home-lessness

POWER BORN OF DREAMS: My Story is Palestine
MOHAMMED SABAANEH
Street Noise Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: What does freedom look like from inside an Israeli prison?

A bird perches on the cell window and offers a deal: “You bring the pencil, and I will bring the stories,” stories of family, of community, of Gaza, of the West Bank, of Jerusalem, of Palestine. The two collect threads of memory and intergenerational trauma from ongoing settler-colonialism. Helping us to see that the prison is much larger than a building, far wider than a cell; it stretches through towns and villages, past military checkpoints and borders. But hope and solidarity can stretch farther, deeper, once strength is drawn of stories and power is born of dreams. Translating headlines into authentic lived experiences, these stories come to life in the striking linocut artwork of Mohammad Sabaaneh, helping us to see Palestinians not as political symbols, but as people.

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

My Review: The author/artist, whose lived experience this graphic novel is born out of, made a beautiful work of art out of suffering.

The linocuts used to create the illustrations are truly brutal, absolutely unsparingly blocky and confining, and that is the essence of the story he is telling us in his words and images. It's my worst nightmare, claustrophobia, made in art. There's nothing worse than the feeling of being TRAPPED, of having no agency in the workings of your own world...you exist that way, you don't live. In the beginning of the book, you're not told what happened to bring the author/artist into an Israeli prison. We're just...in there. We are, like him, forced to experience imprisonment, though we're unaware of why and presumably he is...there's a line that a guard shouts at him about wanting to become a martyr, so I can deduce from that there is a violent act in the man's past. Or the planning of one, or just the suspicion of the planning of one...societies that exist inside a conflict paradigm are noticeably more paranoid than ones that don't.

The flights of the bird the author/artist creates to make the stories of others come alive are beautifully imagined. The linocut technique carries through the sense of enclosure, of stasis within a field; the bird's flights aren't escapes but reminders of the nature of imprisonment, confinement. It is this essential feature of the story that I found least convincing, though. I wasn't sold on the narrative device providing an urgently needed contrast to the overall looming, enclosed tone of the book.

The awful entanglement of the body in the emotional and mental space of imprisonment, confinement, comes through more clearly than ever as the author presents us with the stories of other Palestinians, those not imprisoned with him, as they navigate the awfulness of never being allowed a sense of Home or even of safety in this place they, and their ancestors before them, once were masters of their own fates within.

The entire experience of this artwork, this passionately lived experience of being disempowered, unhomed, dehumanized for wanting what someone else has simply...taken...as their right, their just compensation for a world that you didn't agree with or agree to be identified with's abuse of them...there is no right? There is no Right? Who says? Why do you say there's no solution, because you don't want the one the other side wants? Then when will stories like this one ever cease? Can they ever become history, when they aren't even acknowledged as History?

This Yuletide, pick up a piece of Art, a fragment of story, that you really don't know how much you don't know about. A book like this, with its personal tales as well as a more scholarly, factual end-story, will give you the personal perspective of people you don't know or know about.

Then realize: The issues in this book are not solely Over There. They apply right here on your doorstep. So take a moment to recognize and realize that everything you possess, everything you take for granted, has a cost. And not solely to you.

FOUR STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES NOVELLAS, New York Times bestselling novelist delivers scares galore

FOUR GAY BDSM THRILLERS, the "Power Exchange" series by A.J. Rose

POWER EXCHANGE
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #1)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the moment Detective Gavin DeGrassi steps into the world of BDSM to solve the brutal slaying of Dom George Kaiser, his course is not his own. Mesmerized by the context in which the victim lived and the images seared into his soul, Gavin has to find a way to navigate these unknown waters. With his personal life in upheaval due to a marital split, and his professional life uncertain with the assignment of a new partner, Gavin needs all the help he can get understanding the case.

Enter Ben Haverson, a psychologist and a well known Dom. With Ben’s help as a consultant on the case and attention to Gavin himself, Gavin delves deeper than he ever thought he would into the world of restraints and paddles. Forced to take a closer look at himself, his true nature, and his innermost desires, Gavin has a choice: keep the fear of submitting at bay, or dive in and solve the case with the knowledge he gains? When another victim is discovered, Gavin’s choice is made for him, and he’s pulled headlong into the deepest, most emotional journey of his life.

Unfortunately for him and Ben, a killer has noticed, has taken stock, and has set his sights on the D/s pair. Can Gavin outwit him, or will his first exchange of power be his last?

My Review: Everything that celebration of abuse and belittlement Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't in terms of the BDSM lifestyle. Realistic depiction of how contracts between Dom and sub work, and how very deep a D/s bond becomes in a very short time. It's amazing what committing to eliminating bullshit and nonsense does for a relationship. The sex is really better than the mystery. Not that I'm complaining. That was one fine cherry-popping, A. J. Rose, mighty mighty fine.

The mystery part wasn't deft. Gavin DeGrassi isn't detecting particularly well, given some very very basic events he seems simply not to have noticed. In fact, I spent more than a few minutes screaming at the frequently dumb as a box of rocks Gary Stu "detective" to act like he earned his badge and didn't simply find it in a box of Cracker Jacks....

I could have lived happily without chapter 13 being *quite* so intense. Going over the top here was skating on a razor's edge of being torture porn. Be aware: This is rape, this is abuse.

I picked up the next three in the series after Gavin's Dom said this:

“Gavin, we're going to grow old together, and whether you pick up a gardening hobby, or learn to make you won sushi, or even decide to learn an instrument, I will be right there with you, growing with you. We'll share our whole lives, our quirks and bad habits. It's not just learning your past and who you are today; its getting to see who you'll become tomorrow. I want to be there for that.”

Really, what more can one ask of a gay-themed series than to have the best of us mirrored in the world that even members of our own community regard with alarm.

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

SAFEWORD
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #2)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everywhere Detective Gavin DeGrassi looks he’s reminded of his attack by the Breath Play Killer. It’s in the house he lives in with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson. It’s in the sympathetic yet pitying looks he receives from his fellow detectives when he returns to the force after a year-long hiatus. It’s in the suffocating coddling of his entire family, and the relentless reporter demanding an exclusive of his ordeal.

Most of all, it’s in his lack of submission to Ben, who isn’t convinced Gavin’s recovered enough to trust the power exchange between them.
The miraculous recovery of two teen boys from a twisted kidnapper gives him heart, and Gavin's determined to prove he can handle anything despite increasing strain between him and Ben, painful nightmares, and panic when anyone touches him.

But his next case is too close for comfort: a friend and colleague found raped and murdered in a fate chillingly similar to what could have been his own, and this killer isn’t stopping with one cop. As the body count rises and taunting souvenirs are being hand-delivered to Gavin, he faces a frustrating lack of leads, a crushing need to prove himself, and a sinking suspicion the imprisoned kidnapper’s reach is further than originally thought. A miasma of uncertainty and fear threaten to suffocate him when he asks a question with which he’s overwhelmingly familiar: what happens when a victim is pushed too far?

My Review: Wow, what a ride. What an amazing adrenaline rush of an ending. What can Rose do to top this one? I'll tell you below.

So, after I found out about Consent, let me revisit this book and explain why it is my personal favorite of the books in the series to date.

The end of Power Exchange was, to put it mildly, a horrific test of the men's strength and commitment. The awfulness of the events that Ben and Gavin endured can't be overstated. The impact of the extreme publicity surrounding the events can't be overstated. These two men were traumatized physically, psychologically, and publicly. In Consent, their violated beings are shown in the process of healing. Their family relationships are shown in all their realistic upheaval and flux. The source of their identity as a couple, Gavin's submission to Ben's Domination of his body and his spirit, is fractured and despite their mutual and deep desire to recover that connection, they aren't able to...but they are not either one vaguely in the mood to give up trying.

Ben loves Gavin, Gavin loves Ben. This is the given point from which this story operates. Nothing that has happened has changed them so much that the facts aren't true. But then there is the other stuff lying between them in huge mounds of rubble and vast slicks of toxic waste. The trust issues that follow in the wake of being raped. The fears of inadequacy in the face of your beloved partner's pain, which you can't fix. The awful moment when your own broken inner self seems to be too much for your partner to handle, so you feel you *should* release them from your further fulfilling your needs.

"You still need someone to take control sometimes, but now giving that control unbalances you. Believe me, I understand. I may not feel exactly the same, but I do understand."

"Do you?" I pulled back to look at him. "Does it bother you that I can't seem to trust anyone, even you?"

–and–

"You are the only one I want, sub or not, fucked in the head or whole. This last year, with you, I've woken up inside. I used to think it was the thrill of the whip, of seeing someone on his knees for me, or the heat of a freshly reddened ass that made me feel alive. Getting someone to fly with me, taking submission for the gift it is--that's a heady thing. It makes my nerves sing and my heart beat fast. Gets me hard and I feel like I can do anything. And that feeling is a pittance compared to being with you."

And then the sense of the thing reasserts itself: NO. NOT A DAMN CHANCE. Ben and Gavin each reach this awful precipice and look into the abyss of aloneness after each man finally discovers himself, his best self, in the other man's eyes. They say no, they grab hold of each other and they move together as far away as they can from that horrible annihilating aloneness.

And they do so while solving a horrible crime and rescuing innocent young men from vile servitude. They don't come out of this case unscathed but they come out changed for the better, is also a great deal sadder.

Far and away the best of the series to date.

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

CONSENT
A.J. ROSE
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cole, what’s wrong?

Former detective Gavin DeGrassi likes his new life and his job as a university professor, molding the minds of the next generation of law enforcement. It keeps him in the field he loves, but out of the media and out of the danger he seems to draw. He’s settled and happy with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson.

It’s Myah.

Until a middle of the night phone call from his brother, Cole, whose desperation and fear yank him back into the world of criminals and countdowns. Only this time, the stakes are much higher.

She’s missing.

Detective Myah Hayes, Gavin’s sister-in-law and former partner, has a past of her own, one that has returned to claim her. With only their instincts and the help of a rogue CSI, Gavin, Ben, and Cole will do whatever it takes to find Myah, following a flimsy trail of evidence to Chicago, where all is not what it seems—dirty cops, moral pimps, and a nest of snakes who call themselves businessmen.

They’re on a collision course with the worst of humanity, and more than Myah’s life is caught in the vortex. Can they find her, and if they do, will there be anything left to save?

Warning: contains scenes of rape and graphic violence and may not be suitable for sensitive readers. Discretion advised.

My Review: I will keep this short and simple: Author Rose, you have disappointed me. Chapter 25 was unnecessary and prurient, but my disappointment stems from the cheap and shoddy trick it represents on your delighted and dedicated readers. I am most definitely one of them.

I intend this as a compliment: There is no way I would ever have known from the way you wrote Gavin and Ben's relationship what gender you are IRL. On balance I would've expected you to be male, given the startling depth of your characters's physiological responses and the psychology before and behind them. But truly the way you've written the men's characters is simply good writing, something either gender can create if a given level of talent is present.

That makes the sting of being let down so forcefully by the torture porn in chapter 25 so much worse. It made the unpleasant shock of that unnecessary death much less effective as a surprise, a gut-punch, as it was meant to be. And Myah's later torture after the failed escape attempt was also rendered less effective as the horrifying gut-punch it truly was.

Had I edited this book, I would've made the following observation: This number of words would be better spent throughout the book humanizing Ben, Cole, and the elder DeGrassis via phone calls or something.

I will, of course, rush right out to read the fourth entry in this series because the deep and velvety pleasure of seeing myself (idealized, of course) in Ben is too satisfying to deny myself.

"But I’m not through with you, Gavin DeGrassi. I have plans to redden that ass and mark your skin. There are many more orgasms to deny you, and butt plugs to make you wear in public. D-rings I want to add to your corsets, since it’s clear you need restraining again. I haven’t bought our cabin in Colorado for our retirement. We haven’t been to the beach together. I want to go abroad with you. I haven’t picked out the porch swing we’re going to sit on when we’re eighty and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off our lawn. I want a collar around your throat, and a ring on your left hand. I have plans for us, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see those plans through.”

He's the Dom that many subs crave, and seldom find: The one who loves you and needs to show you that you're his and no one else's. Ben needs Gavin as much as Gavin needs Ben: “I've seen the way you are together. He's your protector, and you're his purpose. He's your glue and you're his art.” That's the best of the D/s world. I need to go back there, and these books do that for me. But I will pick the book up with a heretofore absent wariness.

That hurts like fuck to say.

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

RESTRAINT
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #4)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Who brings a Glock on a honeymoon?

Not retired detective Gavin DeGrassi. When his husband Ben asks who he plans to shoot, Gavin has no answer. They’re spending three weeks in Ben’s family cabin near Seattle, not chasing down bad guys. Or are they?

Ben finds evidence the car accident that claimed his parents’ lives more than fifteen years ago was not so accidental. To avenge the Haversons, Gavin dusts off his detective skills and unknowingly paints a target on their backs. Suddenly, Ben is the prime suspect in a crime and the message couldn’t be clearer: drop the investigation or suffer untold consequences.

Gavin will stop at nothing to ensure Ben’s safety and bring the Haversons’ killers to justice, but without help, they’re sitting ducks. Gavin must make unlikely allies in his quest to clear Ben’s name and stop a ruthless crime syndicate. But with his loyalties divided, how far is too far in his quest for justice?

My Review: One entire star off for twelve (12) instances of the w-verb. Seriously. Using any out-of-the-ordinary word twelve times in your book should be a red flag for an author. What am I shorthanding here? Why does this particular word need to be in my book this many times? Y'all'd agree with me if it was "coddiwomple" or "absquatulate" you know you would. "Wink" *shudder* is just as uncommon a word in every other branch of fiction writing beyond MM romance.

Anyway.

The story here is what happens when Ben, our Dom, goes back to his childhood summer home with Gavin, his sub, to celebrate their honeymoon. It's a delightful idea, the men going to gorgeous Seattle for some smexytimes; but this isn't to be. The smexytimes are really not the point. And that's a wonderful thing.

Seriously! It is!

The relationship between partners in a D/s situation matures with the parties involved as it does in all long-term relationships. With that maturity comes the change of sex life. Not lessening. Not death. Just change. In Ben and Gavin's relationship, their routinizing of D/s doesn't require them to compulsively repeat the same acts. They move deeper into each others' cores and negotiate the introduction of far more intimate and demanding behaviors. It is very much one of my pleasures in reading this series to enjoy this evolution of the characters' interactions.

Feelings of disquiet, anger, or aggressiveness, he considered big weaknesses in a Dom and particularly in himself. Funny opinion for a psychologist to have, but we’d been through this in therapy.
–and–
I leaned into his warmth, my heart fluttering against my ribcage like a murder of crows taking flight.

Being a series novel, there are cameos by characters we've met before; the fact that the entire DeGrassi clan is having Thanksgiving back in St. Louis without the men is played off well. And Gavin's call to a St. Louis source for some crucial help is answered, despite the risk to his helper.

“Why are you letting Gavin fight your battles for you? Can’t bring yourself to do it alone? It’s clear he has a brain, but he’s so blinded by devotion to you that he, a retired detective, is turning criminal to do your bidding, to set your mind at ease about Mommy and Daddy’s deaths. They’re dead. This revenge, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, won’t bring them back. But you have a living, breathing, committed man by your side, and you’re apparently fine if he goes to prison for you. That’s fucked up.”

I like the honesty I see about D/s relationships in the series. It's hard for Ben to give up control; it's hard for him to feel helpless or actually useless in any situation where his earthly treasure, Gavin, is threatened. Every good Dom knows that horrible reality and, if we're at all honest, the creeping fear that our treasured sub will realize "hey! I don't need him after all!" and walk away. Ah, the joys of anxiety! All humans suffer from it. And so very few of us do the simple, smart thing and open up to our most trusted, most beloved partners. How very much pain would be mitigated or even disappeared by this simple, monumental, impossible act!

But such are the musings of one with no dog in this fight anymore. In common with all readers, I use books to teach me the truths I refused to accept from reality. Reading all four books in this series makes me long for a second chance to be young...as do all the other books I read. A joyous ache, a happy poignance, a learnèd innocence. How I pity those who aren't fellow addicts.

THE TURNERS, a three-book gay romance series from Cat Sebastian

THE SOLDIER'S SCOUNDREL
CAT SEBASTIAN (The Turners #1)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A scoundrel who lives in the shadows

Jack Turner grew up in the darkness of London's slums, born into a life of crime and willing to do anything to keep his belly full and his siblings safe. Now he uses the tricks and schemes of the underworld to help those who need the kind of assistance only a scoundrel can provide. His distrust of the nobility runs deep and his services do not extend to the gorgeous high-born soldier who personifies everything Jack will never be.

A soldier untarnished by vice

After the chaos of war, Oliver Rivington craves the safe predictability of a gentleman's life-one that doesn't include sparring with a ne'er-do-well who flouts the law at every turn. But Jack tempts Oliver like no other man has before. Soon his yearning for the unapologetic criminal is only matched by Jack's pleasure in watching his genteel polish crumble every time they're together.

Two men only meant for each other

My Review: First, read this:

Jack had relied utterly on {Oliver} for all things related to navigation—the geography of the north of England was nothing more than an ominous question mark to Jack. This morning, as plain as day, he had seen mountains to the west, mountains that he was certain had no business being in England at all, and yet there they were, which only went to show how completely unreliable everything became the farther one got from London.
–and–
When Oliver gently bit Jack’s earlobe, all those worries scattered like spiders, retreating to the dark and safe corners of Jack’s mind.
–and–
{Jack} said “breeding” like someone would say “syphilis” or “bedbugs.”

The thing about privilege is, when you're born to it, it's a bit...restrictive. There are codes. Rules. Norms. Small price to pay for luxury, grumble those without it. Yeah? You try it, sneer those with it.

Honor was a luxury item, like hair pomade and snuff. Its only purpose was to show the world that you could afford to be impractical, that you had enough money to behave in a way that was compatible with some ludicrous code instead of acting out of self-preservation like the rest of humanity.

So Oliver, privileged by his parentage and his recent Napoleonic-Wars service and injury, is restless back in England. Accidentally he discovers his sister has paid a considerable sum to a private investigator, Jack, and decides he wants to know the whys and wherefores. There are prices to pay for losing one's ignorance...

“No,” Jack said after a moment. “That is not how it works. With all due respect,” he remarked, managing to convey no respect whatsoever, “you wouldn’t know whether or not he was decent. You couldn’t, in fact. You play cards with him, maybe drink or make idle conversation. He has no power over you to be anything other than decent. It’s his wife and servants who know the truth. You would likely have thought your brother-in-law a decent fellow had you met him at your club.”

Jack, well, he doesn't play even when it's playtime. Jack lives his life. There's no room in it for an overbred underdone scion of the nobility he so despises. Until, of course, Oliver:

{Oliver} seemed unperturbed by Jack’s loss of temper. He rubbed has hand along his jaw. “In that case, we could pretend to be cousins by marriage. And then we can both act appalled by the connection.”

Jack laughed, feeling his anger dissipate.”
–and–
“Hear me now, Oliver Rivington. You will not use gestures with me.”

The humor of the situation, a gap in social class being made as nothing when love enters the frame, the stakes of the men's mutual pursuit of a miscreant...all worked for me largely because Author Cat writes amusing and witty lines the way I sweat, effortlessly and profusely. I've tried to sample the typical lines, the ones that aren't set-pieces, as well as those that are. The story will stand or fall on your opinion of the synopsis. The writing, you've seen, is what will make your experience memorable for good or ill.

I'm very much on the "good" side, and I hope you'll be as well.

An almost-perfect score, a quarter-star off for a few mondegreens, but mostly BECAUSE THERE WAS NOT ONE SINGLE SOLITARY AWFUL GHASTLY WINK.

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

THE LAWRENCE BROWNE AFFAIR
CAT SEBASTIAN (The Turners #2)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: An earl hiding from his future . . .

Lawrence Browne, the Earl of Radnor, is mad. At least, that’s what he and most of the village believes. A brilliant scientist, he hides himself away in his family’s crumbling estate, unwilling to venture into the outside world. When an annoyingly handsome man arrives at Penkellis, claiming to be Lawrence’s new secretary, his carefully planned world is turned upside down.

A swindler haunted by his past . . .

Georgie Turner has made his life pretending to be anyone but himself. A swindler and con man, he can slip into an identity faster than he can change clothes. But when his long-dead conscience resurrects and a dangerous associate is out for blood, Georgie escapes to the wilds of Cornwall. Pretending to be a secretary should be easy, but he doesn’t expect that the only madness he finds is the one he has for the gorgeous earl.

Can they find forever in the wreckage of their lives?

Challenging each other at every turn, the two men soon give into the desire that threatens to overwhelm them. But with one man convinced he is at the very brink of madness and the other hiding his real identity, only true love can make this an affair to remember.

My Review: First, read this:

“You have a library of hundreds—if not thousands—of books downstairs, and you let them rot.” So it was a book Turner was waving about, brandishing like a weapon. “Do you have any idea what that does to any person of sense? It’s obscene, I tell you.”
–and–
He ruffled feathers without even knowing he had encountered a bird.
–and–
He had never understood what use fine feelings were to a man who was half-starved.

But now he thought he did.

There just isn't a more fun way to spend a couple of hours than reading well-crafted unserious stories designed to make you smile. Georgie and Lawrence are perfectly matched opposites. A lower-class con-man must be a social creature or fail and be punished by draconian laws. No one is ever going to tell an aristocrat he's wrong and bad for being "on the spectrum" as we say in the twenty-first century. Bring the two together and let the author's wit and cleverness grease the rails and bring the narrative train to full speed.

I love the way Author Cat takes very real issues, such as the social isolation of those on the spectrum, and weaves serious points into her farrago-of-nonsense stories. (I mean that in a *good* way! I need nonsense!) I am, in this case, not quite as rapturous as usual only because I felt it was anachrinistic for Georgie to respond so, well, empathetically to Lawrence. It's not impossible! I do fully realize it's not as though empathy only showed its face, shyly and reluctantly, in this century. (And we could use a LOT more of it, come to that.) But it was just a little jangling bell, a thready response up that one sneaky synapse...this is a bridge too far, even in my willing suspension of disbelief that two men—and one an aristocrat!—would be left alone to do as they liked when one is clearly not "right"...fired and fired.

You know what? Screw all that analytical crud. Get this book, read the series, let your mind take a vacation from the darkening edges of our social contract's shredding. Georgie Turner and Lawrence Browne deserve to live their happily-ever-after and you deserve to have it be in your brain.

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

THE RUIN OF A RAKE
CAT SEBASTIAN (The Turners #3)
Avon Impulse
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rogue. Libertine. Rake. Lord Courtenay has been called many things and has never much cared. But after the publication of a salacious novel supposedly based on his exploits, he finds himself shunned from society. Unable to see his nephew, he is willing to do anything to improve his reputation, even if that means spending time with the most proper man in London.

Julian Medlock has spent years becoming the epitome of correct behavior. As far as he cares, if Courtenay finds himself in hot water, it’s his own fault for behaving so badly—and being so blasted irresistible. But when Julian’s sister asks him to rehabilitate Courtenay’s image, Julian is forced to spend time with the man he loathes—and lusts after—most.

As Courtenay begins to yearn for a love he fears he doesn’t deserve, Julian starts to understand how desire can drive a man to abandon all sense of propriety. But he has secrets he’s determined to keep, because if the truth came out, it would ruin everyone he loves. Together, they must decide what they’re willing to risk for love.

My Review: It's proving difficult for me to arrange my impressions into a shape more useful than "me likee" because I'm so conflicted by Julian Medlock's yuck-ick-ptui personality. A classic climber. Those people annoy me, as in "die monster die" annoy.

Every breath brought him into acute danger of one of his limbs meeting one of Courtenay’s. And that was a fate he ardently hoped would not come to pass, for reasons he chose not to dwell on.
–and–
He had arrived where he was by making a study of how people responded to everything he did, by calibrating his every decision—from the cut of his coat to the company he kept—to achieve a favorable reaction from society. And it had worked.

Sounds like a movie star's life, doesn't it...the constant calculation, the relentless ON-ness of performing one's life as well as for one's career.

Courtenay, his love object, is a wishy-washy sort but I get past that by understanding entirely his pathology: He's an abused boy trying to make his mama love him, little understanding that he can't because she's incapable of mothering.

It had been years since anyone had thought to defend him, even longer since he had believed he merited any kind of defense. And having a man like Medlock—stuffy, prim Medlock—take one’s part made it worth even more.
–and–
For some reason—likely his own perverse nature—Medlock's criticism delighted Courtenay almost as much as his stingy scraps of praise.
–and–
If he went long enough without thinking about it, the memories would fade, or at least be covered up by more layers of protective varnish, and it would be like it never happened in the first place.

Why can't I move past Medlock's climberishness, when his equally valid (and well-drawn, it must be said) pathology explains his behavior so well? Because social climbing is so, frankly, distasteful to me. A man of Courtenay's unusually progressive ideology should revile Medlock. (I certainly do.)

Ay me, we'll have to table the truncheoning for the moment, because this book's a happily-ever-after romance and those are delights to be savored. I'm happy to report that Medlock and Courtenay do indeed heat the sheets, climb out of them, and pine for each other in the approved romance-novel fashion.

Love was somebody aiming a pistol at your heart while you sat there and acted like it was perfectly fine.
–and–
Falling in love wasn’t like a bird hatching from an egg, for all both events were rather messy and fraught with vulnerability.
–and–
Yes, that was how it was when your soul was in pieces and somebody else had one of them. Only when you were together would the pieces fit into place and become whole.
–and–
You can’t possibly mean to kiss me. I’m revolting.” Please kiss me.

“You aren’t. And even if you were, you’d be other things too.”

It was a gentle kiss, the sort of patient and meandering kiss Courtenay liked and Julian had never understood before. It wasn’t a prelude to fucking, it wasn’t even a prelude to a more thorough kiss. It was a conversation, without the burden of words. Please, Julian wanted to say. Let me try again. Julian’s heart felt full of something terrifying, something more dangerous than anything he had ever thought possible. And he didn’t care. He was throwing himself into an abyss he couldn’t even see, and that was fine, at least for the duration of the kiss.

That's the stuff that keeps me hitting the "BORROW NOW" button, the "BUY NOW" button, and the "PAGE TURN" button.

A SECOND HARVEST & TENDER MERCIES, the two "Men of Lancaster County" QUILTBAG novels

A SECOND HARVEST
ELI EASTON (Men of Lancaster County #1)
Self-republished ebook (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: David Fisher has lived by the rules all his life. Born to a Mennonite family, he obeyed his father and took over the family farm, married, and had two children. Now with both his kids in college and his wife deceased, he runs his farm alone and without joy, counting off the days of a life half-lived.

Christie Landon, graphic designer, Manhattanite, and fierce gay party boy, needs a change. Now thirty, he figures it's time to grow up and think about his future. When his best friend overdoses, Christie resolves to take a break from the city. He heads to a small house in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to rest, recoup, and reflect.

But life in the country is boring despite glimpses of the hunky silver fox next door. When Christie's creativity latches on to cooking, he decides to approach his widower neighbor with a plan to share meals and grocery expenses. David agrees, and soon the odd couple finds they really enjoy spending time together.

Christie challenges the boundaries of David's closed world and brings out feelings he buried long ago. If he can break free of the past, he might find a second chance at happiness.

My Review: An enormously resonant story for my elderly self. I knew and tricked with these men most of my life. Had one terrible relationship with one of them, a horrible, painful experience of being the agony and the release from it at the same time. He died of liver cancer after over two decades of alcohol abuse, and a few months later I moved to New York City.

Because life wasn’t worth much before Christie appeared, and it would be worse having had this and lost it. The mere thought ripped his guts out.

Yes, exactly that. So David's story, his wretchedness, moved me deeply. Christie's part I lived in reverse...after getting to Paradise I was a busy, busy boy for a few years. Over a decade, in fact, and I adored all but the last 18 months. When my life unravels, it does the job with verve and gusto. Anyway, Christie deciding to move to Auntie's place made perfect sense to me...I ran back to Austin...and his ultimate fate there mirrored my own, if mine was less painful.

Every time he said no he thought about how much of himself he’d given away all those years. This was a life he definitely didn’t want to return to. But if things with David didn’t work out, he could see himself getting sucked back into this because… what else was there, really?

I left Austin because, after one night of gay-barring, I was followed home by two tradies (google it) who'd been somewhat unsettlingly focused on me. The truck they drove had a gun rack.

It wasn't empty.

Nothing happened.

I don't care. I am never, ever again in all my life going to live in a place where guns are anything other than tightly regulated. I'm also deeply averse to going west of the Hudson or north of the Bronx. When home doesn't want you, it's not home, so here I stay.

This book made all the same feelings as I felt then come roaring back, strong as ever, nauseating as ever. The highest function of storytelling is catharsis, it's why myths are evergreen and stage/screen drama has such a tenacious hold on human psyches. Author Easton has, in each of her stories I've read, given me a safe catharsis, a world built to experience and survive the strong negative emotions parts of her tale evokes.

He’d seen stillbirths before, and they were unsettling. It simply seemed wrong that nature could put so much effort into forming a creature from nothing, and yet fail to breathe in the last important component: life.

It takes skill to do this well. It requires convincing your readers that this *is* a world, this space is in fact telling truths to your emotional core. That takes talent and courage, which Author Easton has and uses for our benefit.

And here I was looking for a light, fun read. Haw. Instead I got a deep and thorough dose of spiritual salts. And, mirabile dictu, was made to enjoy it.

Congratulations, Eli Easton, and to you readers not squicked out by gay men making love to each other, this is a fine and satisfying read. And only two instances of the loathsome w-verb. (Both gratuitous and unnecessary, of course.)

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

TENDER MERCIES
ELI EASTON (Men of Lancatser County #2)
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Eddie Graber’s dream of a sanctuary for rescued farm animals was about to come true when his partner backed out at the last minute. Now Eddie risks losing the twenty-five acre property in Lancaster County—and all the hopes he held for it—before the project even gets off the ground. He needs help, he needs money, but most importantly, he needs to rediscover the belief in a higher purpose that brought him here in the first place.

Samuel Miller worked hard to fit into his Amish community despite his club foot. But when his father learns Samuel is gay, he is whipped and shunned. With just a few hundred dollars to his name, Samuel responds to an ad for a farmhand and finds himself employed by a city guy who has strange ideas about animals, no clue how to run his small farm, and a gentle heart.

Samuel isn’t the only lost soul to serendipitously find his way to Meadow Lake Farm. There’s Fred and Ginger, two cows who’d been living in a garage, a gang of sheep, and a little black pig named Benedict who might be the key to life, love, money—and even a happily ever after for two castoffs.

NOTE: This title is set in the same region as book #1 but features a new couple. It can be read as a stand-alone.

My Review: It isn't up to the standard set by A Second Harvest, but it's a good, solid, enjoyable novel of the harrowing, horrible things religion makes people do to each other. Any accidental good the religious might do will never erase the hateful and damaging effects the institution of religion has had on billions and billions of people yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Men who, like Eddie, don't deserve a single second of the hatred and the disgust flung at them:

Eddie made up a small bowl with some pieces of bread with peanut butter and a cut-up apple. Not for the first time, Eddie was aware of the preparation and offering of food as a service and an obligation. When you gave an animal food, you weren’t just saying, You look hungry, and I have pity for you at this moment. You were saying, I see you. I acknowledge that you exist, that you are not invisible to me.

So why read it? Because men like Samuel escape from the horrible, vicious, vile torturers that victimize them in fiction, and even receive healing after they get themselves away from the poison that is gawd. It doesn't happen near often enough in real life. Look at the devastating statistics on teenaged suicide if you doubt me; look at the trans and lesbian and gay people whose lives are ended or who end their own lives out of despair; in each and every case, religion bears the blame and the religious, one and all, irrespective of personal involvement, are eternally stained with the blood of the innocents they passively allowed or actively wished (aloud, silently, in prayer, whatever) to suffer.

Sometimes Samuel wished he could be like the animals, expecting nothing from life except food and sunshine and another day. They didn’t have the ache of knowing what they could never have.

No one deserves a life spent in such self-loathing. If I've been unclear, I oppose your right to be religious on the same grounds that I oppose someone's right to be racist or Republican: Only bad things happen when y'all get to express those hateful ideas. Stop it.