REARS & VICES is E.M. CARO's involving, exciting Pirate Throuple luuuv tale

REARS & VICES
E.M. CARO
Tides & Troth Books LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Black Sails and Hamilton meet in this queer, poly, spicy Historical Romance set during the 19th century Age of Revolution, when pirates briefly reclaimed the Gulf and Caribbean seas and provided crucial support toward anti-colonial nation-states. Perfect for fans of K.J. Charles, Cat Sebastian, and Courtney Milan!

HE THOUGHT HE’D BE A HERO BY NOW—AND THAT IT WOULD MEAN SOMETHING.

It’s 1816. The wars with France and America are over. Royal Navy career man Everard Anderson de Anglada sails the peacetime Great Lakes, demoted to captain of a tiny ten-gun schooner. When Preston D’Arcy, Everard’s former lieutenant and too-handsome ex-flame, forewarns him about a court-martial they must judge, Everard is begrudgingly grateful.

HE’S RADICAL, RESPECTED, UNFORGETTABLE—AND A PIRATE.

On the docket, however, is Vitaliy “Vitya” Gray, infamous pirate captain and anti-colonial weapons smuggler. Everard has crossed paths with him before—not strictly as enemies.

TOGETHER, THEY COULD BE LEGENDARY…

After a hasty jailbreak, philosophical debates, and proposals—pirate marriage, no strings—Everard finds himself, his heart, and even D’Arcy commandeered: to the Gulf of México. There, piracy is nothing like he imagined, and Vitya is everything Everard ever truly wished to be.

…SO LONG AS LEGEND DOESN’T GET IN THE WAY OF LOVE.

The Spanish crown looms. Dangerous secrets and betrayals come to light. Then Everard is offered a position with the revolutionary Galveston navy. Everard must decide: fulfill his desire for legacy… or stay beside the men with whom he’s fallen in love and make a legacy of their own.

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My Review: Well-researched historical romance with twenty-first century guys parachuted in to do the romancin'. Consent would not remotely matter to guys born in the eighteenth century, nor would equality of the sexes be so unquestioned even among the pirates. Still, I'd prefer to have this quibble (and it's only a quibble) that to squeam out over dubcon or worse scenes, or grunt in disgust at period-appropriate sexism.

The essence of the story was the geopolitical complexity of the Napoleonic Wars, arguably the real Second World War after the Seven Years' War, which counts in my mind as the real First, acted out in the slowly decolonizing New World. There are many moving parts to the mens' relationship development. The idea of throuples is now public, and gaining acceptance under several nammes including polyamory. It's interesting to see it begin to root into historical fiction. It's exceedingly unlikely to be a modern invention but of course the evidence...written words, court documents, that kind of thing...is scant and mostly subject to interpretation.

Digression: this is how progress gets lost, y'all. The evil fucks who want to stop the massive numbers of people in the world from enjoying true liberty and happiness reset the social clock with destruction of records, of books, of art that depict the things they want to deny us. If histories vanish, History is what "They" say it is, and our actual lived lives, our hoped-for, dreamed-of, briefly attained progress has to be reinvented slowly and painfully. And it can always be fought against, denied, diminished by "it's not in the records" arguments. Look up Magnus Hirscchfeld, the Edict of Torda, matelotage. We live in a Golden Age of information availability. Notice how carefully that availability is being sabotaged with fake "privacy protections" and very real power/ownership consolidations.

Matelotage is most relevant to our story, though, because most of y'all ain't heard of this gay marriage from the seventeenth century, yet two of the throuple we're following in this story are matelots. Vitya and Everard are bound in this union and are pretty good at using its spousal-equivalent privilege. Sex, when they get around to TALKING TO EACH OTHER about it, is very much part of the matelotage as we can feel sure it was for others in this and earlier eras.

My main reason for offering only four stars for this very creative and quite interesting story is that not-talking thing was done with such ridiculous and flimsy excuses...honor, the one person not allowing the other to finish a sentence, etc...that I slammed my Kindle shut so many times I worried I'd cracked the screen. Once or maybe twice...okay, especially in the early stages of figuring each other out, or just discovering them. But every time? Every topic? No one, not once, saying "listen to me, please." If that's y'all's experience of being in love, stick to novels, it's just too bleak to be borne in your life.

And not novels like this one that smash the same pathological communication style *after* the love's been established.

As endings go, this one's a humdinger. The last 20% of this story would not let me out of my chair. I got so excited as the throuple withstood the stress test of the awful betrayals!

A good, not quite excellent, love story that offers real rewards for yearning romantics.

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE, charming Regency spy story seasoned with gayness

A MINOR INCONVENIENCE
SARAH GRANGER
Entangled: Select Historical (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A French musket ball to the leg takes Captain Hugh Fanshawe from the battlefield and leaves him enduring long, quiet days compiling paperwork at Horse Guards headquarters. He knows his lameness makes him the object of pity and distaste at the stifling social engagements he dutifully escorts his mother and sister to, but everything in his orderly life changes when Colonel Theo Lindsay arrives.

Theo is everything Hugh is not. He’s a man of physical perfection and an enjoyable companion, and their friendship deepens into love. But when the army suspects there’s a French spy at Horse Guards, Hugh discovers nothing is as it seems, and the paper he shuffles daily could save his lover’s life.

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My Review: A steamless spy drama set in an underused Napoleonic Wars setting, with a lovely little gay romance on top of it. The men who fall in love aren't in rut, they're in a more Heyeresque kind of connection. The author uses on-page euphemism, as opposed to more old-fashioned "the fire flickered and died," to gloss over the physicality of sexual activity. Even a visit to a molly-house is...social, not exclusively sexual. Hugh meets Theo there, yet does not connect this to Theo's later act of seeking him out at the workplace they share.

It is the kind of story I enjoy, set in what feels like a reasonably accurate Regency re-creation. I didn't point and laugh at the...heightened...Heyerlike language, which is a feat. Trying to make champagne with Thompson seedless grapes is usually how the imitators come across; Author Granger, not so much. The spirited exchanges are there to keep me entertained while thinking "shouldn't they be fucking?"

If you're not interested in the steamier side of a story, this one will keep you busy with Hugh's idolizing of Theo as a dashing, omnicompetent godlike beauty. With his serious self-image problems. With his wounded-warrior syndrome. There is a lot to be recovering from after being crippled by a war wound, and by a lifetime of being told you're wrong just for existing.

Add in some amusing family shenanigans (his younger sister keeps Hugh and his mother on the hop, steering her away from trouble), and there was enough oddness with his friend Emily and her ambiguously intentioned attention to him to keep subplots going.

What there is not is the always desirable HEA, because that was not on offer in 1810s England. If Hugh and Thheo transgress bounds of propriety in their attention to each other, they face dreadful consequences. This results in HFN endings being the best one can hope for in this milieu...if that's a deal-breaker, be alert for it now.

A good historical story without sexual content beyond social bounds.

THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS, gay historical romantic story

THE SUPERSONIC PHALLUS
STEVEN KEY MEYERS
The Smash-And-Grab Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When cub reporters Dean and Sam of the Sinai, Colorado Sentinel investigate UFOs seen over Two-Mile Mesa, they have no idea of what they’re about to face—or of what they’ll end up doing. The time is July 1947—the great flying-saucer scare, when thousands of Americans suddenly report seeing UFOs over every part of the country.

Dean is gay, but Sam (our narrator) is decidedly not! But as they interview witnesses and maintain high-altitude stakeouts, Sam begins to fall in love with Dean. Are the UFOs to blame? Is Dean merely the handsomest man Sam’s ever seen, or a space alien? And are the UFOs actually Russian aircraft out to steal U.S. atomic secrets?

The Air Force sends P-51 Mustang fighters to shoot down Sinai’s aerial invaders, even as the Government insists people are just seeing weather balloons. But one night, after a veritable supersonic phallus streaks overhead, Dean and Sam risk everything to let the world know the truth.

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My Review: Sam...married, kid, wife pregnant...wakes up to man sex when Dean enters his life. It's the Cold War, the Lavender Scare, and they're chasing the newly-named UFOs as sightings make the world news...are they Soviet spies, are they really aliens, is this some secret intelligence project we lifted from the recently-defeated Nazis? No one knows but Sam and Dean mean to find out.

It's all told from Sam's PoV and in his voice, which honestly feels light and humorous. I was surprised by that, as he is a man with some deeply unsettling issues to deal with. Not least really lusting after Dean; though that one's tough for anyone anytime. You want someone you're not married to, that's trouble; but they're same sex and the world, the Army, the government in general are all having fits because queers = bad, queers = spies...humor might not be everyone's first option of tone.

It's not comedy, it's not tragedy, it's a dramedy. I smiled more than I laughed, first when I found out out heroes are Sam and Dean and we're in a paranormal hunt for facts and truth. I wondered if it would be fanfic for Supernatural, but that was not my impression as I read along. I'd wondered also if we were to be treated to sex scene(s) but this too was not wher Author Meyers was headed. Sam's awakening was enough of a stretch, in that day and time. Plus when you live in a small town (Roswell is clearly the model) and are pursuing the armed forces to give you information they do not want you to have...well, first rule of surviving in the news biz is "never hand your enemy the gun."

It's a short read. I'm really glad I read it to keep my mind occupied with troubles not immediate to me or real but really grounded and relatable. What it did for me was make me aware that I live a deeply fortunate life as a gay man in the twenty-first century, and how very under threat that is.

Gratitude, meet vigilance, y'all're gonna be roommates in my skull.

Fun, light of tone and serious of purpose. Serves both masters very well indeed, and for three bucks as an ebook, you won't go wrong.

Vale Richard Stevenson, 1938-2022: KNOCK OFF THE HAT

KNOCK OFF THE HAT
RICHARD STEVENSON
Bywater Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dishonorably discharged World War II vet takes a job as a private investigator and begins looking into a sudden and extraordinary wave of gay-bashing in Philadelphia.

It's steaming August in post-war Philadelphia. Clifford Waterman, dishonorably discharged from the Army for "an indecent act with a native" in Cairo, can't go back to his job as a police detective and is struggling to make a go of it as a private investigator. He's soon hired to help a young man caught in a gay bar raid who can't afford the $500 bribe a corrupt judge demands to make a "morals charge" go away.

In the blink of an eye, an entire gay neighborhood is suddenly under siege, and Waterman has to find out why the cops, courts, and the city powers that be have unleashed a wave of brutal gay-bashing—astonishing even for that time and place.

Kept moving by Jim Beam, bluesy jazz, and a stubborn sense of outsider's pride, Waterman makes his way through Philadelphia's social, political, and financial swamp to rescue a few unlucky souls and inflict at least a bit of damage to the rotten system that would lead to the Stonewall rebellion in New York City 22 years later.

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My Review: Vale Richard Stevenson, 1938-2022. This story was to launch a new series of historical mysteries that will not now see their fruition. As a standalone, this is not the most satisfying read for us who read our mysteries to see ma'at served, order restored, evil accounted for.

Why then bother to read it? Because this past could easily become our collective future.

Its thrust is the (I had hoped) well-established truth that gayness is only made problematic by the systems designed to make it so; those are always systems of greed, exclusion, and therefore profit.

Waterman is a decently well-delineated character whose embrace of Otherness resonates with me. I get entirely his desire to stand up and say, "Enough is enough," in the face of those who want only one thing: More. He says "enough" in the face of the yawning voids that scream for, demand, extort, and ruin in search of More.

I hope the pathology of organizing your life in pursuit of More is obvious. I hope the courage to say "enough" exists in greater quantity than the laziness or apathy to let the loudest, the nastiest, the least likely to forgive have their way unopposed.

Because there is no end to, no satisfaction in, no glut capable of ending the search for, More.

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

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

Rating: 3.75* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIGHTBORNE: A Novel, the best stories are in History

LIGHTBORNE: A Novel
HESSE PHILLIPS
Pegasus Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling reimagining of the last days of one of the most famed Elizabethan playwrights—Christopher Marlowe—and of a love that flourishes within the margins.

Christopher playwright, poet, lover. In the plague-stricken streets of Elizabethan England, Kit flirts with danger, leaving a trail of enemies and old flames in his wake. His plays are a roaring success; he seems destined for greatness. But in the spring of 1593, the queen's eyes are everywhere and the air is laced with paranoia.

Marlowe receives an unwelcome visit from his one-time mentor, Richard Baines, a man who knows all of Marlowe’s secrets and is hell-bent on his destruction. When Marlowe is arrested on charges of treason, heresy, and sodomy—all of which are punishable by death—he is released on bail with the help of Sir Thomas Walsingham.

Kit presumes Walsingham to be his friend; in fact, the spymaster has hired an assassin to take care of Kit, fearing that his own sins may come to light. Now, with the queen's spies and the vengeful Baines closing in on the playwright, Marlowe's last friend in the world is Ingram Frizer, a total stranger who is obsessed with Kit's plays, and who will, within ten days' time, first become Marlowe's lover—and then his killer.

Richly atmospheric, emotionally devastating, and heartrendingly imagined, Lightborne is a masterful reimagining of the last days of one of England's most famous literary figures.

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

My Review: I doubt too many unabashedly gay men throughout history are as well-known to modern audiences as Marlowe. He is one of the few in History whose sexuality does not get the "oh, no of course he was just as straight as string" treatment from the "eww-ick" homophobes. Goodness knows they've tried, but it never gets past the "no he isn't because I said no he isn't" level of argument.

No, he was, and he said so too loudly for History to get their anxious denials to be believed.

The delight of this novel, however, is the unnerving time it chooses to bring to life, that terrible last bit of existence after Marlowe left prison for the last time knowing he was not going to be allowed to live much longer for fear of what he knew becoming public knowledge. It was not an unreasonable fear, Marlowe was not a reticent man. It was possible to provoke him into indiscreet speech; he knew embarrassing truths; therefore....

It's never, ever been safe to know things about powerful people that can't be said in public. I suspect that Marlowe, poor lamb, besides being a startlingly bad judge of character was also just as addicted to risk as he was to tobacco. In the story we're told here, by a scholar of Marlowe, his life, and the times, Ingram Frizer is not with Marlowe by mere happenstance but in the role of minder while the decision of what to do about him and the risks he poses to the great and the good is determined. What actually occurs follows the official version established at law...but the unspoken and unspeakable parts are revealed.

I would give this wonderfully textured, nuanced work more stars were it not for something I'm sorry to say is a failing of mine in reading about my bygone ancestral queers: I want writers to choose a side, I want to know what they think, in every case but this one. I'm not saying Marlowe was straight, or gay, or any other modern label because I really believe you can't impute an identity to someone whose worldview quite simply didn't contain it. The torturer should as plausibly think of himself as a serial killer and a sadist if Marlowe was taking the identity "queer." "Sodomite" meant someone who performed acts of sodomy, not someone's fundamental identity. It's no small point to me.

The author, in the epilogue, presents really fun-to-read ideas about Marlowe from days gone by, from the "no he isn't because I said no he isn't" brigade, and from those like me who say identities aren't fungible. He's got sound reasoning for his viewpoint. If Marlowe was alive today he'd very likely be in a leather club somewhere making some platoon of horny men very happy. But he isn't.

For me that's a problem buying into this character. YMMV, and I seriously hope it will. Oh, and Frizer? A real man. I would not be one bit surprised if the role he plays in this story is not precisely the role he played in Deptford.

TRAMPS LIKE US, a bit of history all in 21st-century Western culture could learn from

TRAMPS LIKE US
JOE WESTMORELAND
MCD (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A treasured cult classic following a young gay man crisscrossing 1970s and ’80s America in search of salvation. Now reissued with an introduction from Eileen Myles and an afterword from the author.

Abused by his father and stifled by closeted life as a teenager in Kansas City, Joe, the wide-eyed narrator of Tramps Like Us, graduates from high school in 1974 and hits the road hitchhiking. But it isn’t until he reunites with Ali, his hometown’s other queer outcast, that Joe finds a partner in crime. When the two of them finally wash up in New Orleans, they discover a hedonistic paradise of sex, drugs, and music, a world that only expands when they move to San Francisco in 1979.

Told with openhearted frankness, Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is an exuberantly soulful adventure of self-discovery and belonging, set across a consequential American decade. In New Orleans and San Francisco, and on the roads in between, Joe and Ali find communities of misfits to call their own. The days and nights blur, a blend of LSD and heroin, new wave and disco, orgies and friends, and the thrilling spontaneity of youth—all of which is threatened the moment Joe, Ali, and seemingly everyone around them are diagnosed with HIV. But miraculously, the stories survive. As Eileen Myles writes, “I love this book most of all because it is so mortal.”

Back in print after two decades and with an introduction by Myles and an afterword by the author, Tramps Like Us is an ode to a nearly lost generation, an autofictional chronicle of America between gay liberation and the AIDS crisis, and an evergreen testament to the force of friendship.

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

My Review: When I first read this in the Aughties it was already historical fiction. It was my life, my graduating class, and my generation of gay men who were, to all intents and purposes, vanished. Many died that I knew...almost none I was really close to until the late 1980s.

Reading the story again, at well over sixty, reminded me forcefully of that *horrible* severing. All hope seemed to die. With every memorial service there was less reason to feel as though anyone cared, as though people like me were on anyone's priority list.

I started volunteering here and there. I saw christians at their absolute worst. Mothers rejecting dying sons, fathers speaking loudly with their absence...it was the last nail in my faintest glimmers of religiosity.

So being there wasn't...nice...but it did make me recall the value of community (and the reality of burnout). When my true love was dying of CMV in 1992, I had men around me who loved him, and who supported me so completely (thanks Joe and Domingo!) that I could latch onto Ali and Joe as they created their magic circle, as they ran from haven to hearth looking for home.

It was breathtaking. It was heartbreaking. It was very much the way I want to remember the squashed possibilities of gay liberation...none of this *fighting* for equal rights we've been distracted with for decades, but coming up with new ways to define ourselves in the world.

Not even my grands have come back to that level.

What might have been, sighs the young heart in the elderly chest. Visit it for y'all's selves.

DISORDERLY MEN: A Novel, unnerving in its clarity and emotional acuity...devastating, sleep-robbing historical fiction

DISORDERLY MEN: A Novel
EDWARD CAHILL
Empire State Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$27.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar.

Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.

Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.

For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and a diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.

The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . . and what share of it will he lay claim to?

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

My Review: The chilling truth is that, within my own lifetime, queer life has never been safer than it is now; and it has never been under more sustained attack than it is now.

This novel takes you into the deep, dark chasm of gay males' knife-edge of tolerated behavior when "They" decide to unleash the fury of institutional prejudice on these gay men. It doesn't take much to push an ordinary guy off his place in the socioeconomic pecking order in those times.

What made me feel so afraid was that I had friends and family who were the exact contemporaries of these men. I'd heard similar stories, though not specifically about Stonewall. In that recognition and recollection was a huge ball-peen hammer that hit me again and again. This is the existence the people who drew up Project 2025 believe is the right and proper one for me, men like me, and our siblings across the spectrum of minority behavior. These are the feelings, the troubles, the disasters that they *want*us*to*experience. It is only because, after a while, I felt more like I was reading (good) narrative non-fiction, not a novel, that I was compelled to dock a quarter star off a perfect five.

It's chilling to know this from their own keyboards and placards and gunsights.

I encourage you to read it, cishet, religious, leftist, or simply sentient emotionally literate people. Feel from the inside how this world was for those condemned to it.

Reading truly is resistance.

NO NAMES, a #PrideMonth debut novel from a poet via Minneapolis's estimable Coffee House Press

NO NAMES
GREG HEWETT
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by the iconic punk scene of the late '70s, No Names blurs the lines of affection and sexuality in a haunting tale of desire, hope, and loss.

Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from.

Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection.

As their stories collide, mistakes breed consequences that echo through the decades like the furious reverberations of a power chord.

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

My Review: Two-thirds of an excellent novel...after the twist, it's not excellent anymore. It's good, and as a contrast to almost two hundred pages of really outstanding build-up, I felt really let down by the ending. It was a messy trailing-off of several conversations, between characters and us, as well as each other. Multiple PoV novels are always...baggy...but this one's excitement and intensity came from the sense I had in the first part of the book that each person was picking up the thread of a narrative, was the response part in a call-and-response composition.

Much of that energy came from the way the voices wove around each other as they spoke of the times and events that the narrator before had no way of knowing. By the two-thirds mark, they were not telling the same story. They were following their own strands into a future not shared; it's like life, you meet, connect, intertwine for a time, then the time is over. The problem I had with that in this context is that it takes me from one kind of book...close harmony call-and-response...into another, the oratorio going chapter-and-verse through the wind-up of the stories I'd previously experienced directly.

What started as a five-star read ended at three and three-quarters because the narrative drive leaked right out, becoming severe with Mike's relating with the reader how Isaac fits in with the story. I began to nit-pick characters' word choices, their manner of addressing the facts they presented. That is never a good sign. I was disinvesting before the book ended.

But my goddesses, that first bit! A true joy of reading time spent well, and in the presence of a talented voice in storytelling. So not-quite four stars to celebrate the first novel of a writer whose next novel I want to read as soon as he writes it.

MURDER AT THE MATINEE, second quozy Bertie Carroll mystery...good fun!

MURDER AT THE MATINEE
JAMIE WEST
Brabinger Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.42 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Following on from the success of Death on the Pier, gay playwright detective Bertie Carroll returns for the second book in this golden-age-style whodunnit series, set in the exciting world of theatreland in 1930s London.

An unexpected phone call from a rival playwright puts Bertie centre stage in another mystery. Can he help unravel the motive behind a mysterious newspaper advert that boldly declares a murder will take place during a show’s third act? There’s only one problem, there is no murder in the third act of the play!

When a victim is discovered and the police are brought in, Bertie and Inspector Hugh Chapman get thrown awkwardly back together as they both work to find the killer.

The spotlight falls on each suspect in turn and, this time, even Bertie is not above suspicion. But can rivalries and differences be put aside to solve this devious murder?

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

My Review: A riff on Dame Agatha's A Murder is Announced, this quozy story of Bertie Carroll coming to the aid of frenemy Alice, with his...well, his policeman Hugh there to do...rather less than in the first book; and then narrowly miss out on taking a starring role in the murder as a suspect so that comes out okay.

The reason that sounds incoherent is that I felt more at sea this time than last. How is it Hugh, clearly being set up as Bertie's Gentleman Caller, recedes more into the background? I wasn't expecting grand passion, it may be set in the theatre world but it's 1930s London so discretion was all. However Hugh and Bertie weren't as bantering-mates-with-subtext this time. That was disappointing. I suspect we'll get more of the bantering, and maybe even that mooted swim from the first book, in the next one.

I was pretty clear on who killed Alice but really didn't know why until the polyphonic ending unfolded. This was more than enough to satisfy my series-mytery reader brain. The first book's adeptness at scene-setting that transported me, this time, to 1930s London (instead of the first book's Brighton) is very much in evidence again. The author is a theatre professional. It's clear he's also willing to do careful research into the past. It is always a pleasure to read the words of someone who presents the world being evoked with such panache and confidence.

Aside from missing more Hugh-time for Bertie and me, I felt the mystery was satisfying my series-story craving enough to get a solid four stars. I probably wouldn't have been as generous if I'd read this book first, so read Death on the Pier (my review linked above) before this. But don't miss out. Bertie and Hugh will wile away a few hours while you're focused on the made-up problems of fictional people.

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE, ladypirates who love ladies

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE
BRIONY CAMERON
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available romorrow

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa.

Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.

An unforgettable tale told in three parts, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is a thrilling, buccaneering escapade filled with siege and battle, and is also a tender exploration of friendship, love, and the search for freedom and home.

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

My Review: I think this is a story of two halves: the first half, a survival story rooted firmly in its rime and place; the second more of a fantasy fulfillment that didn't follow the rules of the first half.

The delights, so to speak, of feeling transported to the slave economy of Santo Domingo, there to meet Jacquotte and see the milieu she was destined to live in...many. The characters, the situations, the atmosphere of the town, were all set up sufficiently clearly that I invested in them. That's most of the battle in my reading world. So I was rockin' along, expecting a five, or at worst high-four, star read.

Then came the twenty-first century.

Jacquotte and company all start having very modern conversations about rights and feelings and equality. I suspect this is not realistic not because we haven't seen it before...the cultural conversation has been dominated by the white oppressors for millennia, how would it get reported?...but because this woman and her cohorts have, until now, behaved and spoken more or less like the period demands. The shift was the jarring part, not what was shifted to.

There's action, there's love, there's a lot to like. When we go off into the second half's fantasia, it's still a good read with swashes being buckled and derring being done. It just wasn't congruent with the first half. They're both enjoyable, make no mistake. I'm glad I read the story. I'm glad to get to know Jacquotte.

Be better prepared to suspend disbelief than I was and get even more out of the story.br />

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY, and so he should...and what fun getting him there

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY
CAT SEBASTIAN
Avon Books
$18.99 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An emotional, slow-burn, grumpy/sunshine, queer mid-century romance for fans of Evvie Drake Starts Over, about grief and found family, between the new star shortstop stuck in a batting slump and the reporter assigned to (reluctantly) cover his first season—set in the same universe as We Could Be So Good.

The 1960 baseball season is shaping up to be the worst year of Eddie O’Leary’s life. He can’t manage to hit the ball, his new teammates hate him, he’s living out of a suitcase, and he’s homesick. When the team’s owner orders him to give a bunch of interviews to some snobby reporter, he’s ready to call it quits. He can barely manage to behave himself for the length of a game, let alone an entire season. But he’s already on thin ice, so he has no choice but to agree.

Mark Bailey is not a sports reporter. He writes for the arts page, and these days he’s barely even managing to do that much. He’s had a rough year and just wants to be left alone in his too-empty apartment, mourning a partner he’d never been able to be public about. The last thing he needs is to spend a season writing about New York’s obnoxious new shortstop in a stunt to get the struggling newspaper more readers.

Isolated together within the crush of an anonymous city, these two lonely souls orbit each other as they slowly give in to the inevitable gravity of their attraction. But Mark has vowed that he’ll never be someone’s secret ever again, and Eddie can’t be out as a professional athlete. It’s just them against the world, and they’ll both have to decide if that’s enough.

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

My Review: I'm a Cat Sebastian stan. Her writing chops, her eye for a story, her politics...all *chef's kiss* in my experience. This derfinitely is, please note, a slow-burn love story. I don't think this is a bug, rather a feature; I'm pretty au fait with what happens between men in bed. I'm as interested in how they got there, and why, as in what it is they're gettin' up to.

The fun in this read is that, once the guys get their bodily freak on, I believe that they'll be able, and willing to stay there! These relationships, the ones you can actually picture as real and lasting, are all too rare in fiction...let alone in romantic fiction. It is not, I hurry to reassure the bodyloathers, a meaty, intimately observed intimacy; more of a noises-off kind of affair, where we know what happened and now we see what that brought to Mark and Eddie. One-handed reading is not really Author Cat's stock-in-trade, she hasn't started now.

That being my expectation, and it being met, next point of tension for many readers (including me) is the elephant in the room of any midcentury m/m story: Outing. A reporter and a baseball phenom in physical intimacy would've had a lot of anxiety about being seen to be...a little too close, a bit off in the macho world of baseball...because it would uneash the horrors of public, untrammelled homophobia on the men. This was, after all, the time of The Lavender Scare.

So this backdrop means, in my reading, the HEAs and even HFNs many writers engineer for two men being publicly together in this time-period ring hollow. "That could not happen!" I think, all suspension of disbelief flying away on noisy bat-wings of knowledge. As always, Author Cat spares me the discomfort by making these two behave circumspectly. Mark, a reporter, knows the Power of the Press, and respects the cultural norms to avoid awakening it. He's also just lost his longtime love, and so isn't exactly in a huggy-smoochy frame of mind; Eddie's in his first-ever existential crisis..."I can't do this thing I get praise and an identity from anymore! Help!"...so he's, well, not gonna rock the boat. Such a good way to ensure there's layers of meaning behind their period-appropriate decorous public demeanor.

What makes any story centered around grief readable is hope. The men here don't have a path forward, can't see through the fog of the present into a brighter, better-defined future. Only as they learn to trust each other's love and support as real, solid stones capable of being made into a foundation do they find the ease they're seeking. That was the payoff I needed from this unlikely duo's coming-together: The sense that, to their mutual surprise, they had found together the path that neither had been able to see alone.

In the end, these two find their happiness in their connection. They are, it felt to me, solidly, enduringly connected and will weather their future storms better for being together. Now, how often do fictional people draw out that level of thought and that depth of interest? For anyone who hasn't read Author Cat's earlier work, it might sound surprising that this has happened. I assure you who haven't had the pleasure that this is a long-term feature of all her stories.

Lastly, I hope you'll read this, and resonate to it. It is a very clear statement of a deep, abiding truth of the experience of being Other:

It’s not just the burden of continually lying, it’s keeping your existence a secret. When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

This book, in a period-appropriate way, presents two loving souls whose socially unacceptable love and connection truly prevent them from being erased.

A VERY GAY BOOK: An Inaccurate Resource for Gay Scholars

A VERY GAY BOOK: An Inaccurate Resource for Gay Scholars
JENSON TITUS & NIC SCHEPPARD
Andrews McMeel
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the creators of @verygaypaint, the immensely popular comedy design brand, A VERY GAY BOOK paints a cheeky and satirical portrait of the world where everything—from sports to science to soup—is gay.

Trees are gay. It’s why their branches brush up against each other so softly. Right-handed people are gay because that’s the first hand you use when you do the Macarena. Left-handed people are also gay. Magnets. Palindromes. All gay. A satirical textbook—including sections on history and heroes, customs and traditions—celebrating a very gay world, A Very Gay Book is an invitation to revel in the (both real and absurdly fictional) iconic successes of the LGBTQ+ community.

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

My Review: I don't know if everyone will "get" this very, very gay duo's sense of humor. Here's their pinned tweet from their Twitter account:

Very Gay Paint Retweeted
Nic Scheppard @Nicschepp


Gay porn is so obsessed with guys being broke. I can’t see a financially-stable stud get wrecked?? The system is so broken.
10:16 PM · Aug 4, 2022

I myownself about had an aneurysm from laughing at that. Follow the links! These guys are hilarious!

Like all humor, it's not universal...the French still think Jerry Lewis is a scream, and the Brits and Aussies love them some men in drag, among other utterly inexplicable tastes...and it's unwise to read the hole thing straight through. Humor is like Aperol spritzes or Negronis...one or two, delicious...more than that gets yucky.

I doubt this would be anywhere near as hilarious to someone straight, but I sure as heck don't understand that much about why humor even works.

A lot of the humor in here is barbed, so be aware that you're not necessarily going to be comfortable with the things they're taking aim at:

It's really up to the individual to decide how much is too much at one sitting, but I really hope some of y'all will try this truly howl-worthy collection of rude, thought-provoking, not-always-truthful snippets of prose this Pride Month.

I know I laughed!

MURDER ON MONTE VISTA, 1st Mason Adler post-WWII mystery & MURDER IN UNION STATION, 2nd of the series

MURDER ON MONTE VISTA
DAVID S. PEDERSON (Mason Adler Mysteries #1)
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s 1946, and on a hot spring night in Phoenix, Arizona, things are only beginning to heat up at the Monte Vista Road home of flamboyant decorator Walter Waverly Wingate.

Private detective Mason T. Adler isn’t thrilled to be turning fifty, and the party Walter throws him makes him even more uncomfortable. Walter has arranged a special birthday present for Mason: a private hour with the handsome, young Henry Bowtrickle in Walter’s upstairs bedroom. But the night turns deadly when his birthday gift turns up murdered.

The room was locked, no way in or out, and only Henry and Mason were inside. Mason Adler is on the case, but he is also a suspect, along with the other assorted party guests who were all downstairs at the time of the stabbing. Or were they?

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

My Review: What I expect from a first-in-series mystery is simple: Let me know what this world is about; let me in to the characters' interrelatedness; and tell me what kind of crimes we're going to be dealing with.

Can't say I didn't get all those things...a little bit too much of 'em.

The story is of Mason Adler, newly fifty gay man, and his social circle: gal-pal Lydia, long-term frenemy Walter, and cop Emil. Various peripheral people step a measure before us, but no one else really matters. The main thing about a series mystery is the series, not the mystery, and that very much comes true here. By the halfway mark there's no body worth mentioning. Things are slowly unfolding, and the tensions of Mason Adler's life are lying before us prior to a murder accelerating the plot.

Possibly one of the most mean-spirited murders I've ever encountered, spite and envy fueling the circumstances that enable the murder to take place, and then the dead body comes in for a lot of muffled amusement because of how the whole plot evolved. There wasn't much to recommend the dead one, but there was little enough to recommend a lot of these people.

Phoenix, Arizona, is a place I've never, ever wanted to be the few times I've been there. I dislike deserts. I was transported to Phoenix circa 1946 with the author's major characters. It was darn near told in real-time vignettes. I got the sense of the oppressive, horrifying heat, the blasting, battering sunshine, the dreadful helplessness of life in this kind of nightmare before home air conditioning was ubiquitous in the US. (Even with air conditioning I don't want to be in Phoenix or any other desert city. Or town. Or hamlet. Or structure. Or outdoor space.)

So there was that going against the read. The pluses were the economy of the author's characterization. He needn't linger over loving descriptions because he chooses the details that actually matter and doesn't linger on them. He also doesn't clutter up my mental landscape, choosing instead to focus on the telling details. It was a way of bringing me a vivid, textured experience without using a lot of words to do it.

But at the end of the read, I was just...repelled...by the murder's cruel, appalling conception. (Murder will never not be cruel! I'm going on about the *circumstances* not the act.) The person whose life was taken didn't get, in life or after, near enough sympathy. Then there's the person whose idea erected the framework for the murder...I truly do not ever want to see that person in this series again.

I'll certainly move on to the next entry in the series. I won't be likely to revisit this one, though.

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

MURDER IN UNION STATION
DAVID S. PEDERSON (Mason Adler Mysteries #2)
Bold Strokes Books
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Publisher Says: Phoenix, May 6, 1946

At close to midnight in the Union Station baggage room, the air is hot, still, and thick. The eleven forty-five Golden State Limited to Los Angeles is approaching rapidly when the baggage handler, Alfred Brody, notices a stray hound dog sniffing around one of the steamer trunks. The horrific discovery of a body inside the trunk can mean only one thing: there’s a murderer among them.

The young woman was certainly murdered, but who did it, and why? Suspects and motives abound as Private Detective Mason Adler investigates. He soon realizes that nothing, and no one, are what they seem to be as he races to uncover the truth and bring the real murderer to justice without becoming the next victim.

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

My Review: Oh damn. Walter's back. *shudder*

After the nasty stunt he pulled in the first book, I really don't want to believe it's going to go well for him vis-a-vis this series, if we're going to keep seeing Walter. But the good part is the mystery Author Pederson chose this time is one ripped from the century-old headlines! I was really curious to see what would happen next.

What happens is the requisite amount of banter, a close friendship between a straight woman and a gay guy, bitchy-queen Walter being a complete cow when he wasn't being a tedious crook, oh let's see...hm...oh, Emil the cop being bested by Mason again like Perry Mason beats Hamilton Burger in every contest...um...the murder was done in vain as no one gets away with anything in these books.

I don't think this one took quite as long as the first one, but these aren't propulsive "...and then what happened?!" reads. They're going to take you down the path the detective treads with him, and cause you to get your helper's badge on your efforts and merits. I particularly liked the detail of Mason's car being a 1939 Studebaker Champion, famously a cheap-to-run and stodgy vehicle. The kind of car Uncle Dale drives to Thanksgiving and parks in front of the house despite everyone urging him to take the bus.

By the standards of the day, a real plain-jane-mobile though I myownself would love to have one.

The unmaksing event that Mason stages is very interesting, and not something I expected. Let's just say that Lydia is a useful gal-pal indeed. I was very interested in the book from giddy-up to whoa, and will certainly seek out the next Mason Adler mystery to check in on everyone, make sure they're doing okay.

GREENLAND, debut QUILTBAG novel about Blackness meeting Queerness

GREENLAND
DAVID SANTOS DONALDSON
Amistad
$26.99 hardcover, available now

FINALIST for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story—and then Mohammed himself—begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

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

My Review: I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our priviliege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to fuck". One of them, dear Kip, is "to fuck over" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting fucked is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of Greenland, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings.

RECKLESS, first Exley & Dyer gay transvestite pirate romp

RECKLESS
JESS WHITECROFT (Exley & Dyer #1)
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When pirate Henry Dyer’s ship captures the French frigate Sans Souci, nobody seems to know why Captain Buckler has been chasing such a neglected and unprepossessing prize ship. The puzzle only gets more perplexing when they take the ship and find an English girl in leg irons.

It’s an old and popular love story—the pirate and the virgin who steals his heart away, only this time the pirate is the virgin and the girl isn’t a girl at all. She is James ‘Jem’ Exley, thief, molly, occasional actor and full time transvestite. Jettisoned to the New World in order to spare his aristocratic family any further disgrace, Jem is glamorous, flamboyant and fascinating.

At only nineteen, Henry is determined to prove himself a man one way or the other, and is astonished to find that nothing makes him feel like more of a man than his increasingly reckless passion for Jem. As their love leads them into trouble, the mysterious circumstances of Jem’s capture lead Henry deeper into a mystery that not only upends his whole world, but sees them running for their lives across the Caribbean.

Stolen jewels, scheming Captains and devious drag artists–Black Sails meets Blackadder in this steamy eighteenth century romp from the author of These Violent Delights and Going Sasquatch.

THIS WAS A GIVEAWAY ON AMAZON. THANK YOU.

My Review: Among the many possible variants of “surprised by love” that exist, this one is a less-than-ordinary choice to use. Henry Dyer, pirate, is not the usual hero; Jem Exley, “damsel” in very deep distress, is not the usual heroine. I’m not sure that a pirate in eighteenth-century Caribbean waters would’ve known the word “transvestite” but it’s clearly a concept any moderately immoral character would’ve encountered long ago, so I’ll go with its being used in this context without crabbing too much. The response to it in the flesh was as reasoned and reasonable as I’d’ve expected it to be.

But the molly herself? That backstory! What a way to make a character fly off the page and into my heart! The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher than “being myself would cost me my life but there is no one else I could be so, so be it.” There’s a huge softness in my readerly heart for characters who take agency and act with decision to make their Otherness into a way of being in the world that wants them to fail.

While making myself comfortable in this world, I was often thinking, “what is it here that Author Whitecroft is trying to tell me in the choices?” Usually that means I’m insufficiently wrapped in the story; here, I was reasonably sure I was being led somewhere but not sure enough of where to simply sit back and enjoy the ride. But, as the story unfolds, there is simply nothing for it but to…simply sit back and enjoy the ride. I was all up in this story from chapter two forwards. The action, my dears, simply does not let up. Whee!

The reason that elicits a "Whee!" from my ever-darkening heat-pump (can't rightly call it a heart anymore) is that I am all about quests, mysteries, puzzles in my fiction. I am also an avid follower of Ma'at, I like order. Just not the order most of y'all like...conformity ≠ order. Sameness is not safety. Look at the burgeoning problems presented by monoculture: Cavendish bananas, the ones in your grocery store, are going extinct because they're clones, identical plants, and they've been targeted by a rot that is unfixable. The precise same thing happened to the Gros Michel bananas of my childhood. (BTW the reason artificial banana flavor tastes like it does is that they were aiming for the more powerful taste of the Gros Michel variant.)

Bananas? What the hell...oh right, sameness. Anyway, this book demonstrates a strong affinity for Ma'at in her "spirit in which justice was applied rather than the detailed legalistic exposition of rules" sense. The spirit of Justice demands that Jem get his Henry into bed, into the strange and ever-shifting constellation of acts and demands and solutions that make up a transvestite prostitute thief's life in a time where the mere determination that those things constitute an identity not a pathology was inconceivable. Since this story represents a modern take on the topic, they *do* end up constituting an identity. And do you know what? I am just fine with that. As a gay man of a certain age, whose own family contains other gay men even older than I, it's not in the least inconceivable (and I do know what that word means) that people very like Henry and Jem existed and throve despite their absence of trace evidence in the historical record.

The resolution of this story's plot leaves me disposed to seek out the sequel in hopes that the author's wells have not run dry regarding the Life Piratical of Jem and Henry.

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL, atmospheric horror-adjacent QUILTBAG fiction aimed at older teens

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
ADEN POLYDOROS
Inkyard Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

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

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – YOUNG ADULT SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.

But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows.

Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next.

Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together.

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

My Review: I think there's nothing more delightful to me than queer representation in historical fiction. We were there, too, and deserve to be written into the zeitgeist.

This is Young Adult queer representation in the 19th century, and in my ongoing quest not to die above the neck before I do below it, I got the DRC. I'm really very glad that I did...this read was a great pleasure to me. The use of Jewish folk cultural touchstones...matchmakers, dybbuks being the most horrifying...the sprinkings of Yiddish, the focus...fierce focus...on family and loyalty, were all tastes of delight for this reader. The author doesn't spend inordinate time explaining things but he does provide context and some factual stuff for the more, um, ethnocentric stuff.

It is a sheer joy to see the story being set away from a) World War II, b) New York's Lower East Side, or c) the shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe. The Jewish population of Chicago has never been teensy...the Great Lakes ports were as much a destination as New York, but they get less play. I'm also, since I read The Devil in the White City and read The Man Who Made Parks: The Story of Parkbuilder Frederick Law Olmsted by Frieda Wishinsky to my oldest grandson, a big aficionado of the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition (aka "the White City") in Chicago. That venue plays quite a role in this murder mystery, though exactly how and why shall remain a secret lest I be set upon by spoilerphobes next time I go grocery shopping.

What I will say is that the squeamish should not pick the book up. There are graphic moments of bloodyness, there are awful physical violences, and of course the element of supernatural possession can't be left out. There are more 21st-century concerns like homophobia and anti-semitism (this last pervades the end of the book to a sometimes uncomfortable degree), but this is Spooktober! A few scares, some terrible spooky goins-on, that is what this month is for! Be prepared, also, for the politics of the book. It's solidly anti-capitalist, despite MC Alter's determination to earn earn earn so he can bring his mother and sisters to the Promised Land...Chicago! imagine...because that's really situational not aspirational capitalism. And Alter's failed match-cum-bestie, young Raizel from downstairs in his apartment building, is there to keep him from falling *too* deep into capitalism's cess pit. (She is, in fact, one of the book's most delightful characters, propensity to splash tea onto laps notwithstanding.)

Putting on my YA-unlover's hat, the usual prolixity...why say in ten words what can make an entire chapter?...is fully present, the stakes are APOCALYPTIC ZOMG THE UNIVERSE WILL END!! and that gets really tiring to an old fart like me who knows that, after I and you and the author are all dead the planet will keep spinning on. Probably all the better for our absence.

But that is an elderly person speaking, the audience that's here for YA is going to *eat*this*up* because every one of the elements are handled with aplomb and without the edge of tweeness I've reacted to in other YA books like they're coated in cat dander. I don't at all recommend giving this to a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old. The realities of sexual abuse aren't in any way soft-pedaled. The realities of sexual desire, that it doesn't obey rules or orders, are best left to the older end of the YA spectrum, which I think of as sixteen and up. I know y'all know y'all's kids better than I do, so understand I'm speaking in generalities and not prescribing anything.

The mystery aspect of the story, the resolution to the murders and disappearances of Jewish boys, is very well-handled and was solidly made in serious mystery form. If you're up for it, match wits with the author; if you're not, read the spooky book or the coming-out (sort of!) book or the immigrant-makes-it book. They're all here.

I think my point should be clear: Read The City Beautiful. It will please at least 80% of the folks who read my reviews.