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.