MUÑECA, sapphic gothic tale in 1960s Oakland

MUÑECA
CYNTHIA GÓMEZ
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid, surreal Gothic about a queer, Latine, working class witch who sets out to rescue a bespelled heiress and loses control of her powers and her heart in the process.

It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts—ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

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

My Review: Oakland, California, gets very little love in the literary world. From Gertrude Stein's famous "there is no there there" quip to this very day, Oakland is mostly just the place that's across the bay from San Francisco. This novella/short novel (under 200pp) is set there in 1968, a fraught time before Stonewall ignited the gay-rights movement but after the Black Panther Party was founded there. Oakland was bubbling and seething with the energy of change that so spectacularly fizzled out in the malaise of the 1970s.

Nati is the perfect PoV for a supernatural suspense novel set in 1968 Oakland: she's a closeted lesbian with a hidden extraordinary ability, heir to a line of women who work outside the norms of their society...their white society, the Overculture whose very definition creates or at least delineates repressive, controlling, often authoritarian conformity. Nati does not live within the Overculture's rules though she largely disappears into its strictures by hiding in plain sight. She takes her revenge on those who keep her down because she's a brown-skinned woman by nibbling at the edges, by not accepting what she must obey, by taking a bit here and there. Her chance to exact serious revenge on her late mother's former employers is her cue to grab more for herself.

Only that more proves to be the love and the essence of the family, Violeta. A trapped woman subject to a greedy man's whims, an heiress and a pawn, Violeta is the path for Nati's revenge to manifest itself in the world. Gothic hero stuff ensues as Violeta is the gothic heroine all helpless and needing rescue from a lingering death. Nati does everything she can to break Violeta out of her helplessness, using her not-ordinary familial talents and learning in a 1968 that dismisses suchlike goins-on.

The novellaness of the story shows to disadvantage here. In the rush to resolve Violeta's disability, Nati is kept very busy indeed. She's actively working her magic, she's taking responsibilities in Violeta's life, she's even willing to do the dark work of self-healing. It means I felt knackered by the end of the read, there was so much happening in a tight window of time.

It's a four-star read because I was too tired to press the button for a fifth star. I was delighted by Nati, by her craft and her craftiness. I really wanted to spend more time with her, maybe just hang out while learning about her childhood in and around the Miramontes clan when her mama worked for them, learning about her earlier life with the class divide rigidly in place.

Still and finally a solidly fun sapphic gothic tale of revenge and vengeance and avenging wrongs all happening at once.

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE, ladypirates who love ladies

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE
BRIONY CAMERON
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available romorrow

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa.

Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.

An unforgettable tale told in three parts, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is a thrilling, buccaneering escapade filled with siege and battle, and is also a tender exploration of friendship, love, and the search for freedom and home.

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

My Review: I think this is a story of two halves: the first half, a survival story rooted firmly in its rime and place; the second more of a fantasy fulfillment that didn't follow the rules of the first half.

The delights, so to speak, of feeling transported to the slave economy of Santo Domingo, there to meet Jacquotte and see the milieu she was destined to live in...many. The characters, the situations, the atmosphere of the town, were all set up sufficiently clearly that I invested in them. That's most of the battle in my reading world. So I was rockin' along, expecting a five, or at worst high-four, star read.

Then came the twenty-first century.

Jacquotte and company all start having very modern conversations about rights and feelings and equality. I suspect this is not realistic not because we haven't seen it before...the cultural conversation has been dominated by the white oppressors for millennia, how would it get reported?...but because this woman and her cohorts have, until now, behaved and spoken more or less like the period demands. The shift was the jarring part, not what was shifted to.

There's action, there's love, there's a lot to like. When we go off into the second half's fantasia, it's still a good read with swashes being buckled and derring being done. It just wasn't congruent with the first half. They're both enjoyable, make no mistake. I'm glad I read the story. I'm glad to get to know Jacquotte.

Be better prepared to suspend disbelief than I was and get even more out of the story.br />

LIVE IT OUT, sapphic second-chance romance told with honesty and beauty

LIVE IT OUT
JENN ALEXANDER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Adams was never expected to be anything more than a high school dropout. She’d been a troubled teen, spending more time at the skate park than in school, at least until her music teacher introduced her to the guitar and music class became her lifeline. Ten years later, she is the guitarist in a band that has become a breakout success, and she wants to use that success to help other teens who have had the same rough start as her. She takes on a volunteer project with local youth as a way of honoring her past, not knowing that it will force her to revisit the one part of her past that she’d hoped to forget.

Faith Siebert has always had high expectations to live up to, and she has tried her best to fulfill those expectations, to be a good daughter, a good student, and a good friend. When she fell for Spencer in high school, she knew her family and friends would never approve. Scared of their reactions, Faith ended things with Spencer, following the path her parents wanted for her, even at the immense personal cost. Of course, it had only been a high school romance, destined for brevity anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when Spencer shows up in her life once again, partnered with Faith on a youth music project, her world is rocked and she is forced to re-examine everything she knows about relationships and herself.

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

My Review: Not much for rock-star romances, me, but I am a vulturous carrion-seeker for the corpses of heartbreaks past on second-chance narratives. Give me a high-school/college breakup undone decades later and I am on it like a Jane Austen bonnet. Add in the fact that the parties are a same-sex couple denied a natural ending by homophobia (internal or external, makes me no never-mind) and stand back while I run to get it. Didn't hurt your foot, did I?

I got what I was expecting in this read. I loved Spencer's complete willingness to use her skills to help kids in the same bad situation she came from to cope, on many levels, with their sense of powerlessness and absence of agency. True, they won't become rock stars but they will learn how to play a musical intrument...a thing that by itself increases one's satisfaction with one's life.

Faith, the One That Got Away for Spencer, believes it will and is surprised when it's Spencer who shows up to do the teaching. Her career as a social worker is so in-character for the girl she was all the way back in high school, it felt on the nose. I like social workers, and deeply admire their sense of purpose. I'm all in for a redemption arc here, as well, because Spencer's going back to her roots as a shelter-raised kid to extend her hand in helpful practicality.

Do I need to say that these women find their way into a relationship? It's a category romance. Of course they do.

In forming that long-delayed, much-desired romantic reconnection, each of them has to come to terms with her own part in their long estrangement, what it cost them both, and how best to use the rubble of the past to build a good solid foundation. Here is where I felt both the happiest, because the women are truly honest with themselves and each other; and here is also where I felt the length of the book worked against it the most clearly. There wasn;t room to go into the families, or the people they were leaving behind. That was less of an issue, though, than the way the women were ready for that hard, hard, hard task of being vulnerable and honest within their strengthening bond. I can't say it's unlikely...the author's a therapist by trade, she knows better than I do...but I can say that even fifty more pages with some conversations outside their bond would've helped me invest in the resolution.

That said, I give the book as it is a recommendation, tinged with a litte note of caution for the ewww-ick homophobes because there is some steam in here. (I just turned the pages faster.) The story builds its couple's bond well, believably if very quickly, and tells hard emotional truths with honest, sensitive truthfulness.
I'm really glad that Jenn Alexander has more work for me to get acquainted with.

OUT AT THE PLATE: The Dot Wilkinson Story, deep dive into a QUILTBAG legendary life

OUT AT THE PLATE: The Dot Wilkinson Story
LYNN AMES
Chicago Review Press
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “Dot Wilkinson is the greatest female catcher ever to play softball . A bold, pioneering athlete, she refused to let others define her and instead defined herself. Her story is an inspiration to people everywhere.” — Billie Jean King, Sports Icon and Champion for Equality

It’s not simply that Dot Wilkinson was one of the most decorated women’s softball players, bowlers, and athletes of all time and one of the original players from the three-time-world-champion PBSW Phoenix Ramblers softball team (1933–1965). Nor was it the length of her time here on Earth—over a century—although any of these things by itself would be impressive.

The magic of Dot’s story is in the details. It’s the tale of a childhood spent in poverty, an indomitable, unbreakable spirit, a determination to be the very best to play whatever sport she undertook, the independence to live her personal life on her own terms, and her tremendous success at all of it.

Over more than a decade of countless conversations and interviews, Dot shared all of it with her dear friend, author Lynn Ames. Dot held nothing back. Out at the Plate , told through the lens of Dot and Lynn’s friendship, is the story of a forgotten era in women’s history and sports, and one extraordinary woman’s place at the center of it all.

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

My Review: I had a lesbian "grandma" of sorts, older than Dot Wilkinson, but with the same kind of unwillingness to submit to woman=weakness stereotyping. She saw what she wanted and went out of all ladylike bounds to get it. This included the love of her life, a widow with a son, and the family they made.

Dot Wilkinson is my kinda woman. (Or man, if I'm honest.) Reading about her life, its ups-downs-failures and unimaginably exciting successes, made me smile uncontrollably. QUILTBAG folk are fed a steady diet of disaster and crime with us as the victims, expecting that this will keep us quiet and invisible. This is the classic Linebarger tactic, used for generations now on "minorities" of all sorts. It is now modulated by stories of assimilation, of increased access to "The American Dream" of mortgaged house, kids who need college funds, etc etc. The Dot Wilkinsons who decide to do what the hell they want to do when they want to do it do not, oddly enough, get a lot of overcultural attention.

I can't think why this should be.

Dot Wilkinson deserves every bit of attention you have at your command because she actually was what we're told we love the most, should strive to be, here in the USA. She was strong by every metric, she was a maverick. She was routinely successful in her careers (plural). She lived with the love of her life for almost a half-century. Her example of grace and graciousness under pressure is one to emulate. She never turned it into any kind of doormat behavior. She was likable and well-liked at a time when her rejection of "normative womanhood" could easily have made her a pariah. Lynn Ames manages to convey all this without becoming cloying, though her fangirling over Dot is not at all veiled...or misplaced.

The one thing that leads to, on the "missing three-quarters-star" front, is the tendency to overexplain and repeat. By using many primary sources, Author Ames falls into the "it's really cool how much stuff there is" ditch and doesn't climb out. The sources very often concur, and maybe picking one quote then saying "this is one of the half-dozen angles on this story" could've been less wearing on the reader's nerve. My interest in softball, Dot's biggest claim to Fame and spotlights, is significantly less than hers....

Family issues weren't minimized. It was heartbreaking to learn of Dot's first love's early passing from the then-untreatable scourge of metastatic breast cancer. It was more heartbreaking still to read of Dot's mother's callous...let me be fair, surprisingly insensitive...response to Dot's deep grief at her loss. The fact is a sapphic love wouldn't register with most people as "real" in that day and time, so grief of that depth and duration would seem odd. Still, it's your child! Wouldn't that attune you to the reality of the feeling and thus summon up empathy not dismissiveness?

Apparently not. And honestly that bit upset me as much as the loss did. I was, as you can tell from that, fully invested in Dot Wilkinson's life, and was very, very happy I had this chance to learn about this older sister in queerness. I hope you will give it a chance to grab you, too.

#PrideMonth launches!

#PrideMonth launches! Yes, in the US Pride Month is a June celebration, but lag times must be built into all holiday seasons. I'll be reviewing mostly stuff from, by, about those people somewhere on the QUILTBAG rainbow of identities.

My intention is to get as close as my corpus callosum will support to a full-on review posted five times a week. Burgoines and Pearl-Rules aren't subject to my numerical targeting at any time...though that could happen depending on my capacities. Goodness knows I have the most amazing pile of raw review material, and a number of current-year requests for DRCs are pending. I have, as usual, a few reviews in the queue ready to go, so I like my chances of success.

Click here to see an entire blog's worth of #PrideMonth reviews.

I wish you all a wonderful June, and a grand old party of a #PrideMonth, filled with lazy days of reading in your favorite places.

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING, sapphic Dutch Gothic horror...my first such...please not last, though

MY DARLING DREADFUL THING
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press
$17.99 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a world where the dead can wake and walk among us, what is truly real?

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the only good thing in Roos’ life, which is filled with sordid backroom séances organized by her mother. That is, until wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop attends one of these séances and asks Roos to come live with her at the crumbling estate she inherited upon the death of her husband. The manor is unsettling, but the attraction between Roos and Agnes is palpable. So how does someone end up dead?

Roos is caught red-handed, but she claims a spirit is the culprit. Doctor Montague, a psychologist tasked with finding out whether Roos can be considered mentally fit to stand trial, suspects she’s created an elaborate fantasy to protect her from what really happened. But Roos knows spirits are real; she's loved one of them. She'll have to prove her innocence and her sanity, or lose everything.

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

My Review: Satisfying sapphic romantic story of a woman who uses legit psychic powers in service of a horrible, harridanly charlatan. Or the story of an impressionable mentally ill young woman in thrall to a horrible, harridanly charlatan who grabs hold of sapphic love to effect her escape from abuse.

Either one fits. Both take us down the very dark, quite chilling paths that Author Johanna ushers the reader down. Roos, our PoV, has never experienced a normal life. It's the second culturally Dutch novel I've read this month that paints a very bleak picture of Dutch life after WWII, though I suppose that isn't exactly a shock is it. What does surprise me is the deeply homophopbic atmosphere Author Johanna portrays...I suppose the patriarchal horror of the world she's limned before our utterly appalled eyes is a big part of that, as the homophobia in question is directed at sapphic lovers.

If I'm to offer you one inducement to exceed all the others to get this book into y'all's hands, I'm going with: Dutch Author Johanna wrote this book in English, about lesbian survivors of a horrifying war in the Netherlands, because she's Dutch, because she's lesbian, and because she's clearly not quite right. How many people can accrete so many out-of-mainstream identities, write a story directly centered in them all, and get it published in the insular US market? And then, topping the high-calorie literary sundae with its obligatory gorgeously red cherry, create the undead/zombie character that twangs your readerly heartstrings with her fullness and pathos? Sweet, dead Ruth...my favorite zombie!

There are no others, just this one.

You can read, and there's a synopsis above this, so you know what's going on. I'm here to tell you if I think Author Johanna did the job of convincing me to invest in her world: Yes. Did she make me think long and hard about how the transactional world cheapens, while defining, human relationships: Better than the Southern Gothics. Roos is a classic Tennessee Williams character, a Blanche Dubois plus agency, with the psychic fragility and serious Love problems; Ruth puts me in mind of a gender-flipped Darl Bundren, articulate, doomed. Did her writing cause me to sit quiet for long moments, committing parts to memory: once, which is once more than most books I read. (It's a spoiler, so I daren't share; the Spoiler Stasi are ever vigilant and quick with their truncheons.)

The unique quality I literally never expect from horror, especially Gothic horror, novels is, here, the pervasive Dutchness of the story. It could not be reset in the US, or England, without losing the special something that kept luring me past my usual guardrails against con-artist faux psychics and fantastical stories of spirit lovers. These are usually the tropes I use as reminders that I have compararively few eyeblinks left and don't want to waste them. Author Johanna, in using postwar, post-Occupation Netherlandish settings, convinced me not to pre-judge these characters. Their long national trauma, their dark personal traumas, their battles faught against real cultural horrors, all formed a gestalt of world and people that convinced me to set my usual intolerance for these ideas aside and consider them as real...to the characters, thus opening the door to my belief as well.

That's a huge achievement for an author I'm unfamiliar with. I'm really pleased to say that I felt the ending was indeed a payoff commensurate with my investment of care and attention.

Brava, Johanna van Veen. Clearly your genesis as the odd-triplet-out was predictive of your sui generis selfhood. I'm eager for more from you.

REAL BAD THINGS, a very accurate title for a twisty story

REAL BAD THINGS
KELLY J. FORD
Thomas & Mercer
$4.99 Kindle edition, available for pre-order; releases Thursday

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Cottonmouths, a Los Angeles Review Best Book of 2017, comes an evocative suspense about the cost of keeping secrets and the dangers of coming home.

Beneath the roiling waters of the Arkansas River lie dead men and buried secrets.

When Jane Mooney’s violent stepfather, Warren, disappeared, most folks in Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, assumed he got drunk and drowned. After all, the river had claimed its share over the years.

When Jane confessed to his murder, she should have gone to jail. That’s what she wanted. But without a body, the police didn’t charge her with the crime. So Jane left for Boston―and took her secrets with her.

Twenty-five years later, the river floods and a body surfaces. Talk of Warren’s murder grips the town. Now in her forties, Jane returns to Maud Bottoms to reckon with her past: to do jail time, to face her revenge-bent mother, to make things right.

But though Jane’s homecoming may enlighten some, it could threaten others. Because in this desolate river valley, some secrets are better left undisturbed.

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

My Review: Like her previous novel Cottonmouths (my review linked above), this book is set in a rural area that could be anywhere but undeniably is the American South. At no point do we feel the curiously unmoored sensation that many crime-centered stories have, that eternal-now anywhereness. It starts from when Jane is released from steerage, I mean the commuter plane, onto the hot tarmac of a regional airport. Her mother's nasty phone message hissing in her newly single, newly homeless ear, "don't even think of running." Why Ma didn't say "again" is beyond me, because Jane's running hasn't stopped since it was "away to Boston, there a lesbian to be."

So now she's coming back to face the music for confessing to her stepfather's murder a quarter century ago. Note: confessing to. Not murdering. And that demented witch of a mother believes her, always has, she's been squatting in this nowhere town stewing in her rage and hate for the abnormal daughter who (she said she believed) murdered the abusive man who probably would've killed Ma by now had he lived.

Ah. Family ties.

Like many women with no options, her Ma had never met a nice guy and this latest one was the most violent yet. And the whole town knew it. Not a soul stepped in to help...except Jane's young love, Georgia Lee. Things go very Beautiful Creatures for a minute...Jane's brother Jason gets pulled in...it's all a major clusterfuck, in fact, and when it all settles down there's no Warren. I mean, he's dead, but there's no body. So, no body = no crime. Confess til ya turn purple, Janey luv, no body = no crime. She does spend a goodly amount of time in juvenile detention. The second that ends, she gets the hell out of Arkansas.

What is really clear while reading this book is the quiet insanity of country life. People are all up in each other's hip pockets, they know what's happening, but not a soul interferes. Wouldn't be proper, if a woman lets a man beat her up that's her lookout. Those kids won't amount to anything anyway, so what they suffer.

It's really like this, folks. This is what the world is. And it's ugly as all get out.

Now that everything changed because there's a body, surfaced after twenty-five years, Jane's home to face the music.

What music? She was a juvenile, she was in state custody until charges were dropped, and now there's *a* body but no one knows if it's that right one. (Lotsa men disappeared from this town over the years. No one seems to've looked into it. Not like they were anybody much.)

So we have ourselves a problem. What's Jane facing? Trial? Still no body...conviction? LOLOL

Her life. Her mother. Her ex, her first true love Georgia Lee. Even the little brother who simply existed throughout this ordeal, offering nothing to Jane. All that and more; vaster than oceans and more deep is the need in Jane for answers rather than lies or silences. The answers she finally gets are deeply unsettling. I could never call the last meeting of Jason and Jane a case of healing by honesty, but it was certainly an explanation of parts of their past that seemed weird and random.

Kelly J. Ford was formed by Arkansas and she has never forgiven it for that. As revenges go, this book is a great step.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL, debut SF time-travel Lesbian-led thriller

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL
KATE MASCARENHAS
Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Amazon link; the publisher's site does not have any information about this title)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1967, four female scientists worked together to build the world’s first time machine. But just as they are about to debut their creation, one of them suffers a breakdown, putting the whole project—and future of time travel—in jeopardy. To protect their invention, one member is exiled from the team—erasing her contributions from history.

Fifty years later, time travel is a big business. Twenty-something Ruby Rebello knows her beloved grandmother, Granny Bee, was one of the pioneers, though no one will tell her more. But when Bee receives a mysterious newspaper clipping from the future reporting the murder of an unidentified woman, Ruby becomes obsessed: could it be Bee? Who would want her dead? And most importantly of all: can her murder be stopped?

Traversing the decades and told from alternating perspectives, The Psychology of Time Travel introduces a fabulous new voice in fiction and a new must-read for fans of speculative fiction and women’s fiction alike.

THE PUBLISHER APPROVED A DRC OF THIS TITLE VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Okay. This is hard. I can't explain why I didn't give this fascinating, layered, reality-twisting novel of ideas less than five full stars without spoilering the hell out of the ending.

Let me approach this from the side. I remember a few details from the past, when there was one digit in my age. I don't claim, at this late date, that they are factual and accurate; way too much time has passed, way too many things look completely different to my grandfatherly self than they *could* have to my kid self. So is that The Past, my version of the past, a fantastical creation of my imagination, some combination of these (and other) angles of view? Is something new created, something old altered, is there any way imaginable that this paradox could be resolved with technological time travel? Or would that just make things a lot worse?

“Maybe being in charge of time and space would give anyone a god complex, but she’s such a mean god.”

Reader, this novel does not answer those questions. It does not approach your experience of its story universe from the position of *giving* you answers; it demands of you that you spend significant mental energy creating answers for yourself, using the story's elements (note I did not call them facts) to sort out who actually intended to be good and create happiness for the greatest number of souls.

“Rules exist for a reason.”
“Yes, to stigmatize people.”
–and–
“Sometimes, we have a moral duty to break the rules. Particularly where the rulemakers are corrupt.”

The answer is not the one you expect it to be. Or it wasn't the one I expected it to be. So I think you're likely to be led down the strange and winding thread of the screw bolting the monster's head to their body, directly into a concrete slab, and left there to wonder just what exactly happened while you thought you were reading a fun little entertainment about women empowering themselves in the world of 1967.

“Remember that. When you go, you want to have people you love to think about. You need enough money to feed yourself, and a sense of purpose is nice. But the rest is superfluous.”

And you'll like it.

ALICE PAYNE RIDES, second time-travel novella with badass mixed-race lesbian highway"man" Alice Payne

ALICE PAYNE RIDES
KATE HEARTFIELD
Tor.com Publishing
$3.99 eBook, $14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

2020 NEWS THIS DELIGHTFUL BOOK IS NOMINATED FOR A PRIX AURORA!

The Publisher Says: After abducting Arthur of Brittany from his own time in 1203, thereby creating the mystery that partly prompted the visit in the first place, Alice and her team discover that they have inadvertently brought the smallpox virus back to 1780 with them.

Searching for a future vaccine, Prudence finds that the various factions in the future time war intend to use the crisis to their own advantage.

Can the team prevent an international pandemic across time, and put history back on its tracks? At least until the next battle in the time war…

—ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES IS REVIEWED HERE—

My Review: Back we go to the 22nd century, the Time Wars, and Prudence Zuniga's new base of operations with 18th-century pals Alice Payne, the lover of Jane, as well as the Holy Ghost...a mixed-race highway"man", and all-around badass; Fleance Hall, where she makes her home with Jane and her American Revolution veteran father and is dear friends with Constable Wray Aubry, her father's compadre during their time fighting the rebels in South Carolina.

Of course things on the Time War front are not easy: King Arthur of England is kidnapped from Brittany before John can kill him to become the Bad King John of the history you and I know. Who does it? Take a guess...I'll wait...and, once ensconced in Fleance Hall, Arthur's not going back to *become* King because he likes the 18th century too much. Check? Checkmate? Or just another day at the office for the Time War soldiery? Actually this bit is radically underdeveloped for my taste. We don't see much, and certainly nothing substantive, of young Arthur Duke of Brittany. He's never been King in *my* memory, and I'd've liked to see some hard graft in developing some kind of purpose for him. Never really happened, sad to say. The focus in a novella needs must be tight, and he's outside the cone.

Prudence, aware of the timeline's malleability to focus change, careful to keep her memories in a book outside the time stream. She realizes that General Almo has butterflied away her older sister Grace...of whom she carries no memories or attachments...and sets herself to Get Him Back while retrieving the sister she knows she loved. Even if she can't feel it anymore, the knowledge that someone used their power over the time streams to deliberately deprive her of her family makes her so boiling mad that her love for Grace might as well still be within her.

And Alice? Alice loses her father in 1789, but takes Jane back to 1780 to find out why he returned from the American War so changed. Bad move...the ripples in the time streams from their actions taken there are what put General Almo in mind of the plot to hurt Prudence...and now he has a new, truly terrifying, terrible weapon that bids fair to deprive Prudence of her wonderfully weird made family.

Here, at last, we confront the primary problem that plagues time travel fiction: If you're fighting a Time War, you can never truly win. The enemy can always jump before your latest victory and prevent it. Bummer, right?

Prudence is not a quitter. She's a brilliant, out-of-the-box thinker. And she's HIGHLY motivated to come up with an effective solution to that problem in order to use it on General Almo.

Reader, she succeeds. One of the cleverest endings for a time-travel tale I've read! The title aside, most of this book centers on Prudence, so let me share some of Author Heartfield's more pithy, elegant "tells" on Prudence's delightful character:

Prudence will seldom be drawn on the subject of the future. She protests that “the future” does not exist, that there are many possible futures, and that the future whence she came very likely no longer exists.
***
Prudence has long been a time traveller by profession; she is used to combing vocabulary and references out of her speech.
***
My mentor at the Academy used to say that time travel is like life: there are no rules, only consequences.

To cast Prudence in proper relief, there's something rotten about General Almo that is best shown, not told:

Your sister, like any other human or plastic fork or oak leaf on this planet, was the result of a million events that could have gone any other way. The individual has no inherent existence. A human life is ephemeral. A conjunction of cause and consequence. Each of us is just . . . information. And one piece of information is not any more valuable than any other. If time travel has taught me anything, it’s that individuals don’t matter.

But perhaps the best summation of the sheer joy of being alive and well in this topsy-turvy time-travel-enhanced Universe is Alice's rumination on what the point of it all truly is:

Does any of it matter? All things are true, might be true, have never been true. Knowing that makes the warmth of {her horse}’s neck, the flare of her nostrils, no less real. This life is all there is, all there ever is.

Yes indeed.

ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES, first time-travel novella in what I hope and expect will be a long series

ALICE PAYNE ARRIVES
KATE HEARTFIELD (Alice Payne #1)
Tor.com Publishing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A disillusioned major, a highwaywoman, and a war raging across time.

It’s 1788 and Alice Payne is the notorious highway robber, the Holy Ghost. Aided by her trusty automaton, Laverna, the Holy Ghost is feared by all who own a heavy purse.

It’s 1889 and Major Prudence Zuniga is once again attempting to change history―to save history―but seventy attempts later she’s still no closer to her goal.

It’s 2016 and . . . well, the less said about 2016 the better!

But in 2020 the Farmers and the Guides are locked in battle; time is their battleground, and the world is their prize. Only something new can change the course of the war. Or someone new.

Little did they know, but they’ve all been waiting until Alice Payne arrives.

—ALICE PAYNE RIDES IS REVIEWED HERE—

My Review: I love writing about an excellent alt-hist novella by a woman, about women acting to improve/change the timeline, in women's history month.

Why does there need to be a women's history month? Same reason there needs to be a Black Lives Matter movement, an LGBT Pride month, any number of other celebrations of not-white not-straight not-male not-US-centric etc etc history/achievement/identity. Y'all've had the megaphone long enough. Hand it over.

Kate Heartfield earned my delighted approval when I read her novella The Course of True Love in the five-star Shakespeare-as-fantasy anthology Monstrous Little Voices. What a pleasure it is to encounter an author whose command of the demanding art of novella-writing is so complete. Her gift for concise but not reductive prose is flatteringly highlighted in this form. With more scope than a short story, not as much elbow room as a novel, the usual fate of the novella is to exist like old Lycra workout shorts: Way too tight at entry and exit points, uselessly baggy everywhere else.

Ha, says Canadian Author Kate Heartfield, hold my soy chai latte.

This novella, single-needle tailored to fit three women who share a spirit if not a soul, tells the origin story of an eighteenth-century temporal crusader named Alice, her anchor Jane, and their twenty-second century quarry Major Prudence Zuniga of the Teleosophic Core Command. We'll start the admiration engine here: Teleosophy. Time travel, that is. "Tele-" means to, or at, a distance; "-soph-" from "sophos" means wisdom, learning, knowledge. Seeking knowledge at a distance; going far away to impart wisdom. Combined with "Core" or central point and "Command" or the illusion of control, it makes the whole concept of this story's time travel crystal clear: Traveling in time to create or control events in accordance with a master plan. Implicit in that is both hubris and desperation.

I'm putting my own words to Author Heartfield's ideas, and can't be certain they represent her thoughts, but there are others just as lovely that she explains. I'd suggest to all who belong to Goodreads that they consult Heartfield's Kindle notes, where she offers sixteen "end notes" about various inspirations and sources for tidbits in the story. I was made particularly smug by "Fleance Hall"'s note; I'd thought to myself, "Oho I see the Shakespeare-based novella wasn't an accident!" and was proved correct.

That type and level of intellectual play is a joy. The idea that someone would use the well-worn time travel trope of coming from the future to save the past in this piquant and creative way is a surprise. The demise of Netflix's extraordinarily well-made and -thought-out series Travelers had rather dispirited me as to the trope's pop-culture future. This novella, and its sequel, exist; there is a pulse in these veins, so there is hope yet!

Alice is unusual in any number of ways. Her created identity of "the Holy Ghost," a feared highwayman, as a means of avenging the powerless and simultaneously assisting the father she still adores; her secret self, lover of the young and supremely intelligent Jane; and her given existence as the dark-skinned Caribbean daughter of a well-to-do white Englishman are none of them ordinary. Alice is over thirty and unmarried. She has carefully kept it that way, despite her attraction to one particular, though completely unsuitable for marriage, man. She makes the awful discovery that a deeply unsuitable and unpleasant man wants to offer her marriage in the course of the story. Jane, no fool and surprisingly quick on the social uptake when her happiness is at stake, squashes both the intent and the desire to marry in the suitor with simple, elegant finality.

Prudence, the Major with a mission to change Time, meets these ladies in the course of the Holy Ghost's highwayman-ing. She's been through the mill, spending a decade making a serious attempt to save an unworthy-but-better-than-the-alternative man from his fate. It should tell you all you need to know that it took a decade...apparently character will out no matter what. As Prudence learns she's failed and her superiors in the Teleosophic Core Command are reassigning her, she concludes that teleosophy is not the answer to humanity's problems. A long-cherished and well-planned act of sabotage, assuring that time travel will stop and not be restarted, is her only hope. She needs someone at several points in time to execute a technological action. Jane, known to be a technological tinkerer but also a socially inept naïf, is her target for 1788, but she gets Alice instead. Alice is anything but a naïf...and anything but socially inept....

Oh dear. Things go pear-shaped in several spectacular ways, and the teleosophical implications are simultaneously dire and delicious. The second volume of the series, Alice Payne Rides, is out now. How you can resist dashing away to buy them both is beyond me.

Oh, you haven't. Addressing empty space never felt so good.

COTTONMOUTHS, a GritLit Lesbian take on "Winter's Bone"

COTTONMOUTHS
KELLY J. FORD
Skyhorse Publishing
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: This was Drear’s Bluff. Nothing bad happened here. People didn’t disappear.

College was supposed to be an escape for Emily Skinner. But after failing out of school, she’s left with no choice but to return to her small hometown in the Ozarks, a place run on gossip and good Christian values.

She’s not alone. Emily’s former best friend—and childhood crush—Jody Monroe is back with a baby. Emily can’t resist the opportunity to reconnect, despite the uncomfortable way things ended between them and her mom’s disapproval of their friendship. When Emily stumbles upon a meth lab on Jody’s property, she realizes just how far they’ve both fallen.

Emily intends to keep her distance from Jody, but when she’s kicked out of her house with no money and nowhere to go, a paying job as Jody’s live-in babysitter is hard to pass up. As they grow closer, Emily glimpses a future for the first time since coming home. She dismisses her worries; the meth is a means to an end. And besides, for Emily, Jody is the real drug.

But when Emily’s role in Jody’s business turns dangerous, her choices reveal grave consequences. As the lies pile up, Emily will learn just how far Jody is willing to go to save her own skin—and how much Emily herself has risked for the love of someone who may never truly love her back.

Echoin*g the work of authors like Daniel Woodrell and Sarah Waters, Cottonmouths is an unflinching story about the ways in which the past pulls us back . . . despite our best efforts to leave it behind.

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

My Review: You probably went to Sunday school. Your mama and daddy taught you about Right and Wrong and never the twain shall meet and you either rolled your eyes and agreed to shut them up or absorbed it with every spongy fiber of your kid-soul. Most likely some of both.

But that "moral grounding" does el zippo to prepare you for end-stage capitalism's vampirous demands.

It sure as Hell didn't prepare li'l Emily.

Where she was headed, the cast iron skillet had been seasoned before she was born.
Her mom would cook the beans, potatoes, and cornbread the way her own mother had taught her. Dad would recite the Lord’s Prayer because it required no thought. And Emily would stare at her plate of food and let it go cold while pondering the headset and the cash register and the brown and blue uniform in her back seat, whose fibers still held its last tenant’s stench of fryer grease and body odor—items for a life she had not expected to return to when she left for college, for a job that would not have been offered to her at all had she not removed the name of the state university from her resume—though two years hardly called for its inclusion.

Now you name me a worse feeling than being forced, as an adult, to go to the place you're used to calling Home when it's about as much home as that deep-fat fryer you're smellin' right now.

For a Lesbian sister in a christian-values community, this is WORSE than being in so much debt that you can never dig yourself out, right? Hold my beer, says Author Kelly, I am about to make this fryin' pan seem nuclear powered:

Watching her walk away, Emily felt as dirty as if she’d been watching porn. The craving came on like a fever, as if a coal had been stoked within and blurred the edges of reasonable thought. Rather than push it away, she sat on the floor and let the desire consume her.
–and–
Then an ache no bigger than a marble pulsed inside Emily, an ache born in the woods across the creek. An ache that beat on inside her, steady, steadier, growing until her whole body shook.
–but–
That was the worst of it, to be accused but denied the pleasure of what everyone thought.

That is how Emily responds to the sight of Jody, her long-ago never-was one-that-got-away. Everyone...yeah. Lots of Everyone in Drear's Bluff (isn't that a superb distillation of Home, fellow former Southerners?), and man are they a bunch of self-righteous goobers. Nothing new there...that's how most people are. That's how so many can't help but be, given their lack of moral fiber to resist group-think.

Emily's true self, her inner self, is under siege at home, and she's got to get out...Jody, the woman who revs up her nights this decade-plus, has a solution: Come watch my baby for me! Live here, I'll give you some cash, and you're out of the house. Remember that frying pan?

“This is like the worst stereotype of the South come to life. All you need is a Confederate flag over the fucking door.”
–and–
All those wasted moments of guilt and shame and feeling downright wrong about what she’d done in the bed the night Jody left.
–and–
No matter how tempting the offer, she knew that half a life was no life at all.

It's never, ever the same, not after leaving or coming back; the world's moved on, so have your feelings, so has the person you once had the feelings for. You're in for it, though, while the ride lasts; you're not going to get off until the merry-go-round's slung you onto the bouncy-castle at 55mph and you've gone sailing through the air but there's a landing coming...one you don't have any way to cushion, or even prepare for....

Lovers would come and go. Maybe there’d be one who would be unafraid and teach Emily how to be brave, brave enough to wake up next to her, to walk hand in hand. Someone with whom she’d have a nice life, without trouble and with love. But in the twilight hours of her life, when her body and memory failed, this above all others would be the buoy she would cling to, the memory she would repeat and repeat until the darkness ripped her away. Because this moment, so small, the smallest, had seared her heart.

I wish I'd been able to full-five-star the read; the thing that kept me from doing it was a certain soap-opera quality that, while I didn't hate it (I used to watch All My Children, FFS, I'm not immune to the appeal!), I found...wearing. I wanted something that rose above it more often than something planted squarely in it, and that little niggle took the luster off just enough to be noticeable.

THE LAMB WILL SLAUGHTER THE LION, punk trans writer blows old man's mind

THE LAMB WILL SLAUGHTER THE LION
MARGARET KILLJOY (Danielle Cain #1)
Tor.com
$3.99 ebook, $14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Danielle Cain is a queer punk rock traveler, jaded from a decade on the road. Searching for clues about her best friend’s mysterious and sudden suicide, she ventures to the squatter, utopian town of Freedom, Iowa. All is not well in Freedom, however: things went awry after the town’s residents summoned a protector spirit to serve as their judge and executioner.

Danielle shows up in time to witness the spirit—a blood-red, three-antlered deer—begin to turn on its summoners. Danielle and her new friends have to act fast if they’re going to save the town—or get out alive.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: ...the fuck did I just read...?

Genderqueer, gay, celibate, punk, anarchist, shaman-magical people find a town and found a stateless collective that they defend by summoning a demon to make the world stay the fuck away.

I think.

Fantasy doesn't get more exciting than this. I'm mortally sick of reading yet another iteration of Lord of the Rings and being told it's New! Different! Amazing! No. It's not. But this? This is new, different, exciting. It even eschews urban fantasy tropes. It's refreshing and I'm eager for the next one, coming out sometime in 2018.

Margaret Killjoy, with your pretty hazel green eyes, you made my reading year. This book is a perfect gift item for the jaded fantasy reader, or the fantasy-resistant reader (me) on your Yule gifting list.

My Young Gentleman Caller picked this book up during his Thanksgiving surprise visit to me. (Hint: If you want to see whether someone is Interested in you not just looking for something from you, bore them. If they hang, they're Interested.) His comments are quoted for y'all's amusement and edification.

The only electric light I saw shone inside a small grocery, which was lit up by its bank of fluorescents. The place was filled with furniture, tools, and food. Well-lettered in red and yellow along the facade were the words: EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE. A folding sidewalk sign out front read: A FREE MARKET SHOULD MEAN EVERYTHING IS FREE.

YGC: Did you write this? You don't look like a Margaret but it sounds like you.
ME: Nope. Innocent. Though Margaret's got beautiful eyes.
{WE look at @magpiekilljoy on Twitter}
YGC: Appalachia's far enough away.
ME: For what?
YGC: That I don't have to get worried about you wandering off.

"Cuddling sounds nice," I said.

It should have been nice. The moonlight came in through the circular window, and she laid on her back as I nuzzled up with my head on her. It had been months at least since I'd been with anyone, even slept next to anyone, and my skin was alive at her touch. I could hear her steady breath, smell her pheromones. For a moment, just a short peaceful moment, I was able to revel in that simple pleasure.

YGC: That made me feel lonely.
ME: Yeah, me too.
YGC: Feeling lonely doesn't scare me as much since I started reading.
ME:
YGC: *keeps reading*

"I have this wicked crush on you," Brynn continued, "but also I'm celibate, at least for now. So I guess I wanted to just get both of those things out there before I get too hung up on you or lead you on. Also there's a non-zero chance we're both going to get eaten by a demon sometime soon."
"I haven't let anyone in for awhile," I said, after thinking about it. "You're a total badass and you're a babe. I mean, you've got everything I should want. But yeah, walls. Lots of walls.
I probably can't be with anyone while I'm like this."
"A perfect match," she said.
"Indeed."

YGC: *finishes reading aloud, stares at me*
ME: (defensive) What?
YGC: ::eyeroll::
ME: What are you suggesting?! (more defensive)
YGC: *peck*

"Fucking hell," Thursday said. "It's almost like you can't summon otherworldly beings into existence, let them loose on your enemies, and set up a culture of worship around them without people getting all crazy."

YGC: I call bullshit!
ME: On what?
YGC: You totally wrote this! That sounds just like you!
ME: Thanks, I appreciate the compliment, but no I didn't.
YGC: Go know from there's another sarcastic old smartass in the world.
ME: Love you too, ya little pisher.
YGC: *blush*

After he finished the book, it was time for the Young Gentleman Caller to meet up with his friends for whatever sporting event they were going to watch. As he left, I got another peck and a quiet, "I love reading with you."

Margaret Killjoy, you ROCK!!