WITHOUT PREJUDICE: My Life as a Gay Judge, a memoir of living the curse "May you live an interesting life in interesting times"

WITHOUT PREJUDICE: My Life as a Gay Judge
HARVEY BROWNSTONE
ECW Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$21.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Harvey Brownstone’s story is a tumultuous, sometimes hilarious, and uplifting journey from bullied child to outcast after coming out to his parents, to trailblazing lawyer, to distinguished judge.

Brownstone colorfully details his momentous and inventive judicial career marked by his numerous innovations of the justice system, particularly revolutionizing Ontario’s child support enforcement program.

In retirement, he is no longer shackled by the restraints traditionally imposed on the judiciary, and thus Brownstone provides a frank, unfiltered, and refreshing glimpse into the inner workings of the justice system, boldly delineating the strengths and weaknesses of criminal and family courts, both of which he claims are sorely in need of comprehensive reform. His remarkable story, reinventing himself from high-profile judge to highly acclaimed talk show host, is a testament to the resilience and triumph of the human spirit.

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

My Review: An unusual man's memoir of being unabashedly unusual and unapologetically opinionated.

Judges are not often public figures while still sitting on the bench. Harvey Brownstone got that memo, looked it over for legal penalties, saw there were specific things he was never to speak of so he didnt, and then quietly spoke up for the powerless his entire career. A fluently bilingual judge in an Anglophone province, he was in demand to hear cases involving Francophone participants; he was always active in criminal and family law; he was always, as a good judge ought to be, aware of how his decisions were going to impact all the parties' futures.

A lot of Justice Brownstone's empathy for people enduring trouble, as by definition all those in the legal system are, comes from his parents' surprising rejection of him when he came out to them as gay. It was the 1970s! They were sophisticated people, not from some lunatic religious-nut group...just quite homophobic. This disappointed me, as well as made me empathetically upset on his behalf. Fiive years of no contact made me cringe for him.

As he transitions his narrative to the legal career he self-financed (imagine trying *that* in 2026!) the tenor shifts from personal suffering to compassion for the suffering of other as they wend their way through a system he knows is stacked against them. Defendant or plaintiff, the Canadian legal system is as labyrinthine and intentionally complicated as that anywhere in the world. Justice Brownstone does not hold back in this memoir from expressing his anger at the cruelty baked into the system as it is...most especially the capricious, arbitrary "family" courts.

Justice Brownstone wrote of that system in a 2009 book entitled Tug of War: A Judge's Verdict on Separation, Custody Battles and the Bitter Realities of Family Court in 2009, published by the same house this book comes from. I don't think my blood pressure would remain safely controlled were I to read that book. This one, with its wider focus, challenged me, so I'll be avoiding his earlier book. No more hospital visits for TIAs if I can help it!

I suspect Canadian readers will be more involved in the nuts-and-boltsness of Justice Brownstone's policy agenda for legal-system reform. I'm totally with him in the spirit of his reforms; I can't see anyone in the US who holds a comparable position writing so openly and passionately in favor of redressing the balance of the system. It makes me a bit jealous, like having Mark Carney as their head of government does. Still leaves me with an overall positive impression of Justice Brownstone, and a hearty supportive push for any and all Canadians reading these words to go get themselves involved in his crusades.

I'm hoping the US readers will see what an honest, person-centered, effective and responsible progressive looks like and will start looking for more of them here.

2024 NEBULA FINALISTS: COUNTESS, lesbian Count of Monte Cristo revenge story set in space!

COUNTESS
SUZAN PALUMBO
ECW Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 ebook, available now. Well worth it!

FINALIST for the 2024 Nebula Award! Winner announced at the 2025 Nebula Conference, 5 through 8 June 2025.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A queer, Caribbean, anti-colonial sci-fi novella, inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, in which a betrayed captain seeks revenge on the interplanetary empire that subjugated her people for generations.

Virika Sameroo lives in colonized space under the Æerbot Empire, much like her ancestors before her in the British West Indies. After years of working hard to rise through the ranks of the empire’s merchant marine, she’s finally become first lieutenant on an interstellar cargo vessel.

When her captain dies under suspicious circumstances, Virika is arrested for murder and charged with treason despite her lifelong loyalty to the empire. Her conviction and subsequent imprisonment set her on a path to justice, determined to take down the evil empire that wronged her, all while the fate of her people hangs in the balance.

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

My Review: I wouldn't call it a "romp" but it was a lot of fun to read a lesbian space opera/revenge fantasy with a very prominent anti-colonial slant that does not slacken its pace for a moment. The long, lingering sadomasochistic bit about The Count of Monte Cristo's imprisonment is entirely absent; these things are causally linked. Very enjoyable, Caribbean-inflected setting was probably my very favorite difference from most all the other SFF I've read.

Revolutionary fun! Strongly recommended for young firebrand lesbians! Old white people like me might feel a bit attacked...we are...but, well, is that really a surprise?

Originally published in my September 2024 round-up..

ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN, horror rooted in reality and scarier for it

ALL THINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN
R.J. McDANIEL
ECW Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for TRANSGENDER FICTION.

The Publisher Says: An incisive reflection on identity and wealth, and a refreshing racial queer story of survival

All Things Seen and Unseen follows Alex Nguyen, an isolated, chronically ill university student in her early 20s. After a suicide attempt and subsequent lengthy hospitalization, she finds herself without a job, kicked out of campus housing, unable to afford school, and still struggling in the aftermath of a relationship’s dissolution. Hope comes in the form of a rich high school friend who offers Alex a job housesitting at her family’s empty summer mansion on a gulf island.

Surrounded by dense forest and ocean, in the increasingly oppressive heat of a 2010s summer, Alex must try to survive as an outsider in a remote, insular community; to navigate the awkward, unexpected beginnings of a possible new romance; and to live through the trauma she has repressed to survive, even as the memories — and a series of increasingly unnerving events — threaten to pull her back under the surface.

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

My Review: What a wild ride. I knew, by the end of the read, what it feels like to have paranoid hallucinations, and let me tell you it was 1000% more effective than "spernatural" horror could ever be. Tell me all the mishegas is a demon, I check out; tell me the MC is fresh out of the bin and these weird things are happening, I'm terrified. Plus horror in hot climates works better on 80° (Fahrenheit, obvs)-ought-to-be-illegal me than sweater weather ever could.

Add in homelessness, that scourge of the capitalist world we love for its trinkets and need for its ability to keep us alive at the expense of our future, and my knees are knockin'. All of these elements are central to this story. Alex is genuinely unsure what's in her head and what's not. When, ten years ago, I had a stint in the bin, my roommates were schizophrenic...can you even imagine hearing voices, having hallucinations so real you respond to them like they're there? I don't think you can unless you've seen it, and you will never, ever again think of mental illness as a dodge, a lie, a clever ruse to work the system.

So I'm pretty much the perfect reader for this horror story. Where's that fifth star?

I loved Alex's unapologetic, unexplained queerness a lot. She's just...queer. Nothing's made of it; it just is. This does come with a price. Alex is also not connected to reality in part due to trauma that, again, just is. This makes some of Alex's behaviors feel unmoored to the (negligible) plot. That isn't a problem per se but does leave things, eg relating to Alex's ethnic identity, up in the air that could usefully have been expanded on. It's a quibble; I was drawn along by the sheer richness with which Author McDaniel wove the tapestry of Alex's experience of her world.

This is a horror novel for people who do not read horror novels. It's also truly the best novel I've read about the actual experience of mental illness, of fracturing in the mind, about how the world can simply weigh too much to be borne.

HE WASN'T THERE AGAIN TODAY: An Epitome Apartments Mystery, third in a series I plan to catch up on stat

HE WASN'T THERE AGAIN TODAY: An Epitome Apartments Mystery
CANDAS JANE DORSEY
ECW Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The witty, queer accidental detective of the Epitome Apartments is back. While helping to solve a community murder, she also needs to convince police that she didn’t revenge-kill the man who took everything from her

The nameless amateur sleuth of The Adventures of Isabel and What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? has often said that death is too good for Lockwood Chiles—who is in prison for killing her beloved partner, Nathan, and her close friend Pris—and makes no secret that she hates the man who massacred her shot at happiness. So when Chiles ends up dead in his cell, it’s no wonder she becomes a prime suspect. Meanwhile, an aggressive band of men in military-adjacent garb turn a string of assaults against nameless’s unhoused neighbors into full-bore murder right behind the Epitome Apartments, and she rashly promises to help bring them to law. As if that’s not enough, unscrupulous parties are scheming to strip her of her inheritance, money she and Nathan had intended would address the city’s lack of harm-reduction services and low-income housing. Now it is nameless’s mission to clear her name and to hold her tattered community together, all while she’s coming apart herself.

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

My Review: Canadian SFF monadnock Dorsey is operating in a new field so y'all sit up and hit the one-click. As one would expect from the author of Black Wine, sex and its coevals gender and sexuality get a workout here. Reading the third of what I devoutly hope will be an ongoing series first, I thought permaybehaps I'd be a bit lost, without the deeper background that makes series mysteries such good reads for me.

I forgot whose work I was reading.

Feeling lost and a little at sea is Author Dorsey's calling card. That said, I was never wondering where someone came from, or how anyone fits into the schema of the story being told. It probably helps that the way events unfold is as stochastic as real life is itself...it felt to me as though I was genuinely following our nameless detective around, learning things alongside them. In any truly immersive read I hope that I will be investing in the characters along with the main character, and that was indeed the case here. What might not work quite so well was the book's use of **COPIOUS** footnotes...over two hundred!...and huge numbers of acronyms. It took me some time to find a reading rhythm in this story, but I was so ready to trust the author, from past acquaintance in her SFF days, that I kept my hopes up. I felt rewarded. Again, as one would expect from Author Dorsey, there are little SFnal grace notes relatively unobtrusively scattered about.

As in all series reads, though, it's the characters that make the reader invest or decline to invest in the story at hand. Our nameless protagonist, sharp-eyed and -tongued, is a big draw for me. The other characters are literally kaleidoscopic, forming startling and unusual conjunctions with the narrator, each other, and the story unfolding. This is, to me, a net positive because as unusual as the juxtapositions can be, they're never gratuitous or exploitively deployed. I do sometimes feel as though some authors have, in their heads or on their editors' checklists, a set of identities that they feel the need to dot around to be "inclusive." This is absolutely never the way this read came across to me. In part that's because I've read the author's earlier work; in part it's down to the way the characters are included in the sleuth's life and thus this narrative.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the evident pro-environment, anti-capitalist thrust of the story. That won't work for some readers, because it's intrinsic to every element of the series' world-building. You know who you are, so you should seek elsewhere for your own ma'at needs to be met.

For me, it went down like a truly excellent, complex, single-malt whisky. I heartily recommend the read.

MALAGASH, Canada's New Weird which is really old weird and superbly crafted

MALAGASH
JOEY COMEAU
ECW Press
$11.99 ebook platforms, $15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

She’s started recording everything her father says. His boring stories. His stupid jokes. Everything. She’s recording every single “I love you” right alongside every “Could we turn the heat up in here?” It’s all important.

Because Sunday is writing a computer virus. A computer virus that will live secretly on the hard drives of millions of people all over the world. A computer virus that will think her father’s thoughts and say her father’s words. She has thousands of lines of code to write. Cryptography to understand. Exploits to test. She doesn’t have time to be sad. Her father is going to live forever.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review:

I thought Malagash would be a small town, but it is not even that. One long road, a twisting paved red loop around the north shore of Nova Scotia. There's a tractor sitting in a field. A dirt bike leaning up against a shed. We pass a pen of llamas, who look bored as hell. The Atlantic Ocean itself comes right up to drive along beside us. Then it slips away.

The way he sounds, talking to my little brother, is different from how he sounds when talking just to me. I feel certain that it means something different too, even though the words are the exact same. This particular softness in my father’s voice is meant only for Simon.

There are parts of my father that he shows only to Simon. Parts he shows only to my mother. What if I had never heard this? What if I had never realized this?

It is a fact parents feel compelled to deny: Your relationship with each of your children is different. Each one has a different way of being themself, therefore a different side to show you and you to them. Sunday realizes this, and in realizing it pops a pustulent buboe on the buttocks of every parent/child problem: "You liked {sibling's name here} better than me!" And no parent ever says the simple truth, "Differently, darling child, never better." Routine denials, love all equally and other such impossibilities...Sunday does this wonderful bit of thinking for us all, and arrives at the correct answer. Comeau should win an award or two just for this.

I tell him that it will be our father's ghost. His memory. His echo. I tell him that a virus need not do harm. That not all self-propagating code is malicious. Our father's virus would never delete files. Would never steal passwords or spy on the intimate moments of strangers. Would not spread like cancer, but like a story. Would slip through fibre optic cables to cross oceans, would pass like radio waves through the walls of houses that nobody even knows are haunted. A ghost story that computers tell one another in the dark.

And with that, I died a little. I was utterly forlorn at the idea of a love so strong and sure emanating from a child to a parent. I never experienced that from either side. It made my own grieving heart stop with the loss I felt...not the loss of either parent, not the loss of my child, but the loss of love and family. I feel no love for my siblings, felt none for my parents, all of whom were adults when I was able to know them and self-absorbed, unkind, unpleasantly stridently needy adults who had no desire to listen to the likes of me.

Profound sadness? Not really. Regret? Grief. Poor younger me.

And the family I could have formed? Not to be. Death, despair, misery, but no family.

So reading this book was a giant act of catharsis and a huge relief to me.

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST, a welcome positive message in a world of depressing facts

THE OPTIMISTIC ENVIRONMENTALIST: Progressing Towards a Greener Future
DAVID R. BOYD
ECW Press
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges — climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved, while substantial progress is ongoing on others.

The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species — from bald eagles to gray whales — pulled back from the precipice of extinction. Thousands of new parks, protecting billions of hectares of land and water. The salvation of the ozone layer, vital to life on Earth. The exponential growth of renewable energy powered by wind, water, and sun. The race to be the greenest city in the world. Remarkable strides in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink. The banning of dozens of the world’s most toxic chemicals. A circular economy where waste is a thing of the past. Past successes pave the way for even greater achievements in the future.

Providing a powerful antidote to environmental despair, this book inspires optimism, leading readers to take action and exemplifying how change can happen.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME THIS ARC. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nine years on, this book hits different. We've just been through a truly horrifying US election, won by the lowest scum ever to win the world's most powerful political office; we can expect bad trouble to follow, on many fronts, soon.

That is going to require clear thinking and focused action. In its turn, that will require us to know where we are. The author presents his facts and draws very positive conclusions based on them.

No one can protect something they do not know the value, and the extent of. Learn! Don't despair...learn, and grown hardened to the messages of nihilism and misery and *shudder* change.

Protect our planet or we all go down together.