THE GUNCLE, a sweetly sentimental look at family, love, and their powers

THE GUNCLE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Patrick, or Gay Uncle Patrick (GUP, for short), has always loved his niece, Maisie, and nephew, Grant. That is, he loves spending time with them when they come out to Palm Springs for weeklong visits, or when he heads home to Connecticut for the holidays. But in terms of caretaking and relating to two children, no matter how adorable, Patrick is honestly a bit out of his league.

So when tragedy strikes and Maisie and Grant lose their mother and Patrick’s brother has a health crisis of his own, Patrick finds himself suddenly taking on the role of primary guardian. Despite having a set of “Guncle Rules” ready to go, Patrick has no idea what to expect, having spent years barely holding on after the loss of his great love, a somewhat-stalled career, and a lifestyle not-so-suited to a six- and a nine-year-old. Quickly realizing that parenting—even if temporary—isn’t solved with treats and jokes, Patrick’s eyes are opened to a new sense of responsibility, and the realization that, sometimes, even being larger than life means you’re unfailingly human.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY AFTER MONTHS ON THE WAITING LIST. USE THOSE LIBRARIES! WE'RE HOW THEY LIVE.

My Review: Last year's big beach read was damned near perfect for the job of being gay enough to really show people how this shit works in real life without making straight people squirm. No fewer than 26 (twenty-six!) mass-media straight venues listed it as a must-read! TWENTY-SIX! Ten years ago, I'd've fallen over in a heap; now I'm mightily impressed. And that, mes vieux, is what we call "progress" of the best sort.

But really, can you fault their discernment?

“You’re forty-three!” Maisie bellowed.

“Who are you, the DMV? Lower your voice.”

“That’s almost fifty!” Grant’s eyes grew big.

Patrick took the jab, then closed his eyes and bit his lower lip; the observation was just shy of a hate crime.

–and–

“Canada is harmless and the prime minister is a total snack, so we can do Paw Patrol. But another time, because we have to move beyond brunch and start planning our day. What are you guys thinking, do you have anything on your calendars?”

–and–

Books should be an experience, he thought, not a trophy for having read them.

Really, the most delicious Negroni (Aperol! faugh!) of fun and profundity for the masses! I can absolutely recommend this book to straight women, gay guys over thirty, and the very most adventurous straight men and lesbians.

...wait...that's it? That's the review?

Honestly, it could be. That's what the reviewer does, right? Tell you and those like you if a book is worth reading, and identify that group to the best of their ability. Illustrate with relevant (in the reviewer's opinion) examples, do one's best not to spoiler things for the sensitive fleurs who, inexplicably, still read reviews but don't want to know anything that happens in the artwork in question. But the twenty-six (!) media outlets that yawped about this book in 2021 already did that. (They did not tell you, however, about being assaulted in the sensibilities by twelve {12} w-bombs. It was an invasion of the eye-disease-having winkers. Ick.)

So, let me tell you a little something that is a spoiler, but is also something you really need to know: This is also a book about loving more than you fear being hurt. This is a book about processing loss, making its deforming agonies fit into a shape that will carry you through the rest of a life; this is a book about the unique, unusual pain of losing your mate as a gay man.

Regular readers know that I've had my share of losses, incalculably awful ones, and met them without a lot of inner strength due to my own beginnings among women who judged, and felt comfortable expressing their contempt for, me. I'm not going to rehash the stories, they're spread all over this place, but the fact is I understand Patrick well. He found his Joe...who chose him to be his family...and he had his RG bestie Sara, who also chose him to be her family to the point she married his little brother. His family, then, was born, found, made. He felt it was his...and gawd laughed her evil laugh.

Joe, gone in an instant, his life taken before his body stopped working; Sara, withered and wizened by illness, slowly slowly vanishing, and Patrick losing again...this time with higher stakes, loss built on loss. And Sara? Well. That's the loveliest thing about this book. Sara, whom we meet briefly in flashbacks of her loving bestieship with Patrick, is honestly like Nut the sky goddess and the goddess of Mothers as she was The Mother. Her role is pervasive, her life is not over...never truly will be...but she is, for all that, a space not an object. And that is so exactly like motherhood that it's really a little terrifying....

The word "Guncle" is a portmanteau of "gay" and "uncle" which I trust won't surprise readers of my words. It's a way of refining a relationship that is largely, in the twenty-first century, fungible. I called men "Uncle" who were neither married to my aunts nor related to my parents. It's a standard feature of life now, we claim relationships and make of them things that we're interested in having or being. The family Patrick has built is so deeply rooted that Guncle Patrick is GUP, the Guncle, anything you want because he's still building his identity. As we all should throughout our lives, after Joe's and Sara's deaths, Patrick is reinventing himself in this summer-long story of a clueless gay man taking on the role of grief counselor and rock of support to two kids and, finally, himself.

"Coming of age" is a phrase that, when applied to novels, shows, films, and other cultural detritus, causes my stomach to churn with acid produced by the "flight" part of the famous response. I hated being a teenager and I don't much want to experience that horrible time again in art. Any art. But the simple fact is, we come of middle-age, we come of old-age...we aren't ever Finished Products. That's for characters created to show us their intended side, their best profile. This book's biggest and best gift to the reader of middle or older years is that: Patrick comes of age, again, as he processes his intense and life-altering grief with humor and wit, with stakes far beyond his own self, with clumsy but real love and, finally, respect for the role of loss and sadness, for grief's immense and unending weight.

Lift weights for strength. Do yoga for flexibility. Nourish your body with the tenderest care and attention to its needs. Because it is the vessel that will support your huge burden of grief and sadness, your light and love, your voice as you speak your truth.

Gym bunny GUP did. And Author Steven Rowley led us there without making it a trudge, or selling it short; I didn't just think up that stuff and say it here, I found it all in this light, easy-to-read novel about a man asked to do the impossible. Again: Heal.

VERMILION: Valentine & Lovelace, or the gay Nick & Nora, republished for babyqueers everywhere to fall for

VERMILION: Valentine & Lovelace #1
NATHAN ALDYNE
Felony & Mayhem Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A dead young hustler is found on the lawn of a queer-baiting legislator. Boston's political and queer communities are up in arms about the matter, and police are bent on finding the killer—fast. Best friends Daniel Valentine and Clarisse Lovelace team up and hit the streets of Boston. Through a sinister underworld of bars and baths, bondage and blackmail, they're out to solve a very bizarre murder.

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

My Review: Four w-bombs. It was 1981 and there was no need to torment me from beyond the grave! It was a tough enough year as it was.

Anyway. First, read this:

"I tell you, Lieutenant: twenty-five years ago, it was straight men that got me into trouble, and ten years ago, it was straight men that got me put in jail. It was a fag that got me out of jail and it was a fag that made sure I got a decent job. I got nothing against 'em. I'm not a fag, but I know what they know"—he gestured just as {the Lieutenant} had, with a cocked head—"that straight men are just trouble."

–and–

"...Wednesday night is dollar night and every queen in town with four quarters to her name shows up...that lobby emptied out like they were showing Dark Victory across the street...I'm not afraid of {the Lieutenant} for that, because I can take care of myself, and the time is past somebody like him can come in and push me around just because I'm gay. No judge in town would listen to him for more than five minutes. But like I say, it's the hassle. I don't like having to carry around {his lawyer's} card in my wallet all the time, and I certainly don't like the man coming around flashing his badge."

That, mes vieux, is the way we talked in 1979 when this story is set. It was pre-AIDS and the second quotes are from a bath-house attendant, though it's not like the institution of anonymous semi-public sex has vanished from the landscape (see: Bath Haus) it is a lot less prominent. A lot of things I thought were in the past, like homophobic politicians trying to keep QUILTBAG people down, aren't. But we have fought and fought and fought since the mid-nineteenth century to keep straight people out of our business and away from our basic rights to exist, to speak, to love and marry...so we just need to keep a-doin' it.

What this book does, by coming out again in the Twenties, is to educate the Millennials on the fact that the Boomers were just horny guys, too. The pop-culture references...Mamie Van Doren, Veronica Lake the afghan hound, handkerchief codes, smoking!! boozing!!, calling men who dress up as ladies "drags" and "a drag," the über-fey hairdresser whose professional name, nay entire beauty shop!, takes its names and inspiration from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (which is what we called it then)...are going to be challenging for anyone under 50. My Young Gentleman Caller was...confused...a lot, and kept asking "But WHY is it funny?" So, well, audience defined.

But if it's in your frames of reference, if you're just a weentsy tidge nostalgic one reading day, pick this up and try it.

"Honey, I just got a pistol fired at my face!" She shoved the leather envelope under her arm. "In the immortal words of Mildred Pierce, 'Let's get stinko!'"

Let's!

THE REDSHIRT, Southern American football culture meets gay first love & BATH HAUS, gay thriller about unraveling your own life with plenty of help

BATH HAUS
P.J. VERNON
Doubleday Books
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST LGBTQ Mystery! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.

He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.

What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US AND WE NEED THEM MORE THAN EVER.

My Review: I love flawed gay protagonists! They don't come more flawed than Oliver. What he did, how he did it, all truly contemptible. Why? Lower still. By the end of the story, he is the sort of creepy little loser it's easy to hate. Yet I never *quite* learned to hate him. I was certainly contemptuous of his actions...for which he paid a steep price.

Nathan, well...he's a rotten-souled chip off the fetid, foul-smelling old block. He does nothing for anyone but himself. He is a walking, talking scion of White Privilege, and not worth the powder it would take to blow him up. Nathan (and family, and friends) I hated with force and vigor.

Why I kept going despite serious problems with the characters peopling the book is simple: the pace picked up after about the 40% mark. It got so involving I couldn't stop. But I will say this, I wouldn't have been kind about the whole thing if Tillie had not been okay.

Borrow it from the library. Not a book you'll want to re-read.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE REDSHIRT
COREY SOBEL
The University Press of Kentucky
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Shortlisted for 2020 Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

Corey Sobel challenges tenacious stereotypes in this compelling debut novel, shedding new light on the hypermasculine world of American football. The Redshirt introduces Miles Furling, a young man who is convinced he was placed on earth to play football. Deep in the closet, he sees the sport as a means of gaining a permanent foothold in a culture that would otherwise reject him. Still, Miles's body lags behind his ambitions, and recruiters tell him he is not big enough to compete at the top level. His dreams come true when a letter arrives from King College.

The elite southern school boasts one of the best educations in America and one of the worst Division One football programs. King football is filled with obscure, ignored players like Miles—which is why he and the sports world in general are shocked when the country's top recruit, Reshawn McCoy, also chooses to attend the college. As brilliant a student as he is a player, the intensely private Reshawn refuses to explain why he chose King over other programs.

Miles is as baffled as everyone else, and less than thrilled when he winds up rooming with the taciturn Reshawn. Initially at odds with each other, the pair become confidants as the win-at-all-costs program makes brutal demands on their time and bodies. When their true selves and the identities that have been imposed on them by the game collide, both young men are forced to make life-changing choices.

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

My Review: Let's start with the easy bits: Clearly Author Sobel, football alum of DUKE University, knew the sports parts inside out. Clearly he understood the racism and exploitation inherent in King/Duke University inviting Black players to its program, and campus. And I strongly suspect he knew some closeted players. He himself is not gay, and it shows.

This is not a knock. The man understands viscerally the cost of hiding and sneaking. But he doesn't get the longing for a man to touch you and be touched by you because I'll wager he's never felt it. What he does get is the way love, real true first love, makes a man out of a boy. That part is absolutely crystal clear, and is the heart of my appreciation for this story. Reshawn the phenom's hatred for the entire enterprise of college football, possibly the game itself, gets serious exploration. It's counterpointed to Miles's "I-am-a-camera" absorption in the colors and the personalities and the panoply of the game's celebrants, as Author Sobel directly describes them:

Here came the celebrant. Coach Zeller's vestments were a purple polo shirt, pressed white khakis, and unscuffed tennis shoes he reserved for games. He took his place at the head of the half circle, and once the last people squeezed inside and the doors closed he began his first pregame speech as King's head coach.

It's not necessary to reproduce Zeller's blather about either rising or sliding, about choosing and losing. It's not like it makes any difference, but it does show the author's clear grasp of the milieu and his own keen perception of the performative and ritualistic elements of football at this school.

What the author also gets is what it takes to be Other in a world that has no room, no time, no oxygen for Otherness. What happens is cruel and vicious and mean-spirited. Miles is the most intensely tested character in this book and it is unbelievable to me that his power and strength could go unnoticed by the people around him. The adults clearly see it and clearly want it...but on their own terms.

The end of the story is not at all what one would expect it to be. The end of the story is, in so many ways, the end of childhood's sweet spot in adolescence and the entry of Miles...and Reshawn...into the dark, cold, stinking pool of adulthood. Reshawn is, like Miles himself, tested and comes through a man. The others? The team, the coaches, not one of them is anything other than a dupe. They're fools caught on the deck of Plato's ship of fools, all the worse because they see it and choose it.

I can't imagine all that many of my fellow queer gents are football-mad enough to want to wade through the games and practices. There's no compensatory sex to make the enterprise less...cishet...and that is deeply too bad. I think, if y'all can pry open your rage-sealed hatred for the way team sports treated you, you'll find a story about personal power, about truly accepting yourself and your place in this world, and about how important it is to know your friends are fully, completely there for you if you're to make any kind of success out of adult life. And thus how very satisfying Miles's story is. That is what you get; you should come experience it; and take some time to appreciate that this is not some lame fantasy of The Lockerroom, but the voice of experience telling you how it goes when it goes right.

EVEN GREATER MISTAKES: Stories, Charlie Jane Anders does the "doesn't get better than this" victory lap

EVEN GREATER MISTAKES: Stories
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 2022 LOCUS AWARD—BEST COLLECTION! Watch the entire ceremony here.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary....

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

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

My Review: This is a collection to dip into not slurp down greedily. I mean, where else do you find, "A whole book of short stories can be overwhelming, like imaginative speed dating." This isn't even in a story! It's in the opening act, the Introduction! She's not keepin' her powder dry, unlikely for a seasoned campaigner who's founded geeky websites; or she's just got that immense an arsenal and knows she doesn't need to pace herself.

The best thing I can say of this epitome of Author Charlie Jane Anders's career is that you are unlikely to become bored. A story about time travel that includes, as I've never seen any other place, the fact that the Earth is moving in space; the Sun is moving in space; and not one bit of that enables a careless time-traveler to land where they began. Another story about time travel, but for an extremely specific time, and how that affects a love affair. Love, in every guise you can imagine, underpins every story. Love unspoken, love requited, love rejected...love all over the shop. Seriously. Get some towels.

You'll note that I'm using the venerable tool called the Bryce Method to bring you the flavor of the tales.

As Good As New elicits one of Author Anders's fun personal revelations in its intro...LeVar Burton read this story aloud! I can see why...it's a deceptively simple story about a deceptively simple solution to world peace placed in the executive power of a decidedly not simple heroine. One who does not hesitate to think and plot and carefully consider where others have already gone wrong. A writer, in other words, who loves the craft more than the plaudits.

Marisol had...gone back to the pre-med books, staring at the exposed musculature and blood vessels as if they were costume designs for a skeleton theatre troupe.
–and–
Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged our sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.

4.5 stars

Rat Catcher's Yellows runs the reader smack into the wall of early-life dementia. A mutated virus does it in her story—cytomegalovirus did it in mine. It was so awful reliving those dark, hopeless almost-the-end days thirty years gone that this is where I stopped reading the book my first trip through.

...Shary is forming relationships with these cats in their puffy-sleeve court outfits and lacy ruffs. In the real world, she can't remember where she lives, what year it is, who the president is, or how long she and I have been married.

But Shary wanted me back, and kept nudging me to man up and finish her life with her...because it really was, like my man's ending, a beginning for something new. 4.5 stars

If You Take My Meaning is, per Author Anders's explanatory note, a giant ball of spoilers for The City in the Middle of the Night, which I haven't read yet, so this is me skippity-skip-skipping to the next read! I'm sure I can swing back around to it after I've done the necessary reading.

The Time Travel Club confirms what I've always believed: the only way anything at all ever gets done is the desperation of belonging, of making one's own space in a crowded, empty cosmos, meeting social isolation in a group of one's fellows. It lifted my sadness into a higher orbit to read Lydia's group's happiness-building involvement in a fantasy world that barely approached reality until it became reality. Plus now I know the word "fauxropean" really exists. My joy is unbridled. 4.5 stars

Six Months, Three Days got an entire review to itself in 2013. Go look.

Love Might Be Too Strong a Word has such a great backstory...maybe threatening the story itself for pre-eminence in my heart. And getting a seven-fingered hand on your four-fingered knuckles does a completely scary number on my head.

Until, of course, the true alienness...the multimorphic species with complex reproductive anatomies and even more baroque sexual ethics...hit me. And the pronouns...! Gadzooks! The pronouns make "they/she/he" a doddle! The beautiful weirdness of the alien city, its voyage across space, the fanciful glories of forbidden romance between...castes? morphs?...in defiance of carefully engineered plans, then the Big Reveal gives the intended perspective and, well.... 5 stars

Fairy Werewolf vs Vampire Zombie brings one into range of one w-bomb and what I'd have to call a w-grenade. (Mostly because it makes sense in context to drop the w...but it's still That Unnatural Ocular Act.) Zombies, Fae, vampires, werefolk...all real. And all ready for a drink at the bar where the wolf-bit Faerie princess chooses the most creepy of Cabaret's creepy numbers, "Don't Tell Mama", to settle a magical duel. A magical karaoke duel. There's also brains for a hungry zombie, in a lovely balsamic vinaigrette. That's the kind of world we're in when Author Charlie Jane is at the helm. We're in Weirdsville, sure, but that does not mean we can't have nice things. 4 stars

Ghost Champagne is the weirdest story yet...a comedian with a seriously fucked-up life (not narrowing that down much, am I?) has a strange variation on Cotard's syndrome that helps (?) her cope with crippling depression. Her Evangelical mother's midlife crisis is recognizing she's a lesbian and marrying a woman her daughter's age. And that's where the normal part ends. While Cotard's gets its act together, she's got her groove as a drunken vomiting ghost whose body's now inhabited by the ghost that's been haunting her. Who happens to be the woman who's being haunted, only older. And dead. 4 stars

My Breath is a Rudder is as plain as the nose on your face: Getting older in a city full of Peter Pans is a bear. Not one soul knows or cares about the city you fell in love with and there's no one left to be yourself with. You're as creative as you ever were but that's now the fantasy you're creating for sale. Wonder why no one's biting....

San Francisco, land of my birth, holds little appeal for me. This story brilliantly encapsulates why: Even in the near future, the city believes its own hype. 3 stars

Power Couple has my very favorite Charlie Jane line of all time in it:

Much later, I discovered that his butt fit perfectly inside my cupped hands, the curve of his undercheek resting just right against my crinkled life lines, as if copping a feel was the whole reason I had palms in the first place.

Too much? Not enough! And then there's the story itself, how the World is not designed for people which is deliberate since people designed the World...so why isn't it better?

Because somebody likes the way it is, and that somebody ain't interested in what works for you. Which is why kludges seem like good ideas. 4 stars

Rock Manning Goes for Broke is the longest piece in the book, the revenant of a novel from the early 1990s that had story-stuff in it that was not about to let the eyelashes of its creator go...you'll see why, or possibly have seen why if you've read it in some anthology from the past. I understand...there's a lot in here...but I did not enjoy the violence. It starts from Rock getting slung off the roof by his daddy in the first paragraph. I get the joke...violence ramped up isn't violence anymore, it's a joke...but I'm past the point of my life where I think that joke's funny. In fact, I'm a little bit embarrassed I used to think it was. 3 stars

Because Change Was the Ocean is what will really happen after The Apocalypse. People left will have babies, grandkids, whatever their hard work and their fates allow; these will be the natives of a new normal; they'll decide what to do, how to do it, what happens next, and you know what? San Francisco will still summon the misfits, the wannabes, and the loudly Othered to its sacred hills.

After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

It still, after decades and centuries, calls its own home to be weird together. 4 stars

Captain Roger in Heaven made me squirm as a monster grew before my eyes.

That was the thing {he} had left art school understanding: people make complicated pieces of art to explain human behavior, when the real explanation is almost always stupidity.

It is. And stupidity alone, among all that the Universe contains, has no beginning and no end...we surrender ourselves to it in order to make something, some lack or some surfeit, make ourselves whole with/out that. Like that can ever come from outside. 5 STARS

Clover builds on a dangling thread of All the Birds in the Sky which I've read...and liked...so I read this with a little shiver of anticipation.

Forgetting that it's about a c-a-t. My most beloathèd mammal next to Humanity. I finished it without feeling anything I think a cat-lover would except maybe relieved. But for different reasons. 3 stars all of which are grudgingly granted.

This is Why We Can't Have Nasty Things made me cry like a baby without his bottle. It's "I Love This Bar" only queer. And about an entire city. My Manhattan...the 70s, the 80s...gone forever. And I still love it. 5 stars

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime is silly comedic space-opera joyfulness.

"See what I mean? I may have only one cell, but it's a brain cell!" He whooped and did an impromptu dance in his seat. "Like I said: you're the stealthy one, I'm the flashy one."

You are everything, Author Charlie Jane. You can give me more, and I wants it, preciousssss. 5 stars

Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue is the nightmare/fever dream/body horror of what 45 and the clowncar of deplorables who rode his back to more power than they ever should've had want to do to Others. It's body horror, so be aware of that. It's also nauseating and claustrophobic and just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it does: Your ex-best friend, the one you had to leave behind with your deadname, is the one doing the awfulness to you. Because it's a job. Not rage, not revenge.

Because. It's. A. Job. 4.5 stars

The Bookstore at the End of America proves that the best people on the planet are book people. Bar none. 5 stars

The Visitmothers is proof that, in the end, asking from the heart gets you nothing. Unless you're open to the newfangled idea that your happiness is achievable by making others happier and better and new all over again. Sweet, touching, and delightful. 4 stars

BOYS COME FIRST, indie publisher's first-ever novel...from a Black Queer debut novelist

BOYS COME FIRST
AARON FOLEY
Belt Publishing
$17.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Suddenly jobless and single after a devastating layoff and a breakup with his cheating ex, advertising copywriter Dominick Gibson flees his life in Hell's Kitchen to try and get back on track in his hometown of Detroit. He’s got one objective — exit the shallow dating pool ASAP and get married by thirty-five—and the deadline’s approaching fast.

Meanwhile, Dom's best friend, Troy Clements, an idealistic teacher who never left Michigan, finds himself at odds with all the men in his life: a troubled boyfriend he's desperate to hold onto, a perpetually dissatisfied father, and his other friend, Remy Patton. Remy, a rags-to-riches real estate agent known as “Mr. Detroit,” has his own problems—namely choosing between making it work with a long-distance lover or settling for a local Mr. Right Now who’s not quite Mr. Right. And when a high-stakes real estate deal threatens to blow up his friendship with Troy, the three men have to figure out how to navigate the pitfalls of friendship and a city that seems to be changing overnight.

Full of unforgettable characters, Boys Come First is about the trials and tribulations of real friendship, but also about the highlights and hiccups—late nights at the wine bar, awkward Grindr hookups, workplace microaggressions, situationships, frenemies, family drama, and of course, the group chat—that define Black, gay, millennial life in today’s Detroit.

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

My Review: There's no such thing as "reverse racism." There's just racism, with shifting targets. Dom, Troy, and Remy all say, and feel, really racist things. And guess what: Unlike white people, these Black men have reasons to feel angry and frustrated and dispossessed. Their skin color marks them out as targets for lunatic racist white scum.

And guess what else? Black folks ain't perfect. These are three gay men, in a social milieu that really, really does NOT want their men to be gay. At all. So can you see what leads these loving, flawed, hurting, sadder-looking-for-wiser guys to be mouthy? It's like women of all colors rolling their eyes so hard they see their brains when men of any color start legislating what they can and can't do with their own bodies. There's a lot of anger built up at a lot of groups. Most with reason and justice on their side.

A lot of that anger is faced up to in this story of hurt, betrayal, and abuse. Dom and Troy, in their different ways, are reeling from domestic drama that is instantly relatable. Remy, not part of the kidhood bond shared by Dom and Troy, is probably the most personally insulated from domestic drama since he's in a "situationship," a neologism (it was to me, at least) I really like for a long-distance, still love-based, relationship. Not like I understand that from the inside or anything....

Remy's job as a real-estate hustler leads to a major fracture in his friendship with Troy and, to an extent, Dom, because his work is threatening to repurpose Troy's employer, a school, into gentrification's profitable arms. Detroit's decades of economic woes are a huge part of this story's rage-fuel. Would Dom have left Detroit for New York (and by extension met his cheating ex) had Detroit been capable of sustaining his ambitious need for a media market commensurate? Troy's domestic woes are fed, at least in part, by the economic struggles inherent in pursuing a teaching career. And here's Remy about to make a bundle of cash off the city's redevelopment....

I think the major take-away from this story is that there's no room for racism's corrosive effects in any society we need to support the creation of; and the other hate-isms, like homophobia and colorism, have to go in the dumpster too. When these Black, gay men face so much trouble from outside, it makes their work to fix the problems inside so very much harder. And that stops them not at all, doesn't even slow them down much, as they fight and fuck and work themselves up to fever pitch. These men, messy lives and sad hearts and powerful spirits in them all, make every day count. They don't, by the end of the story, waste what they've got anymre in wanting what they can't have.

But that does not mean they take second best. Not for long, anyway. It makes them great companions for a summer laze on the beach.

Just...maybe skip ahead over the smexytimes. Until you get home, anyway.

ALONE ON THE MOON: A Soviet Lunar Odyssey, alternate history of the Space Race!

ALONE ON THE MOON: A Soviet Lunar Odyssey (Altered Space, #5)
GERALD BRENNAN
Tortoise Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: May, 1970. A two-person Soviet crew approaches the moon, ready to accomplish the greatest feat in human history—provided they can overcome their own petty jealousies, and the unforgiving harshness of space.

Alone on the Moon chronicles a Soviet moon mission through the eyes of Boris Volynov, a backup who’s been pressed into service helping Alexei Leonov (a man he despises) attempt humanity’s first lunar landing. Thoroughly researched, it’s a detailed and plausible rendition of two larger-than-life personalities facing incredible challenges. It’s also a meditation on luck, trust, the nature of observation, and the burden of being chosen—plus the way our personal narratives can shape (or poison) our perceptions of the present. Do the stories we tell ourselves shape our fate, or can we write a new chapter? The answer awaits.

The titles in the Altered Space series are wholly separate narratives, but all deal with the mysteries of space and time, progress and circularity. Each one is an ensō of words in which orbits of spacecraft, moons, planets, and people allow us fresh perspectives on the cycles of our own lives.

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

My Review: Remember Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut of Mars series? Alternate space race with hugely accelerated stakes, a lot of international and interspecies cooperation? Like, even women going to the stars?!? Well, that tore it. I had to have more space-but-not-this-way stories.

So here I am reviewing the next most different take on the Space Race...a Soviet first-lunar-landing story! And I hated it!

More precisely, I hated the narrator: Bitter Boris the Bore. Banging on about how unlucky he is, how a Jew is always held back, how deeply he hates Alexei the Golden Boy...his nickname's fuckin' BLONDIE facryinoutloud!...and his tedious wife, the chilly withholding climber.

I'll never read this book again. But goddam what a story! What a sheer, pulse-pounding rocket ride of a story!

The whole burden of the refrain "unlucky" is simple: Don't be different. Don't stand out. Be there but never be noticeably better than anyone in power unless you're so good there's not a corner that they can sweep you into. Because they will. In other words, big organizations are all alike and whatever alphabet the nameplate's are printed in the behaviors are the same.

What happens to Boris is utterly terrifying. At every turn, his shot is blocked. His spot is taken. When he gets to do anything,it goes wrong. Not just people, then, but gawd hates him. And it's no wonder they do, he never met a joy he couldn't squelch or a happiness he couldn't chill to absolute zero. Even his son is being raised by this dark, unhappy cloud of a belief that nothing goes right because it's inevitable.

Yuck.

What this does for Blondie, the first man on the moon, is give him a partner in space who believes it's all going to shit anyway but he's going to check, recheck, then check the recheck so no one can say it was his fault. He calculates things Control has already fed into his computer. He's always got a finger on the cut-off switch so he can make the computers and the thrusters and the machinery of every sort obey his calculations. Which are, of course, correct. Blondie's always been the fair-haired boy and the lucky one so he's just indifferent to the details.

And do you know what? He should't've been *quite* so sanguine. I delight in that bit. I thrilled to the ways the inevitable problems that crop up got handled, solved, and Boris vindicated. There's a reveal at the end of the book that wasn't a surprise to me, there's a lot of technical stuff that will likely put off a casual reader, and there's the basic problem of feeling whined at for almost 300pp. But there was no damned way I was closing this book until I was sure the story ended...well.

And that's why it gets four whole stars.

May 2022's Burgoine Reviews & Pearl Rule Reviews

Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.

Think about using it yourselves!

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Firefly (Paul Samson series #1) by Henry Porter

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the refugee camps of Greece to the mountains of Macedonia, a thirteen year old boy is making his way to Germany and safety. Codenamed 'Firefly', he holds vital intelligence: unparalleled insight into a vicious ISIS terror cell, and details of their plans. But the terrorists are hot on his trail, determined he won't live to pass on the information.

When MI6 become aware of Firefly and what he knows, the race is on to find him. Paul Samson, ex-MI6 agent and now private eye, finds himself recruited to the cause. Fluent in Arabic thanks to his Lebanese heritage, Samson's job is to find Firefly, win his trust and get him to safety.

A devastatingly timely thriller following the refugee trail from Syria to Europe, Firefly is a sophisticated, breathtaking race against time from the acclaimed and award-winning author of Brandenburg and The Dying Light.

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

My Review: Paul Samson, Arabophone Brit of Lebanese background, has a gambling problem that got him bounced from the intelligence job he loved. He's an adrenaline junky, so he wasn't unemployed for long; he's fluent in the language and conversant with the culture of one of the world's hotspots, so guess where his now-unofficial work takes him!

Naji is the teenaged son of a Syrian academic who, gentle soul that he was, believed he could help some dissident students of his be found in Assad's brutal regime. He later died from the aftereffects of being tortured. Naji, after this awakening, is quick to see through ISIL's façade of acceptance and gets his family to Turkey preparatory to making it to Germany.

With, because he's very intelligent but not very smart yet, damaging information he got because "he's just a kid" and the violent men paid no attention to him.

His head went under. Seawater filled his nose and mouth; his eyes opened and he saw the black depths of the ocean below him. A moment later something knocked his legs—maybe part of the wreckage, he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that he was going to die. Then it came again. This time there was a distinct shove on his buttocks and whatever it was that moved with such intent beneath him lifted him up so his head and shoulders came out of the water and he was able to grab a plastic toggle on the section of the rubber craft that was still inflated.

Not good for his chances of survival...but Paul Samson, now that British officialdom know Naji exists, is sent unofficially and deniably to make him safe and get him to the point he can give the information to them. Kid's a tyro...he leads everyone a merry chase. Author Porter writes a damn good story here, sets it in places I'm convinced he knows well enough to lead tours, but there's not much horsepower in his characters as people. Their motives are clear and powerful. They are also, unlike real people's and thus unlike the characters I most enjoy reading about, unmixed. Black-hearted people, white-hatted people...not a lot of nuance.

That said I read the book as fast as I could. I wanted this kid to win and I think anyone who needs something more or less unambiguous for a restful but still exciting (weird sentence...but that's how this book came across for me) or at least very action-packed story of implausibly lucky good guys needs this read.

A Kindle edition is $10.99 at this non-affiliate link.

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One-Way Street (var. title Monodromos) by Marian Engel

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Said: Her first two books, Sarah Bastard's Notebook and The Honeyman Festival, demonstrated that Marian Engel is a Canadian novelist with a marvelous talent for portraying women. In One Way Street (formerly titled Monodromos), we meet another one of her heroines. Audrey Moore, intelligent Canadian, 36—facts which help her not at all during her solourn on a Greek island where she is staying with her estranged husband, a has-been concert pianist with sexual proclivities that do not include Audrey. Although she senses that life on the island will be a one-way street for her, the heroine becomes deeply involved in the island's characters and finally takes a Greek lover—to the disgust of an island crone who sits in Audrey's doorway loudly lamenting the young woman's sins to passersby. The tensions of Audrey's island life explode in a hilarious finale as she ends her stay with pilgrimage to a Greek monastery where the Bishop attempts her seduction. A tragi-comic masterpiece, One Way Street is an intensely readable novel about Canadians in an alien land.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM ARCHIVE.ORG HERE. COPIES AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE IN VARIOUS EDITIONS FROM MANY VENDORS AT ADDALL.COM HERE.

My Review: I read this book because Jo Walton liked it. Me? Well...it was okay. I certainly didn't hate it. I was slightly surprised that Author Marian Engel was married to Howard Engel, whose Benny Cooperman mysteries I read in the 1980s. They're not stylistically similar at all, in the manner of divorced spouses around the world I suppose.

This book failed me by being a "straight-woman-saves-gay-ex" narrative that portrays him as a hapless and manipulative ne'er-do-well. Now, in 2022, I am less horrified and more simply impatient with that kind of dumb-man stuff. But it not only colored but darkened my appreciation for Author Engel's lovely descriptive prose and perceptive aperçus.

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The Barbary Figs by Rashid Boudjedra (tr. Andre Naffis-Sahely)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2010 Arab Book Prize.

Two old friends and cousins find themselves side by side on the flight from Algiers to Constantine. There is a lot of history between them, as well as bad blood. The flight will last only an hour—an hour during which both their stories will be told, interspersed by anecdotes of Algeria's struggle to release itself from France's colonial grip. The title, The Barbary Figs, is a symbol of the "old" Algeria, since their grandfather used to grow them on his estate. The "new" Algeria is far less straightforward, and has produced far more bitter fruit.

My Review: Algeria was considered a part of France, not a mere colony, from 1830 to 1962. It was not like the country treated the Algerians as French people, for all they were officially citizens. After the war for independence was won, the country began the process of yeeting itself into a civil-warring mess.

Interrogating this process of disintegration is a life-long project for Author Boudjedra, born in 1941 and still with us as of this writing. He attempts to encapsulate his own life by trapping two estranged cousins, Omar and Rashid, on a one-hour flight from Algiers to Constantine, Algeria's second city. They reminisce, as we're all prone to do; they talk about love, sex, and death, and they don't shy away from the anger these conflicting needs and desires evoked then. The issue interfering with my full-on unmixed appreciation of the story is repetition, as it is in all life stories. Are we here again, the reader wonders wearily; as I am an old man with some young people in my life, I cringe a little in self-reflective recognition. Sorry, Rob, I'll try to rein this behavior in.

Most of all, though, I want others to know that this is a story of great resonance, that its title is its organizing metaphor for fecundity and sweetness in many colors and shapes that no longer appear with regularity in public markets. Author Boudjedra's long, fatwa-filled career as resister of the colonizers, then resister of the religious mobs, is summed up in this rumination on what the past offers and what it does not. I think he said it best and most succinctly in a letter from the 1990s quoted in the translator's Afterword:

All great literature has incorporated history as a fundamental element of the interrogation between the real and the human, operating in a more subjective mode than one would think in so far as it is the one fruitful and interesting mode of inquiry, becoming far more than just a reading of the past that is immediate, official, fossilized, academic, mechanistic and opportunistic, always co-opted, distorted, and travestied for the sake of the cause.

His eloquence and his fighting spirit shine through a translation that I can't say scintillates, though it is not pedestrian or plodding. I doubt it's inspired, though, as the source text won a literary prize. Albeit, I must say, one that appears to have vanished as of 2012....

Follow this non-affiliate Amazon link for your Kindle edition, or a tree book if you desire. Each starts at about $16.00.

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The Red Mill: A Musical Comedy by Victor Herbert & Henry M. Blossom

Rating: 3.5* of five

Completely goofy 1907 play about Yankee con-men doing their thing in a tiny Dutch town. It's not anything special in plot terms. It's a musical, so it doesn't have to be. There's a raft of forgettably pleasant tunes telling its sentimental story. What makes it more than a single-star snooze is "Because You're You," a terrific and very ear-wormy meditation on loving someone just cause they's them.

There's a condensed performance of its highlights on The Railroad Hour with Gene Kelly, Gordon MacRae, and beautiful mellifluous soprano Lucille Norman as Gretchen, the Dutch love interest. Check it out, it's only 45min, plus it has a super-funny ad or two here.

"Because You're You," the tune I like, starts nine and a half minutes in.

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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!

As she says:

People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.

So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts:

APRIL 2022's PEARL RULES ARE HERE.

MARCH 2022's PEARL RULES AREN'T.

FEBRUARY 2022's PEARL RULES ARE HERE.

JANUARY 2022's PEARL RULES ARE HERE.

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Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson

Pearl Ruled at 13%

The Publisher Says: This is the revised edition of Dr. Stevenson's 1987 book, summarizing for general readers almost forty years of experience in the study of children who claim to remember previous lives. For many Westerners the idea of reincarnation seems remote and bizarre; it is the author's intent to correct some common misconceptions. New material relating to birthmarks and birth defects, independent replication studies with a critique of criticisms, and recent developments in genetic study are included. The work gives an overview of the history of the belief in and evidence for reincarnation. Representative cases of children, research methods used, analyses of the cases and of variations due to different cultures, and the explanatory value of the idea of reincarnation for some unsolved problems in psychology and medicine are reviewed.

My Review: Two things you should know up front: I believe reincarnation, of some sort, is real; I have little faith in the direction of brain and neurological research as of 2022 answering the question, "what is your mind? what is the soul?" That does not require belief in some sort of supernatural bookkeeper whose Ledger tots up, infallibly and constantly, your personal record of naughty-vs-nice behaviors. It means there is nothing to explain why you're you in the structures of your brain and firings of your nerves. Science isn't looking into the subject because it's like the third rail in a drunken subway pissing contest: contact will be unpleasant and possibly fatal.

And while neurological research is crucial, leading to amazing insights into a host of issues, no one can yet tell us based on neurology or brain anatomy what your mind is. We need to develop the questions before science can apply its astonishingly powerful array of tools to discovering the answers. Not, at present, happening.

So I Pearl-Ruled this book not because it was trying to skip scientific steps and present unfounded answers but because it literally cannot, and does not claim to be able to, answer anything. That got old fast. I'm on board: My Jesus-freak mother was my source of early information about past-life memories. My oldest sister was apparently quite garrulously willing to talk about her bizarrely sophisticated memories of things she couldn't have known about (she remembered having sex as a man but had no idea what any of it was, for example) from age two until she was about four.

As those conversations were memorable to me, I wasn't in need of any persuasion to accept the possibility that these are actual memories of some strange sort. So just watching the evidence pile up was, frankly, tedious. I bailed because I was already on board not because I disagreed, in other words. I don't know if these case studies are the sort of material a skeptic would care about, and a fence-sitter would do well to take it in doses. It's not without value; it's just not designed to meet my need for deeper context.

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PEARL RULED @ 10%

The Nightingale Won't Let You Sleep by Steven Heighton

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: Elias Trifannis is desperate to belong somewhere. To make his dying ex-cop father happy, he joins the military - but in Afghanistan, by the time he realizes his last-minute bid for connection was a terrible mistake, it's too late and a tragedy has occurred.

In the aftermath, exhausted by nightmares, Elias is sent to Cyprus to recover, where he attempts to find comfort in the arms of Eylul, a beautiful Turkish journalist. But the lovers' reprieve ends in a moment of shocking brutality that drives Elias into Varosha, once a popular Greek-Cypriot resort town, abandoned since the Turkish invasion of 1974.

Hidden in the lush, overgrown ruins is a community of exiles and refugees living resourcefully but comfortably. Thanks to the cheerfully corrupt Colonel Kaya, who turns a blind eye, they live under the radar of the Turkish authorities.

As he begins to heal, Elias finds himself drawn to the enigmatic and secretive Kaiti while he learns at last to "simply belong." But just when it seems he has found sanctuary, events he himself set in motion have already begun to endanger it.

My Review: The author died last month of cancer. He was sixty.

This story opens with consensual (or as consensual as heterosex ever can be) sex turning into a shooting and a melodramatic follow-up crime committed by crazed-by-hate Turkish Muslim men in divided Cyprus.

I quit caring fairly quickly. This kind of crime isn't immediately interesting to me because it's using violence against a woman as an excuse to cause trouble for a man. And to be extremely clear, the violence isn't the sex. Which, yes, it was icky but it wasn't coerced or compelled. The violence was some Muslim men taking umbrage that a white guy was going to have sex with a Turkish secular woman.

Great. What the world needs now. However it was going to end, the beginning was pretty crappy by my lights and I don't need this. So Vale Author Heighton, we will not meet again.

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