FRUITS OF OUR LABOR, very trenchant, very loudly thinking about taboo topics

FRUITS OF OUR LABOR
IAN PATTERSON
Shiraki Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A new world is emerging, one parthenogenetic birth at a time.

In a near-future America where women have just achieved asexual reproduction, Samara yearns for freedom from her dying relationship, and a child of her own—fully her own.

As parthenogenetic birth takes hold and the role of men in the survival of the species diminishes, protest and outcry sweep across the nation. Sierra, one of the first “partho babies”, is bullied relentlessly as she grows up and seeks her place in this new pressure cooker of changing gender roles and norms.

And in the aftermath of the “Days of Horror”, a period of violent backlash from displaced men, a professor of history looks back on the rise of PG birth in an attempt to understand the impact of this era of upheaval on the world.

Together, these three converging perspectives tell the story of a profound societal transformation that asks who gets to have autonomy, who gets to write the future, and who that future is for.

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My Review: What fresh hell is this, Dorothy Parker famously (sort of) said. It's probably a situation that sounds perfect to some, reproducing only yourself; it eliminates some troublesome, destructive friction in society.

Does it? Would it? Could it?

"Maybe it’s evolution, maybe it’s divine influence, but at the end of the day, does it matter? I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t think I’m special at all. I’m just the first woman to figure out she didn’t need a man to have a baby. I bet you we’re all capable of it, of self-birth. And if every woman out there focused on it like I did, I think we’d find our true power. And it would change everything."

It's a novella, under 160pp, and it's told in multiple timelines; pay attention, or who is speaking to you could easily slip away from your awareness. It's well-paced and well-designed to make its points with facts (parthenogenesis is seen in all other lineages, but not mammals, so it's not a stretch to see how it might develop) and conjectures (the Manosphere would have hysterics over this and it's not hard to see how violent the response would likely be to this). As an exploration of an idea this is fascinating. As a summation of the awful state of gender politics, it's chilling. And as a meditation on what is invisible to those in the binary mindset, it's...essentialist. No one transmasc has a viewpoint at all; I'm not surprised, because we're talking about exalting Woman, after all. No one transfem is in the book, either; are these oversights or just biases that permeate culture so deeply they're invisible in this Brave New World of all women?

Can't get to a perfect five, but I can definitely say I think more about these issues of sex-essentialism and gendered violence in this framework. I'm fascinated by every twist and turn in the compact story, and hope y'all will be too.

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

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

Rating: 4* of five

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

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

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

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

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

TOGETHER, THEY COULD BE LEGENDARY…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.