STEVEN ROWLEY'S PAGE: a novel about testing your experience of love and a novella about being tested by love's lies

TAKE ME WITH YOU
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A poignant, hilarious, and wholly original love story, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband Norman get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were longing for something, both feeling stuck. But had Norman been so stuck that his only option was to leave Jesse behind?

As Jesse struggles to understand Norman’s disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you’ve always been one half of a whole?

When Norman’s sister Lally lands on Jesse’s doorstep with an urgent request, Norman’s absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse’s grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a strange man following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman’s disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.

In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story—an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.

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

My Review: Being left as a subject for comedy makes more sense to me now that I've left and been left often enough to really *get* why people leave. Jesse and Norman, after a lifetime together, are...ordinary. They don't have the most exciting life but they're...contented. A perfect meet-cute sets them off on a long voyage of comfortable ordinariness. The voyage ends when Norman debarks their cruise ship in a spectacular way.

What follows is Jesse's journey through grief. Where'd he go...why'd he go...is he coming back....

Reckoning up a lifetime's happy domesticity in the ruins of abandonment shouldn't be funny. Often enough it's not. Often enough it is...this is Steven Rowley, after all...but it's muted, it's in the brightly lit pastels of these men's Joshua Tree homeplace. I got to the ending and thought, "if anyone says 'don't panic' I will riot" but no, no indeed, just a very endearing flashback and some rollerblades.

It's not the same as Author Rowley has given us in tje past, it's maybe not his tippy-top form, at least for my taste; but I am happier, I am more at one with my contentment than I was before I read it.

I call that an excellent return on time invested.

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

THE DOGS OF VENICE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebok, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and The Guncle, a heartwarming story about finding oneself in one of the most romantic cities on Earth.

After months of planning a romantic holiday getaway in Venice, Paul is blindsided when his five-year marriage suddenly unravels. Fueled by heartbreak, Paul endeavors to take the trip alone.

Soon after arriving in Italy, he notices a small, scruffy, self-assured dog trotting alongside a canal with the confidence he so desperately wants for himself. When their paths cross again, Paul feels compelled to learn how his new four-legged friend thrives on his own. Amid the food, sights, and welcoming people of Venice, Paul’s journey culminates in a magical encounter that leads him to feel real connection—to a dog, to a foreign city and, most importantly, to himself.

Capturing Steven Rowley's signature wit, insight, and indelible characters, The Dogs of Venice offers another timeless story of love lost, and independence found—a holiday tonic for the soul.

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

My Review: What an awful December Paul is having: the collapse of his love; the need to hide from his lovely supportive friends while the wounds that Christastime-dealt betrayal gave flensed him to the bone start to heal; because let's be so real here...he has to go on the not-romantic-anymore trip to Venice that he planned to take with Darren, the now-ex, at a some expense so he's not around as Darren moves out, which...acceptable. He's rented a cool apartment though it turns out his landlady's got zero English and this presents some amusing miscommunications.

Also, as ways to re-enter singlehood go, a trip to Venice is fire. Most romantic sinking ruin since Atlantis, plus hot Italian guys? Sign me up for the broken-heart tour. Paul even succumbs to the sensualty of Venice by having a fling. I was glad it was just that, a fling, and at the end of the story Paul takes home some lonely introspective walks with one of Venice's stray dogs, some fairly basic grief-processing that gave me very mild hope for his post-Darren future, and a real sadness that there's such a homeless-hound problem in Venice.

I don't think this is peak Rowley, but I do think it was 93 minutes very well spent. It took me away from my deeply grouchy mood that's hung over since yesterday. For that alone, I'd give it four stars; it deserves them more for the way a slightly co-dependent man starts facing up to the cost of couplehood über alles and starting out on the path of learning how much alone gives and how little loneliness is actually in it.

MISSING SAM, urgently tale urgent told

MISSING SAM
THRITY UMRIGAR
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From bestselling author Thrity Umrigar, a thrilling and haunting story of an Indian-American woman who becomes the prime suspect when her wife goes missing.

When Aliya and Samantha have a fight one night, Samantha goes for a run early the next morning—and doesn’t come back.

Aliya reports her wife Samantha as missing, but as a gay and Muslim daughter of immigrants, she’s immediately suspected by her neighbors in Samantha's disappearance. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as everyone around her doubts her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. All the while, Samantha is being held captive, strategizing how to escape before things escalate even more. Meanwhile, Aliya must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for these women even after Samantha is rescued?

A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today’s political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being Brown and queer in America.

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

My Review: I was leery of reading this expansion on the "be careful of your words, you do not which will be your last" aphorism. I took the DRC because I like stories by and about my lesbian siblings in Otherhood, and because I'm pretty damned sure we're going to see this kind of horror again in the future so I wanted to get it out there.

Sam and Ali are well-drawn, fully realized people. We see each one's PoV, so we know what Ali doesn't, that Sam is alive. It should diminish the stakes, yet Author Umgar uses the technique well enough that it did not.

I was, for the most part, glad to keep reading the story though as parents and social media and investigators kept becoming more toxic by the page I wanted to say, "Thrity! enough already!" When piling on the trouble the story begins to feel like the artificial construct it is. Never mind that reality does this ad more to people...fiction is different, plays by different rules. When COVID hit, I hit the wall. It took some time for me to come back.

After Sam is rescued, the true horror (for me) began: How do you put yourself...your wife...you entire life...back together after the sheer awfulness of what each of you has been through? What alchemy do you need to work in order to remake bonds that have been, without either one's volition, shattered? This horror was very well, very believably, explored. The ending was the culmination of multiple strands of un/making and remodeling.

What kept me from making a bigger fuss about the book was the dropped and abandoned threads, eg Kabir's development. I loved the challenged queer marriage that had to sustain or fail the spouses...it's the way reality is when you're in a committed relationship. The resolution Author Umrigar presents is pitch-perfect. I think the story of an immigrant, a Muslim, a queer woman, interacting with the power structures that see her as enemy Other, is one we should all reckon with.

It's not like the world is waiting for us to wake up to injustice on our own. It is ringing alarm bells and sounding klaxons and stories like this one are the easy way to see why waking up to it is so important.

MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

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

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL, hope in dark times...aimed directly at older gay men

THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL
BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG
University of Nebraska Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.85 Kindle edition, available now

WINNER OF THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Romance!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s not easy for anyone to find love, let alone a middle-aged gay man in small-town America. Mike Breck works multiple part-time jobs and bickers constantly with his father, an angry conservative who moved in after Mike’s mother died. When he’s not working or avoiding his father, Mike burns time on hookup apps, not looking for anything more. Then he meets a local guy, Dave, just as lonely as he is, and starts to think that maybe he doesn’t have to be alone. Mike falls hard, and in a moment of intimacy, his pent-up hopes for a relationship rush out, leading him to look more honestly at himself and his future.

Winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, Ben Grossberg’s The Spring Before Obergefell is about real guys who have real problems, yet still manage to find connection. Funny, serious, meditative, and hopeful, The Spring Before Obergefell is a romance—but not a fairytale.

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

My Review: I so relate to Matteo, Mike's first RL shot at Love. Catalyzes something good and big; doesn't get to participate, too acerbic and just Too Much.

It's a curse, unless of course it's not. It felt very very good to read Dave and Mike's borning relationship.

A story set ten years ago about the challenges of forming relationships as gay men in homophobic Murrika. There has never been a moment where this subject, treated with hope, has been more welcome. We're now looking into the maw of Project 2025. *horripilation*

Nothing in this book leads me to believe the author was predicting the future as he wrote it. It's still a welcome moment of hope in a bleak landscape. Part of keeping hope alive is to feed it. The Spring Before Obergefell offers readers, gay men in particular, and older gay men for sure, a story that deals with the reality of family in this new age of darkness. There is always hope. It feels like there is not sometimes. Mike and his world...well...hope is what he found. That message trumps all the noise and chaos of the world.

NEARLYWED, starting #PrideMonth early and with a resounding laugh

NEARLYWED
NICOLAS DiDOMIZIO
Sourcebooks Casablanca
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An engaged couple's compatibility is put to the test during their ill-fated early honeymoon in this smart, dazzling, and provocative summer comedy perfect for fans of People We Meet on Vacation.

5 Signs You and Your Fiancé Might Be Secretly Incompatible…and #3 Will Shock You!

Ray Bruno and Kip Hayes are horrible on paper. Ray is a chaotic millennial ex-clickbait-writer who's been oversharing his every thought online since he was a teenager, and Kip is a pragmatic Gen X doctor who values privacy above all else.

But somehow it all manages to work…until Ray convinces Kip to join him for an early honeymoon at a famous lux resort in Ray's coastal New England hometown, eschewing the tradition of bachelor parties and hoping to recharge before their end-of-August wedding. When a surprising encounter with another couple at the resort leads to a series of escalating mishaps and miscommunications, Ray and Kip are forced to look at their many differences in a stark new light, turning the trip into less of a vacation and more of a test: will they be able to work through their issues in time for the big day? Or is this marriage over before it begins?

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

My Review: Frothy fun. Seriously, there's a lot to love about frothy fun all on its own. I'm not going to criticize anyone for looking to read a plain ol' entertainment.

This book's got the frothy on top, and then a deep well of relationship fiction keeping it up. (So to speak.) The set-up...a prenuptial getaway together...is classic, and introduces the idea that there's something to get away from, which while it's shown as an external...life is always stressful...is really something intrinsic to the couple's couplehood.

That being, in this story, communication skills. Ray is someone who "shares" his entire life online and has used this as a substitute for communicating his deeper emotional reality. After all, he gets the positive reinforcement he needs so badly from his curated, online self's doings, so it's all good. His mom, a deeply indulgent parent who genuinely wants to support her ebullient son, encourages his extroversion without much examination. Then why does he choose older, deep-waters Kip as a partner, the savvy reader notes. Why indeed....

Kip, a buttoned-up young (forties) doctor with a certain kind of background, feels duty-bound to be the man his ancestral expectations lead him to be. The weight of Expectations is, I assume we all know by now, is untenably heavy to carry by yourself. But those expectations make Kip unwilling to ask Ray for badly needed help...it would be All Over The Internet, and what Kip does with Ray should be PRIVATE. (Read: Shame! Shame! Shame!) Kip is, though, loyal to his love, and his love is Ray. How far can Ray push his uncommunicative love before he suddenly, finally sees Ray's essential emptiness?

The stage is set.

What happens between these oddly assorted men at the glitzy resort (a setting that in one stroke assures the reader that shiny, pretty surfaces will be shattered yet the basic architecture will survive) is a very effective communication manual. I do not intend a knock or insult with this! The effectiveness of a story always depends on its logic. The logic of working through communication issues is universally compelling. No one I've ever known has not felt the need to communicate more effectively. These men, one ruled by fear of rejection, the other by shame, discover in their love the support each needs to confront their unique fear.

Because it's the same issue. At heart, "do you love me enough to be with me when I'm just myself?" is the one question every spouse must answer. The good news is, unlike a self-help book or a workbook, reading a novel where each of these two very relatable men answer this question with a resounding "yes, you silly oaf, I always HAVE!" is fun, not a chore. There's a moment in the story where an aperçu is delivered that I think should be part of anyone who's so much as considering the commitment's mental furniture: "The reality of a marriage is all the days that come after." The biggest success of this story is that I believed Ray in all his scattered glory really wanted Kip in all his weighty seriousness to know each of them was loved, accepted, and forgiven in advance for all the mistakes to come.

What fun to find in Nicolas DiDomizio a new gay-fiction writer whose work I want to go back and read, and follow from here on.

A FRACTURED INFINITY, the depths and lengths a man will travel for his true love & OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE, Pakistani gay coming-of-age family saga

OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE
TAYMOUR SOOMRO
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A charged, hypnotic debut novel about a boy's life-changing summer in rural Pakistan: a story of fathers, sons, and the consequences of desire.

At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family's feudal estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family—to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.

Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls his manager; and most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.

Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro's Other Names for Love is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country's troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.

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

My Review: What there is to say about fathers and their gay sons...well, that's just an ocean of story without any limits that I'm aware of. Fathers and sons...disappointments...sadness and silence, rage and screaming...all and none and more. It's a relationship most sons have, even if sometimes it's a relationship with an absence or a cipher. It's always going to resonate with fathers because of the terror of being inadequate, as their own fathers were, and with sons for the same reason.

This short, powerful read is the kind of take on the evergreen that leaves the reader not sure where his sympathies lie. Rafik is not really sure what the hell to do with Fahad; and equally, Fahad is not sure how to take Rafik's overbearing attempts to induct him into a life and lifestyle inimical to him. Not solely heterosexuality...the powerful political and economic family that Rafik comes from and wants to perpetuate.

I don't suppose anyone reading this is surprised that this is the crux of the story.

What transpires, and how we respond to it, is all down to the manner in which this eternal and evergreen tale is told. I wasn't always sure I liked the third-person narrator's abrupt shifts from Rafik's to Fahad's point of view. It's effective, in the sense that it conveys the broken relationship and poor communication between father and son. It's not always pleasant, though. It can feel jarring, and while I accept that was Author Soomro's intent, it's not always a positive service to the story.

What the family saga, no matter how compact one makes it, always does is spread the emotional focus of a story. Mousey, Rafik's cousin and rival for control over their feudal family estate, is limned deftly in relatively few words. His presence is more air than flesh...and then Ali, the local of Rafik's family estate, the one whom he entrusts with manning-up his fey son, is from the moment he appears a fleshly figure, outlined in the light of young love and intense desire. And, like those things, as fleetingly there but always, always part of one's mind, heart, body.

The beautiful as well as beastly problems of family, then, are our roadmap. And their inevitable end. There's no one gets out of this family alive, my father once said to me; I've never been sure if it was humor, threat, or sad truth he spoke. And so it is with all families. I'm totally sure the events of this novel...and its multivarious progenitors, from Lawrence's Sons and Lovers back to Balzac's Sarrasine...took place in slightly different form somewhere, sometime. The gift Author Soomro offers us is that he found the uniquely, specifically Pakistani iteration of this deviant's tale, and deftly turned it into the Platonic solid of the story.

While the son never has a father he can relate to, he never gives his father any kind of solidity by denying him a future. A lot of what Rafik can't reconcile himself to is the way the world changes, has changed. It's a grandparent's trick, to turn that terror of loss into an anchor of immanence. Rafik and Fahad don't ever see the world through the same lenses. (Where did those glasses come from?) They, like real fathers and sons, never wonder "what can I do?" but bemoan "what could I have done?"

A story of great affecting power, told elegantly, with honest sadness and truthful anger. Sounds like a great way to spend a winter's afternoon reading.

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

A FRACTURED INFINITY
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link; any website that will not even allow you to search for its products without enabling cookies is not going to get redirects from me)
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling race across the multiverse to save the infinite Earths—and the love of your life—from total destruction for fans of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Time Traveller's Wife and Rick and Morty.

Film-maker Hayes Figueiredo is struggling to finish the documentary of his heart when handsome physicist Yusuf Hassan shows up, claiming Hayes is the key to understanding the Envisioner—a mysterious device that can predict the future.

Hayes is taken to a top-secret research facility where he discovers his alternate self from an alternate universe created the Envisioner and sent it to his reality. Hayes studies footage of the other him, he discovers a self he doesn’t recognize, angry and obsessive, and footage of Yusuf...as his husband.

As Hayes finds himself falling for Yusuf, he studies the parallel universe and imagines the perfect life they will live together. But their lives are inextricably linked to the other reality, and when that couple's story ends in tragedy Hayes realises he must do anything he can to save Yusuf's life. Because there are infinite realities, but only one Yusuf.

With the fate of countless realities and his heart in his hands, Hayes leads Yusuf on the run, tumbling through a kaleidoscope of universes trying to save it all. But even escaping into infinity, Hayes is running out of space—soon he will have to decide how much he’s willing to pay to save the love of his life.

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

My Review: Likeable people can be reprehensible. Gay men who will do literally...literally...anything for the men they love can be villains. Because, you realize as Hayes perpetrates some truly terrible actions while retaining the same charm and winning ways as led you to invest in him from the beginning, the world doesn't have that many univalent monsters.

What I love best about stories with flawed protagonists is how relatable they are. We're all flawed. And Hayes, he's flawed enough to make him a menace, what he does...causes...to be the engine of this exciting and action-heavy multiverse thriller. Being awakened to an undreamt-of reality, to be chucked into a world that one never once thought might be real, to have the shocking and sudden revelation that someone until now a stranger is, in fact, The One...that's just the first few pages! This script is gonna keep the butts in the seats with no popcirn trips for sure!

Well...okay, that's a small exaggeration. It's not quite that action-packed but it sure as hell feels as though it is. The strangeness of a filmmaker being the one and only person who could resolve the problem of how to use, whether to believe, a fortune-telling device was, honestly, short-changed. It's a point raised, dealt with by saying, "yep that's how it is" and we're off to the races! In fact, there is a lot of the world-building that is treated in this "just the facts, ma'am" laconic way and then it's Gospel.

You did notice the absence of a fifth star...now you know (most of) why.

The merry chase that Hayes and Yusuf, the inamorato, go on across the dimensions is like reading a spec script from a super-excitable young person with not clue one what "budget" means. What makes that fun is the budget is your mind's dopamine-reward system. What makes that sometimes wearing is the film metaphor is the spine of the book...it is literally holding every scene in the story up, leading them together, and the casting of the characters is exactly that: Casting. It's going to be a rough ride for some. I am one. But the roughnss of the ride isn't a deal-breaker because the way this sled handles is *chef's kiss*

Think of Boston. English people, think of Oxford. Got the picture set? Now...change the color of the streetlights and make the roofs green. That's the experience of traveling in Hayes's multiverse...it really is his, he (one of him) is the inventor of the device that enables all this traveling that we're here talking about. And that Hayes, whom the characters we're following most closely refer to as "Figueiredo" to be clear that they mean the evil SOB who wants (for perfectly understandable reasons) to blow the multiverse up one strand at a time, even he isn't a caricature. Insane. Lost to Humanity. But not ever a risible over-the-top cartoon villain.

But those green-roofed mercury-vapor-lit alt-timelines are real, and he's made it impossible for "our" Hayes and Yusuf not to know, and deal with knowing, what it costs to stay alive in a truly random quantumverse. It changes a person to realize what carnage they've left in their wake through this one "wild and precious life" that Mary Oliver so beautifully committed poetry to describe. Now...think about this...there's a lot more than one, and you now know because you can't not know exactly what carnage you've left behind in it all.

It's damned hard to believe this is Author Tavares's first novel. The economy with which he built the pyre of stakes for each strand of the multiverse...and the aplomb with which he lights the stakes into an inferno of loss and rage and gut-hollowing sadness...usually come to a later-career novelist. It takes time to build faith and willingness to go all in and all out at the looming obstacles armed only with one's talent. Yet here he is, attempting and succeeding first time out.

So maybe a few details fell under the table. A last serving of your favorite dish disappeared and you don't have a dog to blame. Big fat deal! You're in great hands as a truth gets told you: Gay men love hard, care deeply, and fight dirty to protect their man.

Even when it's not pretty.

This is what I look for. It's what I want more of. And it's only his first novel! What a great way to celebrate a new year: Read a high-delivery first novel.

THE ENGAGEMENT: America's Quarter Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage & PROUD BOYS AND THE WHITE ETHNOSTATE: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination

PROUD BOYS AND THE WHITE ETHNOSTATE: How the Alt-Right Is Warping the American Imagination
ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN
Beacon Press
$24.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A critical analysis of the intellectual productions of the alt-right—necessary reading for all who seek to counter its appeal and expansion.

The "alt-right" has sadly become a household term. From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, it has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly through America's cultural, political, and digital landscapes. But the alt-right is also mercurial and shape-shifting, encompassing a range of believers and ideas that overlap with white nationalism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism. It provides a big and porous tent to those who subscribe to varying forms of race and gender-based exclusion.

In Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State, historian Alexandra Stern begins with the premise that alt-right literature, most of which exists online, should be taken seriously as a form of intellectual production that has distinct lineages, assumptions, and objectives. Applying the tools of historical analysis, cultural studies, and other interdisciplinary approaches, she explores its conceptual frameworks, language, and narratives. In doing so, she is able to probe the deeper meanings and underlying constructs, concepts, and frameworks that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, sexism, and other social hostilities.

Like George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, Proud Boys and the White Ethno-State is a key tool for combating today's white supremacist ideologies.

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

My Review: What?! A four-star political review at Christmas?! That...that's not what you do, Sirrah.

Let's say I've still not learned my lesson. Political stuff is very much not what most people I know want to read, at least at this time of year. Y'all should read it because...never mind. No one's going to eat their spinach because I said to.

What I *will* say to the two or three whose noses are as yet unwrinkled and eyes still open is that the author delves deep into the cesspit of this reprehensible "ideology"'s apologetics. She does so without coming across as minatory or dismissive, as I do. She clearly shows what the "reasoning" is behind this claptrap and, being an academic, points out where it's deficient in its grasp.

What makes that so very valuable is that we, the unconvinced but still engaged, don't have to experience the awfulness of a people trying to talk themselves into believing they are Superior. I can barely type that sentence without wanting to laugh while barfing.

Anyway. The point of me reviewing it is to say you definitely would learn a LOT about the January 6th events if you read this; you would understand a lot more clearly why the movement is moving peristaltically through the Body Politic of the US; and your grasp of what is at stake in 2024 will impel you to action in place of apathy.

Learn what you don't know that you don't know.

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

THE ENGAGEMENT: America's Quarter Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage
SASHA ISSENBERG
Pantheon Books (Non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States—the most significant civil rights breakthrough of the new millennium

On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage's unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable.

It is a story that begins in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequence of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage. In the White House, one president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which elevated the matter to a national issue, and his successor tried to write it into the Constitution. Over twenty-five years, the debate played out across the country, from the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts to the epic face-off over California's Proposition 8 and, finally, to the landmark Supreme Court decisions of United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges. From churches to hedge funds, no corner of American life went untouched.

This richly detailed narrative follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other. Following a cast of characters that includes those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is certain to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.

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

My Review: I disagree with the publisher's decision to use the phrase "same-sex marriage" in the sales copy. It's not about the sex organs of the people involved. It's about the equality of access to the benefits of the legal state of marriage to all people who wish to avail themselves of it.

If marriage is a cornerstone of a properly functioning society, then what is the justification for denying access to it to the people who wish to engage in it? If your church doesn't choose to solemnize or recognize marriages between people of different faiths, or skin colors, or the same sex, no one can force you to do so. It's against the law that separates church from state.

Your personal fantasyland has no place in the county clerk's office where marriage licenses are issued.

If that's not how you see it, you're wrong.

This book's almost a thousand pages and there's a LOT to learn in here...the role of activists in changing the public conversation is delightfully thoroughgoing...and there's a lot of good reasons to learn it. What gives me pause is the sheer heft of the tome! I very definitely have a dog in this fight and it was still a serious commitment that I took a long time to fulfill. As the current Supreme Court has shown us, there is no such thing as established law when the scum of the Earth want to resist things changing in ways they're not comfortable with.

Might be time to get your eyes around this well-written and thoroughly sourced and closely argued tale of how Justice was finally served.

The Kindle edition's so cheap and it's SO much easier on your wrists...plus they've made checking endnotes a whole lot simpler in modern Kindles as well. A great bargain!

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, coming-of-(middle)-age story set in familiar suburbia

THE TOWN OF BABYLON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Astra House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction! Awards will be presented on 16 November 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

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

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.