THE BOOK OF DAVID, powerful evocation of the grief of losing your love

THE BOOK OF DAVID
JEAN-LUKE SWANEPOEL
Kindle edition (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gut-punch record of what remains when an imperfect relationship between two men comes to an abrupt and tragic end. A tender exploration of longing, memory, and regret, and ultimately of love at its messiest.

When Leon Jonker meets David Hale, David is naked on a San Francisco beach. Six months later, they meet again and begin a relationship which will end with David’s death.

Leon, unsung novelist, retreats to South Africa and there attempts to write David out of his system. But falling in love with David—loud, vulgar, and uninhibited—was easier than falling out of love is proving to be. The firsts, Leon discovers, come to mind much easier than the resentments, the recriminations—the rest.

There are two sides to the story of every relationship, and somewhere in between lies the truth.

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

My Review: There aren't only two sides of any love relationship, there are multitudes...people who love you, hate you, all the points on the spectrum between those poles all invest in some version of the narrative you're living. I think this slender work of queer relationship fiction operates from that reality.

We spend time with the men as they collide on a nude beach in San Francisco (David's nude, so ipso facto it's a nude beach), Leon there from his native place in queer-unfriendly South Africa after his parents emigrate from there to California, and sparks fly. The lust is immediate; love comes (!) later. Or is it just agreeable sex between lonely men...is it love from Leon to David, from David to Leon, all these things in turn?

A short novel of a turbulent interconnection told by Leon mostly, with bits and bobs from David's journal. It's raw, it's honest, it's complex. I like all of those characteristics in my gay fiction. Us queer men are often flattened in affect to our genitals and organs. Thee guys aren't a standard couple, David being twenty years younger than Leon. This resonated with me. David coming from a very different background to Leon did as well.

Leon processes his grief at David's death...not a spoiler, it's there throughout the story...right in front of us, really truthfully and in the fits and starts I know so well from my own life lived in grief. We don't expect to be sent on a spiral into our past, but *wham* some invisible-to-others Thing happens and it's time to process the loss. Again.

Jean-Luke is a Goodreads connection of mine. This is the first of his three (through May 2025) books I've read. I feel sure I'll enjoy his other work because this slender book made such a good impression on me. I love being able to recommend books by people I've known for a good while; it's fun to say, in honesty, that someone I know (however slightly) has made a fine story out of the pain and loss of Life lived in love.

I will say that the dislikable Leon as the main narrator was not always agreeable, though I understand the choice. Even the spikiest hearts give love, it just looks a little weird sometimes. But a full fifth star was not possible on the back of that minor quibble.

THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS, a lovely story of discovering your true self

THE FANTASIES OF FUTURE THINGS
DOUG JONES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A compelling and timely debut novel following two Black men tasked with overseeing the destruction and gentrification of the predominantly Black neighborhoods surrounding Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics.

The Fantasies of Future Things follows two Black men working for the real estate development company responsible for the revitalization of Summerhill in Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Olympics. But Summerhill is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and real estate agents Jacob and Daniel know that “revitalization” is code for “gentrification”—which means they will be tasked with displacing people from their own community.

Brooklyn-born Jacob, a recent Morehouse graduate, is armed with the hopes of his parents and has big dreams about the life he should be living. Daniel, a native of Atlanta, is tired, angry, and disillusioned with his career and ready for a change. While different in many ways, Jacob and Daniel are coming to grips with many of the same accepting their sexuality, dealing with the pressures of family, wrestling with the conflicting morality of their jobs, and coping with the daily trauma that comes with being Black in America. As we follow the parallel journeys of these two men, and in the face of towering obstacles, Jacob and Daniel must decide what they are willing to do for themselves and for their communities.

This lacerating, bold, and moving novel deftly explores our need for intimacy and the harm of internalized homophobia, the relationships Black men have with family and each other, and the restrictive masculinity so often required of them.

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

My Review: The 1990s are very recent, right? What do you mean, thirty years ago?! Thirty years ago it was 1966!

I need a lie-down.

So that trauma being delivered to my undeserving psyche, I set about reading this book in an existential crisis mode, which turned out to suit the read down to the ground. Jacob and Daniel are pursuing dreams that they've bought into but did not create, do not trust, and can not break free of. The price of the men getting what they were ambivalently pursuing is the meat of this story.

I'm rootin' for this book to succeed from the off, is my point. I think the exploration of what a man will do to survive versus what does that man need, want, and desire to make his survival into a life is what makes a story one that stands out from the crowd. Jacob's Morehouse degree and the weight of his Brooklyn-originated family's desire for him to continue the bougie life and style they love is at variance with his lived experience working to "gentrify" a living community away from its residents. Daniel's more local experience as a fatherless boy coming to manhood in Atlanta is rooted in a life more like that of the people the two men are displacing. While both men are striving to make lives defining themselves as materially successful, the cost in honesty about themselves, and in the acceptance of the shady tactics of the developers, is bitterly poignant.

Daniel and Jacob are well-rounded characters. They felt to my reading eyes like people I could pick out on a street. I was fully convinced when Daniel got a lead on his father's identity at the choice he made sprang from a real person's heart and mind. Jacob's entanglement with social-worker Sherman and its soul-awakening consequences also felt as though it was something I heard from Jacob's actual lips. I was that enmeshed in this story's reality, and was disappointed when I had to come out of it.

I don't imagine a lot of readers will like the slightly pat resolution. I don't think it was necessarily the best possible way to end this story. I did feel it had the honesty to bring closure to the plot. Would a slightly more open-ended resolution have gained it a full fifth star? Yes. But this is a complete story, one that does a lot of honest and unflinching soul-searching among its characters, and that matters a lot.

Four and a half stars for its loevely sentences, and its loving soul searching truth-telling ways.

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.

WELCOME TO FOREVER, lovely meditation on what makes you, you

WELCOME TO FOREVER
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping, psychedelic romance of two men caught in a looping world of artificial realities, edited memories, secretive cabals and conspiracies to push humanity to the next step in its evolution.

For fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Ubik, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Evangelion.

Fox is a memory editor—one of the best—gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Center for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe.

Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself. But he quickly realises his world is changing, unreliable, and echoing around itself over and over.

As he unearths endless cycles of meeting Gabe, falling in love and breaking up, Fox digs deep into his past, his time in the refugee nation of Aaru, and the exact nature of his relationship with Khadija. Because, in a world tearing itself apart to forget all its sadness, saving the man he loves might be the key to saving us all.

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

My Review: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind only gay it up. I loved that film, and this book, for the same reasons: They show us how extremely integral to our sense of self and buying in to the social construct of reality memory is. If someone doesn't share your memory of something, is your memory wrong? If you can't find a memory in your mind, is it gone? Where'd it go?

After the strokes I had in 2023, these questions are more important than ever to me. They were never unimportant to me but have gained urgency as a result of that crisis. Reading this book with its structural similarity to my own experience of needing others...the kindness of others is literally everything, y'all, practice giving it as well as receiving it....to help me find my sense of myself in the world was satisfyingly resonant.

Questioning one's identity is a thing we're told magically stops for queer people when we come out. (Spoiler alert: It does not.) All the jostles to one's sense of self that a long-term intimate relationship brings are wildly out-of-proportion shocks to many of us. Fox meeting Gabe, meeting him again and again, and still coming up against that shocking wall of The Other as a complete and entire being not knowable to yourself, makes this a wonderful piece of relationship fiction. It's very much also a SFF exploration of overweening tech hubris. It's also a sly jab at the savior complex of the people who look at humanity as a set of problems to be solved. All of these facets are inherent in the story's conflicts, in the quest that Fox sets out on to rediscover and reintegrate himself after trauma.

I'll say that, after the success that was my read of A Fractured Infinity, I went into this sophmore effort hoping for no slump and wishing for an out-of-the-park homer. I got neither. I got the top-quality expansion on the strengths of the first novel, its relationships, and that is way more than enough to get an extra half-star from my stingy self. A full star didn't happen because the first book's film-editing style didn't thrill me this time, either. I honestly expected scene numbers and location directions. I suspect Author Tavares uses shot lists to organize the stories he tells...hoping for his sake this makes the film industry take him up and film both his stories.

This story should be of extra deep interest to readers over 35 because that group has, as a rule, experiences like Fox's and Gabe's to bring to the table. It is straight-people safe, no NSFW smexytimes to shock and/or affront you. The love story, the trajectory of a man constructing and reconstructing his life after a horrible, external trauma, ought to draw in all identities...or so I hope in this polarized world.

Very much a recommended #PrideMonth read for us and for allies all.

I MAKE ENVY ON YOUR DISCO, solid debut of a strong storytelling voice

I MAKE ENVY ON YOUR DISCO
ERIC SCHNALL
Zero Street Fiction/University of Nebraska Press
$21.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

A trip that begins in isolation evolves into one of deep connection and possibility. In an intensely concentrated series of days, Sam finds himself awash in the city, stretched in limbo between his own past and future—in nightclubs with Jeremy, a lonely wannabe DJ; navigating a flirtation with Kaspar, an East Berlin artist he meets at a café; and engaged in a budding relationship with Magda, the enigmatic and icy manager of Sam’s hotel, whom Sam finds himself drawn to, and determined to thaw. I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute to Berlin, a novel of longing and connection, and a coming-of-middle-age story about confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be.

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

My Review: Sam's got a problem. He doesn't like his life much, right now at least, in no small part because his husband's got an itchy zipper, his career's reached the same-ol' same-ol' stage, and he's nudging forty...gay man's death. What better idea could a man in these dire straits have than to run away from home?

"Home" in New York City; he runs to Berlin on the rather flimsy pretext of an art opening...has this yutz heard of climate change and carbon footprints?!...in search of a path to the future. This reminded me of a very common trope in fiction, middlescence I call it in tribute to my old friend Juanice. She took the old-fashioned view that her husband was going to stray because he was reliving his adolescent horniness stage one last time, this time knowing what he was doing. Sam's a classic example of that middlescent man.

So was Less in the eponymous novel. I really disliked that novel.

The idea that one should run away from problems that absolutely won't fix themselves is an evergreen for novelists because it makes the narrative structure obvious and the stakes unambiguous. Your fish is out of water, your side characters write themselves. And the metaphorical journey/quest will never run out of steam. Okay, then there's the debut novel bit: Wise novelists spring from the acorns of the successful tropes past topiaried to order for their garden of prose.

This iteration of all the above uses the material to do what we hope for when we buy a relationship novel. It convinces the reader to invest in the characters, it affords us room to look at the ways and means Sam uses to escape as markers of solution, resolution, completion. Interestingly to me, this novel eschews the easy answers and instead makes us live in a real-life space of ambiguity.

Things end. Sometimes cleanly, without edges that could be kintsugi'd together. Mostly not, though. Mostly the Sam Singers and Lesses of the world do not get clean, fresh starts because that is exceedingly rare in life. There's a lot of charm in the kind of ending that spawns new beginnings. This book's stuffed full of those...though in my experience the new beginnings learned from travel are, of themselves, ephemeral. Their main value in my life has been to prove to me that new beginnings are possible. The intensity of Sam's connections to Jeremy the straight poet and Magda the stuck concierge bid fair to be short-lived; Kaspar the love interest, though, might be different. Might be.

The irony of seeking one's way forward in Berlin, that city resolutely planted in its pasts, isn't commented on in some arch or knowing way. That facet of the story's quietly acknowledged by Sam's attendance at the art opening that has as its topic what Germans now call "Östalgie", or nostalgia for the dear, dead days of two Berlins, two Germanys. The switch to capitalism was not smooth, and is not smoother now it seems. Culturally anyway that all collides hardest in the place that was defined by The Wall. My one and only trip to Berlin was pre-Wall fall, so I actually kind of get it. Nostalgia for how things were definitely communicates itself to those who were NOT there. Humans are weird and define "coolness" in very exlusionary ways. Sam, whose career is in the arts, gets this in his bones, since it's part and parcel of that world to exclude all but the wealthiest and most sophisticated. Those are overlapping but not identical groups; they are each quite exclusive, in every sense of the word, though not of each other.

So that's why I don't give the book five stars. I enjoyed the read. I like the characters. I really like the ambiguous ending. I don't care for the run-away-from-home trope. I ended up, mostly, not resonating with the way Sam drifted through Berlin "Östalgie" with what felt to me like very little curiosity. When an adult travels, but doesn't question the place and its history, I don't see why the author set the travel destination where they did. Author Schnall gave me a decent day's reading. That's great.

I would've liked to have been given an awakening of curiosity about Berlin, akin to the effect of The Sheltering Sky or even Death in Venice. Not, I hasten to assure you, a fault of craft on Schnall's part. More a lacuna between my expectation of a novel about a traveler to a place and what I got about the place.

I hope you'll try this debut novel out.

STARLIGHT, third in Lisa Henry's DARK SPACE trilogy, ends Cam and Brady's outer space adventure in style

STARLIGHT
LISA HENRY (Dark Space #3)
Lisa Henry
$5.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Brady Garrett is back in space, this time as an unwilling member of a team of humans seeking to study the alien Faceless and their technology. It’s not the first time Brady’s life has been in the hands of the Faceless leader Kai-Ren, and if there’s one thing Brady hates it’s being reminded exactly how powerless he is. Although dealing with the enigmatic Faceless might actually be easier than trying to figure out where he stands with the other humans on board, particularly when one of them is his boyfriend’s ex.

Cameron Rushton loved the starlight once, but being back on board the Faceless ship forces him to confront the memories of the time he was captured by Kai-Ren, and exactly how much of what was done to him that he can no longer rationalize away. Cam is used to being Brady’s rock, but this time it might be him who needs Brady’s support.

This time Brady is surrounded by the people he loves most in the universe, but that only means their lives are in danger too. And when Kai-Ren’s fascination with humanity threatens the foundations of Faceless society, Brady and Cam and the rest of the team find themselves thrust into a battle that humans have very little hope of winning, let alone surviving.

•FIRST NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•SECOND NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•

My Review: It's time for the ride to end, it seems. The third and possibly final outing in the Dark Space series dropped on 1 December, and I was up all night devouring it. Author Henry, all is forgiven for the FOUR-YEAR WAIT you subjected us to.

Ahem.

The ride to Kai-Ren's homeworld, or so the men and the audience assume, is on the Faceless battle-regent's (heh; the joke makes sense after this book, promise)...vessel...that has an atmosphere shareable by humans if not particularly pleasant to them. It's also downright inimical to their tech. (A thing I'd think Cam, accustomed to the vessel as he must be, might've mentioned was a possibility, but we're never told such happened.) Luckily, Cam's ex and Brady's object of derisive jealousy Chris Varro thought ahead and brought pencil and paper notebooks! (Although how the paper stays inscribable is somewhat beyond my ready comprehension.) And he's prowling Kai-Ren's...vessel...making copious notes and poking around wherever he can find to go. All unmolested by the Faceless.

In fact, they appear to have no particular interest in the human passengers, not troubling themselves to provide food and water and sanitary arrangements. Of course, the men (and Lucy) brought some food and Doc and Brady brought cigarettes (ickptui and why hasn't the devastated Earth stopped growing the noxious resource-hogging tobacco plant?!), but no one knew how much they'd need. They're in the, um, third month? how does one accurately measure time in an alien environment? of a voyage without a set duration. Where they're going is unknown, how long it will take is unknown, how the...vessel...propels itself is unknown...lots to learn by Humanity, and Chris is the only one we actually see doing the work of figuring it out.

No wonder Brady hates him. He's like Cam: The omnicompetent hero-guy, only this one doesn't care about Brady so he must be a jerk. And why was it again that Cam left him, or he left Cam, or however that was?

And if it was weird for me to be sharing a room with my boyfriend’s ex, how fucking weird was it for him to see us together? At least he didn’t try to pull rank on me anymore, and I didn’t try to stab him in the throat with a screwdriver. We were a work in progress, Chris and me.

These thoughts are part of Brady's ruminating (in the psych-problem sense) about how much he's a waste of space on this trip while simultaneously, and redemptively in my eyes, worrying about the bright spark that is Lucy. Is she developing properly in this weird environment? Is her bright, inquisitive nature going to make her into a Cam instead of her rage-inducing reffo (refugee to us 21st-century Murrikinz) background making her into a Brady? It is a sign of Brady's growth as a person that he's worried about Lucy's personhood on this voyage into the utterly unknown:

Here, Lucy was with me. I was looking after her, just like our dad had wanted. I had Cam as well, and he was more than I’d ever dared to hope for. Cam saw better things in me than I ever saw in myself.

Knowing that someone else sees you differently from the way you see yourself, for better or worse, is a sign of increasing self-awareness and hope, and not a second too soon in Brady's case. His ragey adolescent acting out is touched on in this book but not seen in action. Thank goodness. I was way over that after Darker Space, I must say.

So the routine, set largely by the Doc and his analog clock, abetted by Chris-the-eternal-officer, ticks along until after about three months of relatively unchanging conditions Something Happens. Kai-Ren's...vessel...has finally revealed its true nature to the men's combined observational powers. It is a spoiler to mention it, so I won't, but suffice it to say that the entire purpose of this trip has been to take the humans with the Faceless to a place in the galaxy where the Faceless can begin a new generation. Kai-Ren's position in the inscrutable hierarchy of the Faceless is bolstered and enhanced by the presence of the humans and he shows them off to the lower-ranking Faceless in some humiliating ways. The humans aren't in any position to fight against this, or back after things happen; the Faceless are simply not killable in any ordinary way.

Extraordinary ways have a way of happening quite extraordinarily often in fiction, have you noticed?

As we're entirely in Brady's head during this trilogy of books, we don't see anything from Kai-Ren's PoV and we don't get any non-Brady-level views of Faceless society. But the events that form the climax of the book are all Brady all the time, from the shocking and unexpected moment that disaster strikes, to the intense and exciting ways that disaster gets amplified, and thence to the cause and the resolution meeting in a scene that left me slightly weakened from clenching and sweating. Faceless society has been dealt a major surprise, and Kai-Ren is the vector of and the victim of it. Humanity's role? Casualties, of course, because whether elephants fight or fuck, the grass suffers. Not entirely powerless at last, possessed of a secret weapon that absolutely no one could've predicted would exist, Brady (especially), Chris, and Cam all unite in purpose to get themselves to safety...possibly at long last not illusory!

Thus does Author Henry leave us after around six hundred pages of Brady and Cam's life together. It's barely the beginning of the journey, that much we're sure of:

And after that he kissed me, and told me that he loved me, and the universe shrunk to just the two of us.
***
I would never understand where Cam found his faith, not if we were together for an eternity.
***
...Cam’s freaky prescience...I think that was all him. Or I was as easy to read as book. The sort with pictures that popped up.

Brady's learning how to conceptualize a future that has Cam in it. He's even admitted out loud that he needs to get psychological help when they get home. He's growing up at last, and he's lucky enough to have someone to grow with who is willing and able to grow along side him.

The surprises in this book are too spoilery to go into. But I very, very much want you to know that they make the future for Humanity a lot more interesting, and I hope very strongly we get more views of that world.

He hinted broadly.

DARKER SPACE, second Brady-Cam-and-Faceless space opera, good gay SF

DARKER SPACE
LISA HENRY (Dark Space #2)
Lisa Henry
$4.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Brady Garrett is back on Earth. He’s living with his partner Cam and they’re raising his sister Lucy together. Life is better than some feral reffo from Kopa has any right to hope, and Brady knows it. He’s even grateful for it, most of the time. He loves Cam, even though he’s afraid that he’s not good enough for him, and he’s still having nightmares about the alien Faceless.

Cameron Rushton loved being a pilot once, and he still feels the pull of the starlight. He’s building a life with Brady now, and with Lucy. Life is good, even if it’s not without its complications. Both Brady and Cam are dealing with the endless cycle of interviews, tests, and questions that the military hierarchy hopes will reveal the secrets of the aliens who could very easily destroy humanity. They have each other though, and together they’re making it work.

But from out in the black, Kai-Ren is still watching and everything Brady and Cam think they’ve won, they stand to lose all over again.

•FIRST NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•THIRD NOVEL REVIEW IS HERE•

My Review: Pretty much all four stars are for the last 50% of the book. It isn't necessary to grind us into Brady's deeply boring late-adolescent angst for an entire half of the book. At least Brady and Cam are hilarious together. Cam's so patient with Brady's annoying-as-fuck oppositional disorder! What he has to put up with...

“Crewman Garrett,” Stockade Sam said when the MPs dumped me in his custody again. “Your usual room?”

It's hilarious, spot-on, and deeply telling. But I guess when a man has kept you alive by sharing his literal heartbeat with you, allowances get made.

The story's heartbeat, you should forgive the wordplay, is the love shared by Brady the fuck-up and Cam the saintly patient grown-up. He's there, steady and solid and accepting, as Brady acts out again and again and again. As Brady's the one telling us the story again, it's not all that surprising that he's giving us his own slant on the action...but what a jerky kid he is. I know we're all jerky when young, but good lord Author Henry please give us surcease from Brady's solipsism in the next book!

Cam, because of their indelible link established when he needed saving in the first book, knows Brady's past as intimately as if it was his own. He seems to be able to make that work in their love's favor, where Brady is not quite so self-aware or so well-adjusted or something. He knows as intimately as Cam does what was done to the returned...prisoner? captive? plaything?...that Kai-Ren the Faceless battle-regent, um, modified shall we say in his own image.

Don't try to tell me that won't come back to bite him in the ass. (And yes, the antecedent is vague there, by design I assure you.)

So we get a chance to see what life is like for the new family, which now includes the resilient and plucky Lucy. Cam, in his saintly way, makes no objection to Lucy entering his new pair-bond with Brady. I can't help wondering if it had been Cam's sister, how Brady the bratty would've reacted.... Anyway, the couple is tentatively thriving, the world is still spinning, and then *BAM*

Kai-Ren and the Faceless are back.

Suddenly the mentally linked men in Humanity's midst are a Threat to Security. Suddenly the hands-off approach the authorities took to the people wearing the identities of Returnee and Mate is revoked and the fact that they share a mental bond that also includes Kai-Ren and the Faceless is too much risk of exposure to ignore. Let's not forget that this is an Earth whole population was literally decimated by the Faceless not so very long ago. Their caution, well...I'll never really get it, this Security State mindset, but I recognize its reality. What exactly can be done against the Faceless is what is never clear. Their weapons are simply too far advanced for Humanity to defend itself against, so what sense does it make to try?

Well, anyway, there we are and there Brady and Cam are in prison and there Lucy is with Cam's also-saintly parents and the story becomes a seriously exciting ride. I was breathless as Kai-Ren came back back to Earth to invite, for want of a better term, Brady and Cam to see his culture. It is just about lethally frustrating that we don't get to go there as soon as the ship arrives. Kai-Ren's essential alienness is a thing we're allowed to hope, by the end of this story, will be a bridgeable gap. Brady is scared to go back into space, as who wouldn't be when only bad things have happened to him there. Cam is...ambivalent, but honorable, and desperate to stop the extermination of his species. The military men who clutter up this installment in the series include Cam's first love, Chris Varro. Who, for a wonder, Brady falls in love with via his shared memory with Cam...until Chris (unsurprisingly) simply doesn't see Brady.

Ouch! Your beloved doesn't even see you! But wait...how can he...he doesn't know you from a hole in the ground. He was in love with your lover, they were first-loves, not you.

Ouch!!

So of course, this being a Lisa Henry novel, Varro is on Kai-Ren's vessel with Brady and Cam. And Lucy, who simply will not be left. Not that Brady wants to leave her; nor does he want to take her into the unknown, the blackness of space; but he can't, in the end, feel like he's depriving her of Family (a thing he treasures as only one who's never had it can) potentially forever. Along for the ride comes Doc, whose caretaking of Brady while he was a raggedy conscript on Defender Three no doubt saved his life and most certainly enabled him to save and enter Cam's life.

The gang's all here. How long until Darkest Space comes out?!?