THE TULIP POPLARS, a poet's lyrical retelling of a story in every family tree

THE TULIP POPLARS
SILAS HOUSE
Algonquin Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A sweeping historical novel about hidden, forbidden love in the early 1900s by bestselling writer and former poet laureate of Kentucky, Silas House.

Amos and Tom fall in love while working in the tobacco fields during the hot summers of the early 1900s, yet Tom cannot shake his strict religious upbringing nor the responsibilities of his family’s farm. His longtime friend Maeve also pines for a man she can’t have, lest she endanger his already tenuous life in a town and world shaped by racial lines. How do you live a life that feels untrue, and at what point do you risk everything?

The Tulip Poplars is a gorgeous and moving novel spanning most of the 20th century, centering on four people trying to find happiness in a world that demands conventional choices. House tells a deeply intimate story of faith and doubt, race and class, sexual desire and the longing to be good when you’ve been taught that you are evil for loving who you love.

Based on the story of an ancestor, House’s new novel takes us from New York City to Southern cities to Appalachia and will leave you with a bigger heart.

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

My Review: It's a lovely, lyrical telling of a story every last one of us, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, has in our direct line of descent. In a world as hostile as it is to same-sex love (let alone sex) the closet has created a lot of unhappy marriages. Statistically there were happy ones, too, but I'm willing to wager there were, and are, fewer of those.

So I was predisposed to like and enjoy the story of the "good" people of Bright Star, Kentucky, and unsurprisingly I did. Especially the men falling in love across class *and* queer prejudice lines. Talk about an uphill battle, though, that's Maeve, a white woman breaking literal Jim Crow laws by indulging in carnal congress with Paschal, the only Black person in her father's Episcopal school. He risks his literal life being with her; she loses social standing by her miscegenation, and becomes a pariah by getting pregnant out of wedlock. Fortunately Paschal's whisked away in 1919 due to the Corbin Expulsion, an appalling event I'd never heard of before. Amos self-exiles to New York City, where revolting incidents of police violence against queers impact (!) his life; Tom's confined to a mental institution to undergo insulin-overdose induced coma to cure him of being queer. (In order to include this nightmarish torture, the author says plainly he moved its US application earlier than it took place in reality, which I appreciated.)

As the escapees from Bright Star form new connections, Tom and Maeve navigate their dishonest marriage, raise a daughter, live lives...longing for others. So very many of us do this. We find the scraps and hidden bits we can enjoy to the degree possible, but happiness is a bit strong of a word for the twilight state of anesthetized misery company, if we're lucky turning into companionship, preents in the absence of a love lost. I know all of us carry some unfixable sadness. Far fewer carry this level of punishing loneliness found in settling.

The role of the piano, whose keys I discuss below, stitches the emotional reality of Bright Star together. I know for sure all y'all will know Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 the instant you hear it. It will be less obvious until you read about the pieces why Author House likely chose them. Safe to say this is the point I fully got on board Author House's Yearning Express.

I've docked a star because on the first page, the first paragraph even, reference to a piano made in the nineteenth century having "Tanzanian ivory" keys caused me to stop reading for weeks. "Tanzania" is a name invented in 1964...during my lifetime. "Tanganyika" was used when it was a German colony in the 19th century, up through independence to the invention of the portmanteau of "Zanzibar" and "Tanganyika." This is easily checked, and as a throwaway line it could've been "African ivory" with no change in meaning. My remaining fraction of a star loss was down to my significantly lower interest and investment in the straight couples.

It's a lovely reading experience, another one of those where I'm compelled to read bits aloud. Normally I'd chuck one in here so you could feel smugly superior about not liking it, but there were six that I could not choose from, so I skipped it.

This caused me significant emotional anguish. It's beautiful writing, and proof one needn't insert weird line-breaks or fail to interconnect the ideas behind the words into grammatically correct sentences to evoke strong emotions and offer beauty to the Muses.

Take note of this before committing Poetry *ptooptoo* again.

TAXI DANCER: A Novel, based on a sad, depressingly relevant true story

TAXI DANCER: A Novel
MARIVI SOLIVEN
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the University of Washington

Based on a true story, Taxi Dancer is a gripping historical novel by Marivi Soliven that illuminates the hidden world of Depression-era Filipino taxi dance halls, weaving a forbidden interracial romance with a high-stakes murder mystery to explore race, desire, survival, and the Filipino American experience in 1930s California.

“If we can’t marry white girls, we can at least dance with them.” In response to Depression-era California laws that criminalized interracial marriage, Filipinos established taxi dance halls where they could mingle with American women. When Filipino farmworker Eli and American taxi dancer Lucinda fall in love, they hope to move to Washington State where they can legally wed. Their plans are derailed when Eli is arrested for the shooting death of a dance hall owner. As Lucinda fights to exonerate Eli, she uncovers a murder conspiracy orchestrated by Mamie Savage, a rival dance hall owner and Sal, her Filipino bartender. The capital punishment trial brings to light abhorrent secrets concealed by the conspirators, the victim, and Lucinda herself. Inspired by true events in San Diego’s Stingaree district.

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

My Review: Laws about whom you are allowed to marry are always popular among the "FREEDOM FREEDOM—not for you for me" religious or otherwise intellectually impaired sort. I get that the state has a need to know with whom its citizens and residents are forming households. Beyond registering those households formed, there's no need to poke further into their business.

That's not a popular opinion in these United States in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-six. It's being shoved down our throats that some people, white men especially, deserve more of the benefits that come from freedom than other, darker and/or female people, do. This is not new, nor is it confined to the US. It's a nasty, unjustifiable piece of cruelty that's been on the run for decades and that rollback of privilege is now taking root. Therefore the demographic and actuarial reality that fewer white males are being born thus diluting their godlike, "god given" dominion over...them...is fading. The present dangerous pass in public life is down to the death throes of the established order being played out with maximal ferocity because, once gone, there will be no way to get them all back.

Exhibit A: look at every "AI" controlling person's color and genitalia.

As proof it's not a new thing, look at the reason this book exists. It's telling the story of a statutorily "inferior" man forgetting his appointed place and having sex with a white woman. Stick to your own kind, race purity is paramount so you getting a white woman pregnant is not to be tolerated! This panic, fomented by the likes of Stephen Miller among others, has deep roots in white nationlism and authoritarian corporatocracy. The Filipina author of this story based it on a tragedy that occurred in San Diego, California; I was surprised at how totally unfamiliar I, a native Californian, was with this aspect of the state's ethnic history.

It was the first of several revelations. Like everyone of my generation, I'd at least heard of (in my case seen) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? so was aware in a vague, general way that there were things called "dance halls" and the dancing was a form of socially accepted foreplay conducted for profit by unsavory people. I had not put that together with the "shocking" idea that the races (stupid term) can mix! Panic! Horripilation! In structuring her story on the bones of a real, dreadful moment in San Diego history, Author Soliven uses the time-honored epistolary method for relevant passages from official records, newspaper accounts, and suchlike demonstations of the story's authentic roots, interspersing the imagined—I'd say better described as "recaptured"—dialogues. It makes Eli and Lucinda and Amado and all the other men and women in the story come alive in sharp relief. Like a change in lighting from fluorescent ceiling fixtures in linoleumed hallways into soft lamplight on carpeted upholstered comfortable spaces.

As the story unfolds the Filipino words and phrases become more than Google fodder, the sounds and the feel of the words in my mouth become part of a truly immersive journey into a cultural state of mind. I had not expected to experience this because I am very unfamiliar with more than the broadest outlines of the milieu. In US colonial history the Philippines loom large, after all General MacArthur had roots there and he was a huge figure in my early life; but that's not the Filipino people, their lives, their needs and wants from coming here. As I spent more time with these fictionalized people and moved between chapters through the epistolary bits, I got more and more into Author Soliven's characters in their raw form. It made me appreciate more and more her careful work of fleshing the factual bones with forms so real I was gripped. I cared more what was coming next in their story after each reminder of the facts.

It all leads to tragedy. All stories do, as death is always without fail the end of The Story. In this case, Amado is shot and killed in his successful dance hall for stupid, petty reasons (at the literal beginning of the book, it's not a spoiler)...but the system's wicked, cruel restraints are, as so often, the levers used to move the structures a bit more in the direction of Justice.

We're still working on fairness. It appears to be a Sisyphean task.

AMERICAN DREAMER, first in the Dreamers series by ADRIANA HERRERA

AMERICAN DREAMER (Dreamers #1)
ADRIANA HERRERA
Carina Press
$7.75 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: No one ever said big dreams come easy

For Nesto Vasquez, moving his Afro-Caribbean food truck from New York City to the wilds of Upstate New York is a huge gamble. If it works? He’ll be a big fish in a little pond. If it doesn’t? He’ll have to give up the hustle and return to the day job he hates. He’s got six months to make it happen—the last thing he needs is a distraction.

Jude Fuller is proud of the life he’s built on the banks of Cayuga Lake. He has a job he loves and good friends. It’s safe. It’s quiet. And it’s damn lonely. Until he tries Ithaca’s most-talked-about new lunch spot and works up the courage to flirt with the handsome owner. Soon he can’t get enough—of Nesto’s food or of Nesto. For the first time in his life, Jude can finally taste the kind of happiness that’s always been just out of reach.

An opportunity too good to pass up could mean a way to stay together and an incredible future for them both...if Nesto can remember happiness isn’t always measured by business success. And if Jude can overcome his past and trust his man will never let him down.

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

My Review: I gained at least 15lb reading this book. Nesto's food truck needs to park here on the beachside lots so I can eat there every day.

Author Herrera is a dab hand at using Spanish in her mainly-English text in such a way as a monoglot will get what was said, a bilingual reader will get the feelings of the speaker, and both will be able to feel involved and invested in the story. It's a tricky thing to accomplish.

It felt to me as though the main issues in Jade and Nesto's relationship were...details. Not superficial, understand, but the kind of things couples have to negotiate as time tugs them in different directions. Nesto needs reminding that Jude needs his time as much as the food truck does; Jude needs reminding that Nesto is focused and so needs reason to focus on him.

I stepped away from the vehicle, taking a long look at it. Emblazoned on the back was the logo for my business, OuNYe, Afro-Caribbean Food in huge bold black font on a red background. The black and red contrasted with the flags of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica painted over the entire truck. To name my business, I used a word from the Yoruba language. Which had been spoken all over the Caribbean by our ancestors, the West Africans who were brought there as slaves. Ounje is the Yoruba word for nourishment, and I’d decided to play a bit with things and put the NY right at the center.

You know the kind of stuff, it's happened to all of us who are not terminally single. It's not that it's inaccurate, but it arose really fast; we sped through the getting to know you phase a wee bit less lingeringly than I think is ordinary.

I'm pretty sure Nesto knows what Jude needs from him but is Jude clear on it? We're reading Nesto's PoV so I wasn't all the way sure...though it's obvious Jude knows he'd be a fool not to make a real family, away from the rigid, rejecting Evangelicals who raised him,right by Nesto's side. He's experienced the darkest side of the Murruhkun Dream, its eager hatefulness at those it deems not good enough; Nesto lives the anti-immigrant, racist bit daily; they're in tune already on this, but still need to work out their harmony. Very much what makes real couplehood so much fun, so much work, so deep a reward when it's done, to build.

A romance with its flaws. but those are minor; a love story it's easy to invest in; and a food-based novel that ought to come with recipes...or an online ordering app.

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION, a still-rare example of transgender representation in romantic fiction

THE DOCTOR'S DISCRETION 

E.E. OTTOMAN 

Pronoun 

$3.99 Kindle original, available now

 Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: New York City, 1831.

Passion, medicine and a plan to break the law ...

When Doctor William Blackwood, a proper gentleman who prefers books to actual patients, meets retired Navy surgeon Doctor Augustus Hill, they find in each other not just companionship but the chance of pleasure--and perhaps even more. The desire between them is undeniable but their budding relationship is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious patient at New York Hospital.

Mr. Moss has been accused of being born a woman but living his life as a man, an act that will see him committed to an asylum for the rest of his life. William and Augustus are determined to mount a rescue even if it means kidnapping him instead.

Their desperate plan sets William and Augustus against the hospital authorities, and the law. Soon they find themselves embroiled in New York's seedy underworld, mixed up with prostitutes, spies, and more than a lifetime's worth of secrets. When nothing is as it seems can they find something real in each other?

My Review: Transgender persons have been among us throughout time, just like lesbian or gay persons have. What is different now is that we have the vocabulary to identify, to label them; this is both a blessing and a curse. I know, from my own experience of growing up Other in a world (South Texas in the 1970s) and in a family of mostly unsupportive women, the incredible power of naming yourself: "I am gay. Not a faggot, not a queer. I am gay."

What, then, is one to do when a transgender person has the clawing need to name themself? How to find the courage and the model? For millennia, that wasn't on offer; there was no way to explain a transgender person to themself. With few exceptions, societies where the trans people came out and lived as they ought to have had the freedom to live were reviled, subjected to psychological and physical violence at even greater rates than the merely homosexual. Most of us who are cisgender but queer (and it took a long time for me to warm back up to that label, let me tell you) can, at a pinch and for a minute, hide it well enough to pass if trouble looms. Not so a man in women's clothing, or a woman trying to pass as a man.

This is becoming a thing of the past. Bodies are plastic; we are able to sculpt and mold them in many ways once impossible. We understand the endocrine basis of gender a great deal better than ever before. How we're failing the transgendered persons in our midst is less and less medical and more social, political. MANY folk feel they are being abused by being asked to refer to and address the trans community by the gendered pronoun of their identity, not their biology. These are usually also the people whose faces turn red and mouths spew hate when asked to wear masks to help keep everyone safe during a plague whose causal virus is *demonstrated* to be airborne.

Idiots, in other words; deeply ignorant and utterly unworthy persons without a shred of worth or value to add to society.

That being both self-evident and inarguable, the book I review here is one in which a transgender person is "discovered," arrested, and subjected to the full brunt of the hateful and misguided legal and medical regimes in place in the US during the 1830s. These truly are enlightened times, as much room for improvement as there remains; we should all be grateful we live in them as well as practice kaizen, the path of pride in accomplishment melded to continual striving for improvement.

Mr. Moss, the person in question, is lucky enough to be rescued by Dr. Augustus Hill, a gay Navy veteran without a hand due to combat injuries. Dr. Hill's maiming hasn't disabled him; he practices medicine at New York Hospital. He must, given his limitation, accept the other work that comes to him. For example, as we meet him, he is busily cataloging and organizing a collection of medical books and objects. With him in this task is Dr. William Blackwood, a trained physician of free African descent. The men meet in the book stacks, sparks fly, they begin what must be a clandestine relationship of great tenderness, passion, and intimacy.

So when Hill impulsively rescues Mr. Moss from the humiliations and horrors attendant on being shown to be a "transvestite," he is by no means sure Dr. Blackwood will assist him in arranging an escape. This is a romance, so we all know that he will; but the author effectively conveys the uncertainty of Hill's anguished waiting for Blackwood to decide.

In the end, the to-ing and fro-ing of this rescue-cum-escape is resolved a bit too neatly; the idea of their assistance to a wanted fugitive possibly rebounding on them is snipped at the same time. One can see the appeal of such a symmetrical bounce of the ball. It wasn't particularly satisfying to me.

What worked very well was the atmosphere, the world-building of sights and sounds and customs and coping skills. I was immersed, I was enfolded, and I was invested in the Happily Ever After that must follow such a lot of stress and battling of demons.

What gave me great pause was, in this deeply unenlightened passage in US history, the fearful recognition that this story could become a cautionary tale and not just a thumping good read if too many people, for whatever reason, do not get themselves up off their hindquarters and vote 45 and his fellow kakistocrats out of office on 3 November 2020.

THE PURSUIT OF..., an interracial gay love story between an English aristocrat and a Revolutionary War Black soldier

THE PURSUIT OF... 

COURTNEY MILAN (The Worth Saga #2.5) 

Self-published 

$2.99 Kindle edition, available now 

Rating: 4* of five 

The Publisher Says: What do a Black American soldier, invalided out at Yorktown, and a white British officer who deserted his post have in common? Quite a bit, actually.

• They attempted to kill each other the first time they met. 

• They're liable to try again at some point in the five-hundred mile journey that they're inexplicably sharing. 

• They are not falling in love with each other. 

• They are not falling in love with each other. 

• They are… Oh, no. 

The Pursuit Of… is about a love affair between two men and the Declaration of Independence. It’s a novella of around 38,000 words. 

My Review: Courtney Milan has caused waves in the small, tightly-knit world of romantic fiction writers. Her relentless pursuit of a plagiarist, her #MeToo advocacy and personal, public acknowledgment of its relevance to her, and her battering down the racist gates kept within the Romance Writers of America, all conspire to make it close to inevitable that she would write this novella of men in love across multiple cultural barriers. In keeping with the norms of the genre, they live Happily Ever After...a thing few of us meatspace folk ever manage, but do we love to read about people who do! 

Milan clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy, as well as on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Did you imagine that, with that kind of résumé, she would shy away from fighting the battle of queer representation in a field where it's been sorely lacking? It's true she isn't an #OwnVoices writer, but she is and always was an ally of the QUILTBAG community. So here she is, using her storytelling and her best-selling author star power, to make this novella of an English aristocrat and a freed Black Revolutionary soldier happen. 

Lord Henry's long-tongued prattle gets him into boatloads of trouble, from before we meet him to the worst possible moment: he's a British aristocrat behind enemy lines, a man's been murdered, and he's in the wrongest place possible. 

The more loquacious...possibly he's better described as "an oyster"...John, a Black freedman in the Rhode Island Regiment (real thing, Author Milan explains in her Author's Note), also in the wrong place at the wrong time, finds himself saddled with a redheaded enemy chatterbox for a five-hundred-mile WALK home to Rhode Island! 

John trusts no white people (one finds it hard to blame him) and Henry, emotionally abused child of parents who ignored him, never met a stranger. Along this long walk they acquire and lose many things, including a cheese of truly repellent odor, flavor, and existence. This misbegotten milk product, ever riper and less appealing to the senses, grows more rank as Henry talks more and more sweetly, saving the men from trouble, managing to open his ever-more exasperated oyster's mind and heart, and generally making himself necessary to John's world. 

For his own part, Henry's decided that John is everything he wants in life: quiet, proud, honorable, and deeply focused on the success of the Revolution that earned him his freedom. Henry needs to return home to England or risk being shot as a spy. John needs to reconnect with his own family. Parting is most definitely not sweet, but a great sorrow to them both; any 18th-century parting, let alone one that involved an ocean and warring nations, was as likely as not to be permanent. 

It's a romance! You already now that's not The End. But the way they come back together was rushed, since this is a novella. I forgave it for that reason, and for the better reason that the men didn't compromise so much as accommodate each other's realities. It feels very good when people of true hearts come together, which is why romances exist at all. That this one features a color divide, a Revolution of one's country against the other's, and an inventive solution to the societal disapproval of gayness issue, all harmonized to make this a pleasurable read for me. 

It is sex-free, so the eww-ick homophobes may enter this world without that sandbar awaiting them. At all. Ever. For $3, and with The Plague running us all through our TBRs at lightning speed, bookhorn this one in and see what the fuss is about.

A GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF EAST AFRICA, sentimental and charming and moving

A GUIDE TO THE BIRDS OF EAST AFRICA
NICHOLAS DRAYSON (Mr. Malik #1)
HMH
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For the past three years, Mr. Malik has been secretly in love with Rose Mbikwa, a woman who leads the weekly bird walks sponsored by the East African Ornithological Society. Just as Malik is getting up the nerve to invite Rose to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball (the premier social occasion of the Kenyan calendar), Harry Khan, a nemesis from his school days, arrives in town. Khan has also become enraptured with Rose and announces his intent to invite her to the Ball. Rather than force Rose to choose between the two men, a clever solution is proposed. Whoever can identify the most species of birds in one week’s time gets the privilege of asking Ms. Mbikwa to the ball.

Drayson's charming descriptions of the Kenyan wildlife and his sharp take on the foibles and follies of the people and politics sketch a rich picture of contemporary life in Nairobi. Fans of Alexander McCall Smith will delight in this transporting and witty novel.

My Review: Actuarially, I am past middle age. In fact, more than 90% of the world's population is younger than I am. And that shows in the things I care about, read, and buy. Advertisers, take note: Old folks in America are *not lying down to die*! Pay attention to us!

Like the author of this book did. Mr. Malik, a widower and Mrs. Mbikwa, a widow, both of a certain vintage, are the focus of the love story in this book. Each has lost a well-loved spouse, each is living a full, interesting life and each is aware of a...space, an unfilled spot, in life. So what do they do? They go watch birds.

It's happened to me, and it's probably happened to you. From the first exchange of good mornings they had recognized in each other a kindred soul. Though neither spoke much to start with, they felt an immediate ease in each other's company that was both surprising and yet the most natural thing in the world.

God, doesn't that sound dull? It's not. It's just the starting point for a deft, elegantly made meditation on what love means and how love is transmitted, received, and propagated in ever-larger and more complete circles. Drayson creates Rose Mbikwa, nee Macdonald, as that hardest to portray character: the lively, sad, solitary widow of a charismatic man. Her loss and her life are completely, and concisely, and elegantly drawn in less time than lesser prose stylists take to make minor characters. Mr. Malik, a complex and private man, isn't so much drawn as peeled, layer by later, until the things we think we know about him become...well...iceberg-tips of the cold, sad, lonely sea inside him.

But...and this is the biggest but I can imagine...he's *never* whiny, self-pitying, self-obsessed, nothing like that oh nay nay! He's a force in his own life and he's working on making it, and as much of the world as he touches, a better place.

The spirals Drayson spins as Mr. Malik and Mrs. Mbikwa orbit each other are always tightening and yet never constricting or confining our perceptions...this is good stuff, ladies and gentlemen! Good, good craftsmanship and an excellent storytelling eye.

I'd say do yourself a favor and read this book. It's short, only about 200pp, and it's fun, and it's got great substance. Most highly recommended.