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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

Instead, he finds humiliation.

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

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

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

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

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

Solid, sudsy stuff!

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

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

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

GIRLS WHO LIE TOGETHER, exactly what it says on the tin

GIRLS WHO LIE TOGETHER
JESSA RUSSO
Kindle Freebie
$0!

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Easy summers lead to hard falls in this Grease meets Mean Girls contemporary romance…

When seventeen-year-old Renata Carpenter hijacked her stepdad’s classic car, she hadn’t planned on totaling it and landing her best friend in a cast from hip to heel. She definitely hadn’t planned on being sent to a work program in New Orleans as punishment. And she certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love.

But Ren’s summer of forced manual labor has a bright side: her name is Brit, and she’s everything Ren never knew she needed. First love becomes first heartbreak when their summer romance comes to a crashing close earlier than anticipated. Adding insult to injury, Ren’s break-up with Brit is followed by a big move to a small town.

As if starting senior year completely alone isn’t bad enough, Ren soon discovers that the Hell on Heels mean girl who rules Sun Ridge Prep with an iron fist and a vicious tongue is none other than her first love. Too bad this Brit is far from lovable.

But Ren knows the girl beneath the façade, and she refuses to give up on rekindling their relationship. Secretly, the girls pick up where they left off, falling deeper in love and risking it all to be together. But when their affair is exposed by Brit’s boyfriend, Ren and Brit are faced with the ultimate choice: love or acceptance.

Because they certainly can’t have both.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK AS A PROMOTION. THANKS!

My Review: The author markets this as a YA title. I disagree. I'd hesitate before I gave it ti a sixteen-year-old, or a naïve seventeen-year-old. So let's say it's more a New Adult title.

It's definitely on the money with the Mean Girls comparison. Ren is a classic Mean Girl. She's also a very horny character, and no respecter of boundaries. Brit: "I'm not gay!" Ren: "Get a load of those tits! Such a sweet pair of [upper]lips!"

Then there's the slur usage. I get reclaiming words, and even use queer myownself these days. That was a nasty one in my youth. But using slurs and only slurs? Not now, not ever. That's reinforcing abuse.

While I thought Brit was toying with Ren's feelings...denying you're gay does NOT absolve you of responsibility for behaving sexually with someone of the same sex...I found Ren deeply dislikable and overbearing. Brit's manipulative. Neither is someone I'd like to spend any more time with.

The main issues above weren't made better by the way the story is structured, with time-gaps that just make the chemistry between these two feel very unlikely for teens to experience. The writing was okay, with flashes of creative interest once in a while. Not a favorite read. Caveat emptor re: sexual content.

PROVIDENCE, first novel of gay psychological suspense

PROVIDENCE
CRAIG WILLSE
Union Square & Co.
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An introverted English professor falls for an enigmatic sophomore and is lured into a web of chaos and deceit.

Mark Lausson, a professor stuck in the middle of Ohio, is smart enough to get a job at an elite liberal arts college but not smart enough to know better when he meets charismatic sophomore Tyler Cunningham. In Tyler, Mark sees another way of being in the world—he finds Tyler’s self-possession both compelling and unsettling. Caught in the rush of sex and secrets, Mark ignores the increasing evidence that Tyler can’t be trusted. But by the time Mark comes to his senses, the irreparable damage is done. Providence shows how feeling trapped in our own lives can lead us to make choices we otherwise would not and the ways in which sexual desire can distort our senses of self and other, right and wrong.

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

My Review: A slow, suspenseful read that takes on gay intergenerational relationships. It does it in a very squicky way, as the power dynamic between teachers and students is (even when inverted as here) very, very fraught. There is a lot of pornography in the gay-male pornosphere that centers on incest...a thing that causes me no little discomfort for obvious reasons...and then, one step lower on the transgression ladder, a fair bit of teacher/student porn.

I'm not going to label this read as a one-handed reading story, but a few judicious pacing changes and a bit more descriptive instead of allusive language et voilà!

Mark gets tangled up in his history...not fully explored or explained...and Tyler uses his youthful beauty to make that history come alive; the results are predictable. The story isn't groundbreaking, the pacing isn't thrilling, so it sounds like my hatchet's about to come out, doesn't it? Nope. No hatchet job, this.

I'd label this a psychological suspense novel not a mystery or a thriller. The crime doesn't need solving; the pace is not thrilling. There is a lot of suspense, however, in the psychology of the developing relationship between Mark and Tyler; what is this kid after, and why did her target Mark, for starters. Had Author Willse and/or his editors developed Tyler and his motivations more, I'd be five-star hollerin' about this book. Tyler is the weakest part of the narrative: A kind of ambulatory "why, how come". Tyler's calculating nature is seen solely in its results and that leaves me thinking only about the nasty results of his manipulations for those he doesn't notice or even care about. Mark's perfectly nice, if boring, life gets upended and ruined from the outside. His boyfriend, whose name utterly escapes me, gets his world crashed by the narrative equivalent of a rock from space...for what? I'm not advocating for an excuse for Tyler's actions. Just a reason.

That said, this is a first novel and so gets most of a pass on some structural issues. I recommend the read to fellow old gay men who have much younger men in their lives; to those seeking a weekend's immersion into the consequences of a disastrous affair; and psychological suspense readers needing a fresh angle on their preferred genre.

THE VILLA, subtle, fun, and in the end, more than it says on the tin

THE VILLA
RACHEL HAWKINS
St. Martin' s Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

NOW $2.99 on KINDLE

The Publisher Says: The bestselling author of The Wife Upstairs returns with a brilliant new gothic suspense set at an Italian villa with a dark history.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable. But by their 30s, their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend.

Villa Aestas in Orvieto is a high-end holiday home now, but in 1974, it was known as Villa Rosato, and rented for the summer by a notorious rock star, Noel Gordon. In an attempt to reignite his creative spark, Noel invites up-and-coming musician, Pierce Sheldon to join him, as well as Pierce’s girlfriend, Mari, and her stepsister, Lara. But he also sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Mari writing one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Lara composing a platinum album—and ends in Pierce’s brutal murder.

As Emily digs into the villa’s complicated history, she begins to think there might be more to the story of that fateful summer in 1974. That perhaps Pierce’s murder wasn’t just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock & roll gone wrong, but that something more sinister might have occurred—and that there might be clues hidden in the now-iconic works that Mari and Lara left behind.

Yet the closer that Emily gets to the truth, the more tension she feels developing between her and Chess. As secrets from the past come to light, equally dangerous betrayals from the present also emerge—and it begins to look like the villa will claim another victim before the summer ends.

Inspired by Fleetwood Mac, the Manson murders, and the infamous summer Percy and Mary Shelley spent with Lord Byron at a Lake Geneva castle—the birthplace of Frankenstein—The Villa welcomes you into its deadly legacy.

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

My Review: What fun it is to sit, or lie in bed, with a read leaning/sitting/suspended above you by your boytoy at your preferred angle, and just submerge into a story. It must needs be a hefty stew, a thick and savory amalgam of tastes powerful and subtle, to get through the fog of quotidian tedium we're all settling back into in the wintry northern hemisphere. Remember it for August reading, global southerners!

Rachel Hawkins delivers a big, full bowl of it all. The middle-escent quondam besties who, in the present, are surprising themselves when they decide to spend girl-time together at one of those fabulously gorgeous rentable family seats in gloriously scenic Italy. Each woman, trying to gin up something to fulfill a publishing contract, is finding that she just is not feeling the love for anything she's got at that moment. The mystery writer's cozy series is sour for her now that her soon-to-be-ex husband is suing her for a chunk of her future royalties because she, in a moment of candor, told an interviewer that her series' most beloved character was based on him. The self-help writer's having an existential crisis because she's been fleecing desperate people by ladling out craptastic nostrums knowing full well that a trip to the Hallmark card shop would give them the same level of help and insight into their problems.

Oh dear! Silly me, saying what I really think about things again. Strike that! Of course, she's simply seeking something to afford her fresh insights and, well, what better than a friend in the middle of a rancorous divorce? (I don't in all honesty see how that's better but I'm not here to judge.) (Well, only the story I'm being told, not the realities of publishing.)

Em and Chess, in the present day, are going through the middle-escent crisis of "is this it?" and need to make their eyes see past the same-old same-old surfaces. At their gorgeous holiday Villa Aestas, they learn to listen to themselves more carefully as the delicious herbal remedy of being in Italy brings up things neither was ever planning to work through, or even acknowledge...admit. That stew has tough cuts of meat that just about break your jaw muscles to chew....

Their motivation to do that tough work is the fifty-years-gone history of Villa Aestas. Golden-boy rocker, two teenaged girls in love with his fame and poetry, a Svengali older man...all of twenty-six!...who guides the group into a Byron-and-Shelley creative ferment that he uses to elicit full-body responses to the sexual tensions inevitable in this situation. Tell me how any writer of anything at all could resist poking this spiritual sore tooth! And the existence of a memoir-by-novel about it, telling a story so soppily romantic that you just know a teenager wrote it. Should they, and we, trust the story we're told here, the story in front of us? Emily, she of the murder-mystery instincts, doesn't seem to question Mari's published version of the 1974 events until present-day events make her think carefully for once in a long, foggy, unhappy time.

But writers, you know, writers aren't simple little souls ready to take dictation from their imaginary friends the voices. Writers (of murder mysteries, of books about changing your life) need to be ruthless and "kill their darlings." Success can breed jealousy as always, but so can a lifetime of coming up short when comparing yourself to someone else...and poets (as songwriters insist they are) are doubly susceptible to this. Add in a hefty libido and a sense of entitlement and, well....

What Author Hawkins does is not something unexpected. But what she accomplishes by bringing all the strands...the two parties visiting Villa Aestas and the book that Mari, the central voice in 1974's strands, writes...into one bundle is to scrape away the grease she's been applying to the ropes of the plot so they won't rub too hard together and weaken each other. The bare ropes of the meanings and emotions scrape and snarl and burn each other as they are suddenly and forcefully made to change the story's velocity and angle. No tangles, some fraying...I think Mari's book got just a hair (heh) more time in the spotlight than it merited...but supporting structure of the thriller parts of the story suspend their scenery and allow you to scrape your stew-bowl clean without feeling like you need to rush before it all comes crashing down. I heard some creaking from behind the scenes but, crucially, felt that this was not the ropes complaining as they got overworked in moving the parts. It was a quiet invitation from Author Hawkins to consider the thriller you've seen in its intended configuration and perspective.

And question if, just maybe, there had not been a last-minute change of plans, well laid to achieve one result, to achieve instead another result entirely.

This elevated a solid three-and-a-half stars entertainment to a four-star puzzle (despite some eye-rolling but period-appropriate homophobia). Definitely recommended to thriller fans and to the small corps of remaining lovers still thrilling to the wonderful Cary Grant did-he-or-didn't-he films of the 1940s.

MY BROTHER: A Novel, Scandinavian grimdark not-fantasy with a sting in its tail

MY BROTHER: A Novel
KARIN SMIRNOFF (tr. Anna Paterson)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Swedish publishing phenomenon: a literary noir of extraordinary power follows the discovery of a young woman’s body in the long grass behind the sawmill...

Which part of the story is not for telling?

Jana Kippo has returned to Smalånger to see her twin brother, Bror, still living in the small family farmhouse in the remote north of Sweden.

Within the isolated community, secrets and lies have grown silently, undisturbed for years.

Following the discovery of a young woman's body in the long grass behind the sawmill, the siblings, hooked by a childhood steeped in darkness, need to break free.

But the truth cannot be found in other people's stories. The question is: can it be found anywhere?

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

My Review: First, read this:

We were born just a few minutes apart and are alike in many ways. Especially in how we look. We are thin and gingery, with straggly unpigmented hair. We are so bleakly unremarkable that nobody used to remember either of us as somebody. Only as the twins.

–and–

So the police were looking into her death I said.
Of course they did. What did you expect. A dead woman found in the grass near the sawmill and it turns out she has slept with most of the married men in the village. And a number of others as well. On top of that one of the suspects is a convicted murderer.
Who I asked. Me of course he said.

You're now familiar with the author's voice in this, the first of three novels set it the Arctic Swedish town of Smalånger, where Bror and Jana are from...Jana has left...Bror hasn't bothered, he can drink himself to death in the comfort of what was the family's home. With, now, the company of his twin, as she chooses to come back to, to, help? Anyway, bear witness if not accelerate the crash. To keep herself in food (Bror worries about booze, nothing else) she starts working for the local social services department, which she calls smalångerhomecareservices, thus making herself useful while getting fully up on the local gossip from the people she works with and the ones she's helping to survive whatever time is left to them in a modicum of physical comfort. No one in Smalånger lives in psychic comfort, she discovers early, and often.

My idea of what I was in for was too weak-kneed. I thought I'd get something dark, but not my-eyes-my-poor-eyes dark! A woman suffers a dreadful childhood; returns to the scene of the crime to be there with the brother ("Bror" is Swedish for "brother"; unlike Jana, he has no personal name) whose life was stalled, stopped, and never had any particular reason to start it again. He drifts aimlessley, but reasonably harmlessly...yes, he sleeps with his best friend's wife, but it's not like he was the only one who did; he's drinking himself to death, sure, but when the woman he loved but who was murdered by person or persons unknown, what else is there to do except hang out with her widower and drink?

No, not chuckle one in this book. But there are two more in Swedish and I need to read them now!

What the heck? I need to read them? Yes, while I wouldn't have predicted that I'd get invested in this Nordic grimdark saga of terrible, sad, claustrophobic life in a tiny, remote, and dark (physically) place, that is exactly what happened. What more there is to learn I want to learn it.

It's that kind of a read, y'all. You won't leave the same as you entered.

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM, clever, amusing, witty even! But...

JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM
RYAN O'CONNELL
Atria Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Read this interview with Author O'Connell on LitHub!

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a darkly witty and touching novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world.

Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.

After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done.

Candid, biting, and refreshingly real, Just by Looking at Him is an incisive commentary on gay life, a heart-centered, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.

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

My Review: No one, looking from the outside in, will ever know what others are enduring, surviving, overcoming...or hiding. The author's got a track record of blowing the doors off handy hiding places...go watch his first show, Special, if you're in any doubt...and he's brought his unsparing honesty to bear on fiction about the supremely ableist gay-male world. Being a gay male, that's what he knows, so that's perfectly fair. It's a solid, explanatory fact that the author, writer for and star in the Peacock revival of Queer as Folk as well as the creator of the Netflix series Special based on his differently-abled-gay-guy memoir I'm Special and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves, is also the partner of Jonathan Parks-Ramage of Yes, Daddy fame.

This, then, is a Personage within QUILTBAG creativeland. I expected that I would be treated to outstanding stories told in superbly structured chapters.

I didn't get that.

I did get the expected honest and unflinching, no-bullshit presentation of Elliott's struggles with what I'd call impostor syndrome, fear of rejection, and a huge self-confidence deficit stemming from being gay and having cerebral palsy. I got hefty doses of snark and sarcasm; I got unblinking acknowledgment of the harm divergent career paths and the temptations of sudden financial freedom present in a couple's life. I got the eternal, and unwinnable, struggle of people to be monogamous when there is a vast smorgasbord of yummy side dishes available in any number of technologically assisted ways.

It was a lot of fun to read the author's one-liners, eg: "Lately I’d been feeling more and more that monogamy, like capitalism or keto, wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t be sure Gus was on the same page." It was not quite as much fun to have the funny one-liners be the book. It's like reading a really hilarious Twitter thread. (Seriously...seventy-four chapters is way, way too many for three hundred-ish pages.) After a while, enough with this...I'm working harder than I think I should have to to get the laffs. It's the comedy set that goes on too long, the Saturday Night Live skit that refuses to end.

It's also the man's first novel, these are common problems with comedic first novels, and there's not one thing in here that I didn't think belonged; it's just that it belonged in a slightly different structure. There's a great deal of sexual material and a great deal of discussion, in what I found slightly cringe-worthy (ie, dismissively dealt with via humor) terms, of substance abuse. It really highlights a very significant issue I felt as I got deeper and deeper into Elliott's story: He's really blind to his white cismale privilege. He's disabled, and an addict; but he deals with those problems from a very, very high platform that puts him in reach of all kinds of support and help.

Lamenting the innocence of 2012 wasn't a great idea, either, Author O'Connell. Things were easier? For men like us, maybe, but things are only getting better too slowly for others not white, not male, and not well off. We're still MILES ahead in this miserable race called "being American." Using self-deprecating humor to deflect negative awareness of one's privilege isn't a viable strategy in this day and age. (Maybe that's what the author meant about 2012 being easier?)

On balance, then, while I laughed and even found a lot of the self-reflection (primarily done at the end of the book) moving, I was too aware of some problems with the way this book was conceived and executed that, quite honestly, I didn't expect to see in 2022's publishing environment.

THE REDSHIRT, Southern American football culture meets gay first love & BATH HAUS, gay thriller about unraveling your own life with plenty of help

BATH HAUS
P.J. VERNON
Doubleday Books
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST LGBTQ Mystery! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.

He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.

What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US AND WE NEED THEM MORE THAN EVER.

My Review: I love flawed gay protagonists! They don't come more flawed than Oliver. What he did, how he did it, all truly contemptible. Why? Lower still. By the end of the story, he is the sort of creepy little loser it's easy to hate. Yet I never *quite* learned to hate him. I was certainly contemptuous of his actions...for which he paid a steep price.

Nathan, well...he's a rotten-souled chip off the fetid, foul-smelling old block. He does nothing for anyone but himself. He is a walking, talking scion of White Privilege, and not worth the powder it would take to blow him up. Nathan (and family, and friends) I hated with force and vigor.

Why I kept going despite serious problems with the characters peopling the book is simple: the pace picked up after about the 40% mark. It got so involving I couldn't stop. But I will say this, I wouldn't have been kind about the whole thing if Tillie had not been okay.

Borrow it from the library. Not a book you'll want to re-read.

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

THE REDSHIRT
COREY SOBEL
The University Press of Kentucky
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Shortlisted for 2020 Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

Corey Sobel challenges tenacious stereotypes in this compelling debut novel, shedding new light on the hypermasculine world of American football. The Redshirt introduces Miles Furling, a young man who is convinced he was placed on earth to play football. Deep in the closet, he sees the sport as a means of gaining a permanent foothold in a culture that would otherwise reject him. Still, Miles's body lags behind his ambitions, and recruiters tell him he is not big enough to compete at the top level. His dreams come true when a letter arrives from King College.

The elite southern school boasts one of the best educations in America and one of the worst Division One football programs. King football is filled with obscure, ignored players like Miles—which is why he and the sports world in general are shocked when the country's top recruit, Reshawn McCoy, also chooses to attend the college. As brilliant a student as he is a player, the intensely private Reshawn refuses to explain why he chose King over other programs.

Miles is as baffled as everyone else, and less than thrilled when he winds up rooming with the taciturn Reshawn. Initially at odds with each other, the pair become confidants as the win-at-all-costs program makes brutal demands on their time and bodies. When their true selves and the identities that have been imposed on them by the game collide, both young men are forced to make life-changing choices.

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

My Review: Let's start with the easy bits: Clearly Author Sobel, football alum of DUKE University, knew the sports parts inside out. Clearly he understood the racism and exploitation inherent in King/Duke University inviting Black players to its program, and campus. And I strongly suspect he knew some closeted players. He himself is not gay, and it shows.

This is not a knock. The man understands viscerally the cost of hiding and sneaking. But he doesn't get the longing for a man to touch you and be touched by you because I'll wager he's never felt it. What he does get is the way love, real true first love, makes a man out of a boy. That part is absolutely crystal clear, and is the heart of my appreciation for this story. Reshawn the phenom's hatred for the entire enterprise of college football, possibly the game itself, gets serious exploration. It's counterpointed to Miles's "I-am-a-camera" absorption in the colors and the personalities and the panoply of the game's celebrants, as Author Sobel directly describes them:

Here came the celebrant. Coach Zeller's vestments were a purple polo shirt, pressed white khakis, and unscuffed tennis shoes he reserved for games. He took his place at the head of the half circle, and once the last people squeezed inside and the doors closed he began his first pregame speech as King's head coach.

It's not necessary to reproduce Zeller's blather about either rising or sliding, about choosing and losing. It's not like it makes any difference, but it does show the author's clear grasp of the milieu and his own keen perception of the performative and ritualistic elements of football at this school.

What the author also gets is what it takes to be Other in a world that has no room, no time, no oxygen for Otherness. What happens is cruel and vicious and mean-spirited. Miles is the most intensely tested character in this book and it is unbelievable to me that his power and strength could go unnoticed by the people around him. The adults clearly see it and clearly want it...but on their own terms.

The end of the story is not at all what one would expect it to be. The end of the story is, in so many ways, the end of childhood's sweet spot in adolescence and the entry of Miles...and Reshawn...into the dark, cold, stinking pool of adulthood. Reshawn is, like Miles himself, tested and comes through a man. The others? The team, the coaches, not one of them is anything other than a dupe. They're fools caught on the deck of Plato's ship of fools, all the worse because they see it and choose it.

I can't imagine all that many of my fellow queer gents are football-mad enough to want to wade through the games and practices. There's no compensatory sex to make the enterprise less...cishet...and that is deeply too bad. I think, if y'all can pry open your rage-sealed hatred for the way team sports treated you, you'll find a story about personal power, about truly accepting yourself and your place in this world, and about how important it is to know your friends are fully, completely there for you if you're to make any kind of success out of adult life. And thus how very satisfying Miles's story is. That is what you get; you should come experience it; and take some time to appreciate that this is not some lame fantasy of The Lockerroom, but the voice of experience telling you how it goes when it goes right.

BOYS COME FIRST, indie publisher's first-ever novel...from a Black Queer debut novelist

BOYS COME FIRST
AARON FOLEY
Belt Publishing
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Suddenly jobless and single after a devastating layoff and a breakup with his cheating ex, advertising copywriter Dominick Gibson flees his life in Hell's Kitchen to try and get back on track in his hometown of Detroit. He’s got one objective — exit the shallow dating pool ASAP and get married by thirty-five—and the deadline’s approaching fast.

Meanwhile, Dom's best friend, Troy Clements, an idealistic teacher who never left Michigan, finds himself at odds with all the men in his life: a troubled boyfriend he's desperate to hold onto, a perpetually dissatisfied father, and his other friend, Remy Patton. Remy, a rags-to-riches real estate agent known as “Mr. Detroit,” has his own problems—namely choosing between making it work with a long-distance lover or settling for a local Mr. Right Now who’s not quite Mr. Right. And when a high-stakes real estate deal threatens to blow up his friendship with Troy, the three men have to figure out how to navigate the pitfalls of friendship and a city that seems to be changing overnight.

Full of unforgettable characters, Boys Come First is about the trials and tribulations of real friendship, but also about the highlights and hiccups—late nights at the wine bar, awkward Grindr hookups, workplace microaggressions, situationships, frenemies, family drama, and of course, the group chat—that define Black, gay, millennial life in today’s Detroit.

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

My Review: There's no such thing as "reverse racism." There's just racism, with shifting targets. Dom, Troy, and Remy all say, and feel, really racist things. And guess what: Unlike white people, these Black men have reasons to feel angry and frustrated and dispossessed. Their skin color marks them out as targets for lunatic racist white scum.

And guess what else? Black folks ain't perfect. These are three gay men, in a social milieu that really, really does NOT want their men to be gay. At all. So can you see what leads these loving, flawed, hurting, sadder-looking-for-wiser guys to be mouthy? It's like women of all colors rolling their eyes so hard they see their brains when men of any color start legislating what they can and can't do with their own bodies. There's a lot of anger built up at a lot of groups. Most with reason and justice on their side.

A lot of that anger is faced up to in this story of hurt, betrayal, and abuse. Dom and Troy, in their different ways, are reeling from domestic drama that is instantly relatable. Remy, not part of the kidhood bond shared by Dom and Troy, is probably the most personally insulated from domestic drama since he's in a "situationship," a neologism (it was to me, at least) I really like for a long-distance, still love-based, relationship. Not like I understand that from the inside or anything....

Remy's job as a real-estate hustler leads to a major fracture in his friendship with Troy and, to an extent, Dom, because his work is threatening to repurpose Troy's employer, a school, into gentrification's profitable arms. Detroit's decades of economic woes are a huge part of this story's rage-fuel. Would Dom have left Detroit for New York (and by extension met his cheating ex) had Detroit been capable of sustaining his ambitious need for a media market commensurate? Troy's domestic woes are fed, at least in part, by the economic struggles inherent in pursuing a teaching career. And here's Remy about to make a bundle of cash off the city's redevelopment....

I think the major take-away from this story is that there's no room for racism's corrosive effects in any society we need to support the creation of; and the other hate-isms, like homophobia and colorism, have to go in the dumpster too. When these Black, gay men face so much trouble from outside, it makes their work to fix the problems inside so very much harder. And that stops them not at all, doesn't even slow them down much, as they fight and fuck and work themselves up to fever pitch. These men, messy lives and sad hearts and powerful spirits in them all, make every day count. They don't, by the end of the story, waste what they've got anymre in wanting what they can't have.

But that does not mean they take second best. Not for long, anyway. It makes them great companions for a summer laze on the beach.

Just...maybe skip ahead over the smexytimes. Until you get home, anyway.

FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING, which is why you should read it

FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING
HENRY FRY
Ballantine Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Danny Scudd is absolutely fine. He always dreamed of escaping the small-town life of his parents’ fish-and-chip shop, moving to London, and becoming a journalist. And, after five years in the city, his career isn’t exactly awful, and his relationship with pretentious Tobbs isn’t exactly unfulfilling. Certainly his limited-edition Dolly Parton vinyls and many (maybe too many) house plants are hitting the spot. But his world is flipped upside down when a visit to the local clinic reveals that Tobbs might not have been exactly faithful. In fact, Tobbs claims they were never operating under the “heteronormative paradigm” of monogamy to begin with. Oh, and Danny’s flatmates are unceremoniously evicting him because they want to start a family. It’s all going quite well.

Newly single and with nowhere to live, Danny is forced to move in with his best friend, Jacob, a flamboyant nonbinary artist whom he’s known since childhood, and their eccentric group of friends living in an East London “commune.” What follows is a colorful voyage of discovery through modern queer life, dating, work, and lots of therapy—all places Danny has always been too afraid to fully explore. Upon realizing just how little he knows about himself and his sexuality, he careens from one questionable decision (and man) to another, relying on his inscrutable new therapist and housemates to help him face the demons he’s spent his entire life trying to repress. Is he really fine, after all?

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

My Review: It's far from my first time for...well, almost anything. Yet this British tale of being a twentysomething soul whose entire world turns upside down, whose every point of trust in his relationships is called into question because he wasn't having the same relationship with others they were having with him, just called to me.

Danny is our PoV character, a young man who's daring to think his life is going well and he's among the people who understand and love him. It's a heady place to be. So, this being a story, we know it's not the way things will stay. First, Tobbs (his long-term love) brings home an STD. So there goes that whole monogamy fantasy...and his love says some self-serving things about it being heteronormative and I cringed so hard I looked like I was trying out for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've used that line, though I hasten to say not to excuse my transmission of an STD! Just...well, Author Fry, you scored a point with me by holding the Ouch Oculus up to my face.

Thank goodness, given this, that Danny doesn't live with that knob Tobbs. Laura and her husband seem...nice. Do please note I said "husband" and extrapolate from there that there is procreative activity taking place. We who have paid attention in sex-ed classes (or just had families) will be unsurprised to learn that Danny's rent payments are less desirable than the space he's taking up when the inevitable pregnancy occurs...just as his relationship with that knob Tobbs is over.

Danny's in therapy...terrible anxiety issues...and that completely won me over. Nina, Danny's therapist, is brilliant (in the UK sense) and comedy gold. She's not a comedy therapist, the kind you read in older books who either bumbles or is sibylline. She's commonsensical, not here for self-pity, and deeply committed to Danny learning to manage his issues. Her solidity and warmth were equaled by the obligatory wild BFF: Jacob. They are enby (non-binary), ace (asexual), and so utterly FABULOUS that I think they should have a book of their own.

Hint, hint.

The things that happen in Danny's world, in hindrance that proves to be help, are all relatable. The voice the story's told in makes the project of reading it a pleasure, and the laughter it evokes is frequently tinged with sad recognition as well as joyful anticipation. Given that Author Fry, in an interview with Debutiful.com, says he was inspired to write this story in part by television sitcoms, it's no surprise that he's already got an adaptation in the works from Aussie production company Moonriver as it expands its UK footprint.

This debut novel is a delight from giddy-up to whoa. I'd've kept this review back until my June Pride Month cavalcade of Queerness but I just couldn't...I want you to go get one and read it now.