militantlyromantic: (Default)
This one has been sitting on my TBR for quite a while, since Aoki is digital-only and I'm not particularly good at digital-only. But having inherited an e-Reader from my father, I've embarked again on the attempt to clear out some of the stuff I can only get in this fashion.

I'd been quite interested in this one for its setting, in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Historicals set outside the UK or nascent US are not easy to find, and depending on when they were written, can be something of a gamble. This is even more true for queer historicals.

Our two leads here are Alfred, a British Marine, and Zhang, an officer in the Chinese military. The POV is entirely Alfred's, though. As a general rule, I'm not bothered by single-POV, and there's a solid reason Aoki chooses it--for the Big Misunderstanding to work, the reader has to not understand what's going on in Zhang's mind. (Which also presumes the reader doesn't understand that certain cultural concepts are at work.)

I found it uncomfortable in this case, though, since Alfred is part an army that China does not particularly want at its shores, and I was never entirely able to shake that discomfort.

The first half of the book moves fairly quickly, with Alfred and Zhang meeting in a garden in Shanghai, where Alfred's ship is docked. There's a decent amount of chemistry between the two leads, and there's very good sense of place.

The problem is that the Big Misunderstanding happens at basically 50% in, and Alfred and Zhang spend almost the entirety of the rest of the book apart. At that point, the book becomes more historical fiction with a side of pining than anything else. And, due to it being wholly from Alfred's POV, Zhang's story is entirely lost.

Further, the book ends with them reuniting/the necessary HEA, but...it's deeply unclear how each of them has worked through the problems that drove them apart. And they are not petty. Zhang conceives of Alfred as his wife or subordinate, and Alfred is incensed and hurt by that. And yet, at the end, Alfred claims to want to be Zhang's wife, and Zhang responds that Alfred is his equal. Only, again, forget telling not showing, we haven't even been TOLD the steps either of them took to get there. It basically seems to depend on a combination of "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "but you could have DIED" and...sure. But that doesn't change that the two of you have fundamentally different conceptions of partnership.

I think there's a little bit too much going on in this book, and that the romance element of it gets short shrift. This is fine, if the book isn't, you know, a romance. Unfortunately, in this case, it's a bit of a problem. 
militantlyromantic: (Default)
This is an MMM, so we have three male leads.  Our first is Josiah, our second Mateo, our third Tristan.  We meet Josiah and Mateo when they are teenagers and are being fostered in the same home.  Josiah knows he's gay and evidently presents as gay enough that he's bullied for it at school, but his foster parents don't seem suspish.  Mateo also knows he's gay, but doesn't present that way and has had some pretty intense toxic masculinity beaten into him by his dad, who's currently in prison. 

The way race is handled in this book is pretty interesting.  I've seen people identify Hart as a WOC.  Honestly, I have no idea if she is or not, I've never seen a picture of her, I've never seen her say one way or another, etc.  And even if she is a WOC, I have no idea WHAT color she may or may not be, which means I can't identify whether this is an #ownvoices book or not.  Idek if Hart identifies as queer or not, to be honest.

Mateo's father runs a gang, and his uncle is running it in said father's stead.  Mateo is positioned in a lot of ways as someone who is a victim to his circumstances.  The problem is, he often valorizes Josiah's willingness to acknowledge his own queerness, where Mateo hasn't been allowed to do such, in a way that doesn't recognize the class/race privilege difference.  E.g., Mateo loves Josiah because he's so "brave" to be "out" (I put out in quotes because it felt less to me that Josiah was out than that he wasn't lying about his gayness, which are actually two different things.  Both are valid options, but for queer persons for whom the difference is one of safety, the difference is hella significant.)  The problem is, Josiah can be "out" in a way Mateo has never felt he can be because, well, his safety has never been threatened by it.  Josiah clearly comes from like...white suburban parents who loved him and it's unclear it they would have accepted his gayness or not, but we don't get the feeling he would have been unsafe telling them.  Mateo is very pointedly from a culture in which machismo/toxic masculinity is incredibly significant and being out WOULD have been unsafe.  I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Mateo to find Josiah brave, in a certain manner, but the underpinnings of that bravery are never really explored and I think that might be part of why I had a hard time hooking in. 

Add to this, teenage love is something you have to convince me of pretty heavily to begin with--teens are, well, teens--and Mateo seems to love Josiah because Josiah is the first person who has looked at Mateo like he was worth something.  That's not actually a reason for lifelong love.  Meanwhile, it honestly feels like Josiah loves Mateo because Mateo protects him and is a boy, and attractive, and they have access to each other.  In other words, I'm never really convinced that these two like each other as PEOPLE, so much as concepts in each other's lives.

There's a lot of somewhat predictable melodrama at the midpoint of the book with the foster mom getting cancer and Mateo getting kicked out mostly because they Nice White Foster Parents defs think the Mexican Kid is perverting the Nice White Kid, but Josiah runs away with Mateo, and then they go back to Mateo's uncle because that's how Mateo knows how to make money.  Josiah ends up almost being assaulted seemingly because it's a rough area and Mateo does the whole "oh, if he's with me he'll never be safe" and rejects Josiah.

Then there's this long period of time where Josiah gets a job at a coffee shop in the PNW and eventually learns to make a friend despite himself, and finally starts going to college and you know, learning to be a human?  This was the point where I was like "I realize this is supposed to be an adult romance, but if there's a whole section on learning how to be a single human, I honestly cannot."

Enter Tristan, the rich attorney (who...seems to maybe be a prosecutor??  Idk, it's very unclear what kind of law he does, but this was one of the most hardcore "wow, this person really doesn't understand how lawyers who make serious money make serious money" book I've read in a looooooong time) with Damage, who sees Josiah feeding ducks (because of this whole thing with Mateo about how they'd go feed ducks together and here his ass is, still feeding the ducks, which I'm guessing is meant to be romantic.)

On the plus side, Tristan and Josiah's romance made...more sense to me?  Tristan is one of those "I had a crap upbringing, and all I care about is taking care of my mom and being rich" people, who has a single friend who he treats like crap and yet, of course, that friend is in love with him for reasons that are beyond imagining, but there you have it.  In any case, he likes Josiah because Josiah is (at this point) sweet and optimistic, and makes Tristan do things that aren't work.

Tristan is of course all "I can't love you, I'm not made like that."

Josiah is like, "welp, I like you, so I guess this works for now, at least you're upfront about it."

And then they have lots of sex.  *shrug emoji*

I will say, I love how Josiah's easy acceptance of Tristan's mom and her mental illness/trauma reach Tristan and get him to come out of his dumbassity.  (It's a word now, I made it one.)  Tristan's mom might have been the one part I really liked about this book.

Re-enter Mateo who has just gotten out of prison and somehow gotten free of his gang situation (how, you ask??  yeah, no, it was super unclear to me, but in fairness, I might have checked out by this point).

The last part of the book is Tristan and Mateo getting to know each other to see if they can make it work because they both recognize that making Josiah choose is a Bad Plan, and both of them want Josiah.  The funny thing is, there's actually a fair amount over which these two could have bonded, given their upbringings/experiences.  But again, it never feels like they like each other for each other, so much as because they need to for each of the to function with Josiah.  Now, here's the thing.  IRL poly?  This is when you recognize each other as non-hierarchical metamours and move the eff on.  And I realize this isn't IRL.  But the writing never convinced me of the HEA or even the HFN.

This book was highly, highly recced on one of the comms I'm on, it clearly works for a lot of people.  It just fell flat in pretty much every direction it could for me.
militantlyromantic: (Default)
This is kind of a strange book.  I liked it, but there's definitely a lot going on.

It's single POV, and our POV character is Frank, who's just barely making it on tutors wages after being seriously injured in action in India.  Frank's understanding of colonialism is complicated.  He's well aware the people he was fighting were people, just the same as him, and has the PTSD to show for it, and he's equally sure England shouldn't have come in and taken their resources/effed around with them.  He's also not sure it's possible for the colonial powers that be to just go back to where they came from and leave the rest of the world alone at this point.  It's an interesting (likely anachronistic, although my awareness of the levels of discussion of imperial spread in Edwardian England is almost none, so, who knows) perspective.

In any case, he has a lifelong friend, also gay, whose life he saved in action, thereby receiving the serious injury.  Said friend has surprisingly inherited, but the money is tied up for the moment and is living beyond his means in a state of drunken Depression.  In this state, said friend somewhat accidentally procures Frank a private tutoring job.

The private tutoring job is for Viscount Gracewater, an adult still living with his father, and this is one of those "something is clearly wrong the moment you walk in the house" situations, you're just not entirely clear what is wrong.

The Viscount, "Gracie", immediately takes to Frank.  Gracie is curious about the world around him, he seems childlike in many ways, and perhaps as though he has some type of learning disability, maybe dyslexia.  

The book is a slow burn with a lot of subtle darkness under the surface and then, occasionally, that darkness will just burst out of the narrative in ways that are very unnerving.  Each time, though, it forces Gracie to grow some, to settle into himself and learn to stand on his own two feet.

This book is a mass of content warnings, including rape (not between the main characters), child abuse, and suicide, among others.  But Fox handles the topics deftly and compassionately, and nothing feels dismissive.  This is a case where the HEA is both earned and feels almost just, for lack of a better word.
militantlyromantic: (Default)
I went back and forth over whether to even talk about this book.  I want to support this author.  She comes out of fandom, she has poly titles, POCs, other stuff I want to see in romance, and particularly in histrom.  And in general, my experience with her on panels is that she's a smart, fun human. 

This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare.  It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp.  I REALLY want to like this book.

That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.

The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters.  Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch.  I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem.  However, that's really all Sarah is.  She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger. 

Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea.  She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book.  There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out.  There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.

Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.   

So.  I have a lot of problems here.  First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman.  We're not socialized to see it.  When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that.  But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth."  There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma.  Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.

Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you."  Uh.  You're offering to MARRY her.  Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met.  At least tell me what that person did for you.  Something.  Anything.  (Nor is this followed up on.  We're never given the reason Alex does what she does.  At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too??  I have no idea.)

Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town.  But it's nutballs?  Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control?  Or federal, if it was a territory.  And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism.  I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States.  I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things.  But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it.  Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.

Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot.  On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult.  Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married.  Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.

The last third of the book is stronger than the first two.  Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead.  There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one.  I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me?  I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.

There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book. 
militantlyromantic: (Default)
This book is why I have my Kugel Rule.  It's a contemporary, BDSM, with a significant age gap wherein one of the partners in nineteen.  On paper, this should not be my thing even just slightly.

This is the single erotic romance I've ever read, and certainly the single published BDSM work I've ever encountered that made me think, "Oh, this author actually has met humans who have kinky sex.  And possibly humans who have relationships with other humans who have kinky sex."

I should be open about the fact that it undoubtedly helps a lot that both protagonists are male.  I sincerely doubt I could have read this if this had been a male/female pairing, regardless of dynamic.

The basic premise of this work is that Laurie, who is thirty-seven and finally getting over a truly traumatic break up with a partner he'd had since college until about six years earlier, has been going to the kink clubs with a couple of his friends mostly to find a pick-up play and satisfy basic bodily urges.  When we meet him, his friends, Sam and Grace, have dragged him out to a club night.  Laurie is Not Feeling It.

Couple of shout outs here: I love that this book recognizes that a club is always going to be zoned in a warehousing district.  And is going to be a converted warehouse itself.  And that you can't really just walk in off the street, there are certain memberships or rules enforced to somewhat police the community.  Dungeon Monitors also come up, which is great.  There's also an awareness that people actually do just sit around and shoot the shit at these clubs.  Just, in general, this felt roughly one billion times more accurate than basically any other scene description I've ever read.

Anyhoodle.  Enter Toby.  Toby is nineteen, aware that he's what I call "vanilla incapable", aka, someone with zero ability to get anything out of vanilla sex, painfully aware that being dominant at that age is often laughed at due to a lack of life experience, and just wanting to see what he can see.

Laurie actually approaches Toby to tell him to get out, that he's too damn young to be there.  And Toby gives him the most beautiful what for.  He just stands his ground and makes it clear that he might not know what he's doing, but he knows what he wants.  And Laurie is enchanted by how sincere Toby is.  By the depth of his awareness that this is just what he is.  So, for the first time since his ex left, instead of bottoming, which he has done plenty of, he submits.

It's not fancy.  He's on his knees because that's where Toby wants him.  There's not even really a lot of touching.  It is incredibly spot-on about how D/s dynamics work when they do.

D/s and sex between these two might be fumbling and uncertain, given Toby's age and lack of experience, but the chemistry is just right.  (And the sex never feels like just sex, which is an extremely hard thing to make happen as a writer.)

Everything else between them is complicated as all get out, and not in a manufactured way.  As someone who knows how hard it is to find kink-compatible humans, I very much understood Laurie's hesitations about seeing the relationship as dating or real.  In fact, the least realistic element of the book to me was how smoothly his friends supported the relationship.  Since I enjoyed that, I forgave it, but the truth is, especially at nineteen and thirty-seven, people judge.

And Toby's not wrong about Laurie's commitment issues.  Even Toby's inability to just talk about things the way he should at a certain point is understandable, because he might be a mature nineteen, but he's nineteen.

However, both of them are such fully-fleshed out people, with lives and concerns and needs of their own, that the emotional ups and downs feel entirely natural.  At one point Laurie tells Toby that couples fight, it's in how you recover from it that matters, and it's so elementary and so unbelievably true.

Honestly, the only drawback to this book is that it's currently only available through the 'zon because of Riptide being Terrible People.  Worth it.  Totally, 100% worth it. 
militantlyromantic: (Default)
This is written in a tight POV from one of the main characters, Tom.  Tom grew up incredibly wealthy, the child of a widower.  It's not clear how his mom died.  Possibly in childbirth?  Illness shortly thereafter?  Anyway, she's not in the picture.  Tom's sophomore year of college, his dad gets charged with running a huge Ponzi scheme.  This first leads to Tom being barricaded in his house with his father while the press surround them on every side until they run out of food--delivery services have proven unwilling to deal with getting through the press--being betrayed by one of his friends to the press, catching his father having tried to commit suicide and having to call the ER, and then, when the charges are actually set, all of the assets being frozen.

Tom basically decides that he desperately needs his college degree to dig himself out of the mess, but not having any financial help, he starts living out of his car and driving it as a gypsy cab in the hours when he can't drive a legal cab.  He does this the entire summer and then shows back up at school to find out he has a roommate, Reese, who Does Not Want a Roommate, and was specifically promised by the school he would not have one. 

We later find out why Reese is so het up about this issue, and frankly, it does not come as a surprise that his previous roommate stood by and watched as Reese was assaulted by some of the roommate's friends the year before, largely for the crime of being out and gay.  Reese's father, also a single parent, is super in Reese's corner, and when he finds out about it, bullies the school into making sure Reese will be at least slightly more safe.

Which the school promises to do and promptly drops the fucking ball on.  Reese embarks on a campaign to run Tom off with his Gayness, including regularly bringing back hookups, even when Tom is in the room.  (Something that Reese does without any type of discussion or consent on Tom's part and despite the fact that Tom finds it hot, that honestly bothers me a lot.)

Tom, however, already has a pretty good idea that he's bi, or, as he often calls it "equal opportunity."  It doesn't work out the way Reese wants it to.  Or, arguably, it does, because after about six misunderstandings caused by the fact that Tom has trust issues from here to Siberia, and Reese is doing his best to fuck his way past his trauma, the two of them end up getting together.  It's actually from there that things get particularly interesting, as Reese is out and Tom is not ready to be, for a whole slew of reasons.  There's a lot of compromise on both parts, and working through things, and fights, and working to be better for the other person.

One of the things I particularly liked about this book was the frank acknowledgement that being bi means a person is capable of dating the other gender, and that doing so is simpler not just in terms of prejudice but in terms of meeting partners.  I also appreciated that it called out the problem of bi invisibility when bi persons enter into relationships, and the way both the het and queer communities have issues with the identity.  Worthwhile as well was the unpacking of the struggle of being out even in an environment where Tom is aware that it's most likely to be easily accepted.

I was pleased that the two of them genuinely broke up and were apart for a chunk of time.  I think it's true of a lot of relationships that begin when people are young that a break is often necessary to define who you are as people apart from each other and if the relationship works if you are those people in it.  

I didn't love that while we know Tom is an unreliable narrator, it's not clear just HOW unreliable until pretty late in the book, and then it's a little bit harder to grapple with how much you can support his motives or not.

In addition, I felt like the climactic moments were all weirdly placed.  I appreciated that Reese didn't wig when he figured out a secret Tom had been keeping because he was ashamed, but at the same time, it's been this huge thing for like three-fourths of the book and then it's just neatly resolved in about a page.  Or, when they break up, we don't find out that Reese has officially done so until Tom thinks about it in a flashback.

I suppose I just felt like a lot of time the real heft of where the emotions should be isn't where they end up, or maybe that there's just not enough of them, period.  I didn't mind the book, but it never really grabbed me, either.
militantlyromantic: (Default)
Thesis Statement: I was very sad when this book was over.

All joking aside, this was one of my favorite reads of the year, and I have read a metric shit tonne of books this year.  I'll start off with what this book is not: (a) historically accurate, (b) packed to the gills with female characters, and (c) terribly good at acknowledging that the British need to kill other people and take their home lands wasn't really a GOOD practice.

Given that, it is my recommendation that if you read this, you read it more as like fantasy!England.  Because if you stop to think about it too hard, it is a little disturbing otherwise.

For pure romance, though?  *chef's kiss*

Basically, we've got Harry, our wet-behind-the-ears, just-promoted-from-Squire Knight.  By dint of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it), he is part of a band of British knights who goes into Scotland after they've most recently won a decisive battle and retrieves a guy.  Not for nothing, said guy is retrieved by said knights slaughtering all of the unarmed and on-the-edge of starvation people who are living in the keep with the guy.  This is Not What Harry Signed Up For.

For Reasons, head of this knight expedition wants guy, whose name is Iain, alive.  He also doesn't want to deal with him, so Head Knight pawns Iain off on Harry with the blackmail that Head Knight has bought up all the debt on Harry's struggling estate and will foreclose on him if he doesn't keep Iain both alive and under control.

Narratively, we don't learn who Iain is or why he's important until considerably later, although, honestly, I was pretty certain I knew from early on.  Harry's...a little dense politically.  Which is not to say he's dumb.  In the areas that Harry needs to be skilled in, say, running a small estate, being a knight, Harry's pretty smart.  And he can be people smart.  But politics have never mattered to Harry and he's kept himself largely blind to them.  (In fairness, even with the dickish behavior toward the rest of what would later become the UK, at this point, England is kind of a backwater.  If Iain hadn't come into Harry's life, there would have been very little reason for him to care about politics, let alone international ones.)

But Iain is the product of a whole epic morass of court politics and betrayal and terribleness and when we meet him, he's extremely good at being who Harry wants him to be right up until he can wiggle free and effect an escape.  At one point, this actually ends in the death of Harry's horse (making it one of TWO romances I've read this year where the horse dies and like, STAHP).  Understandably, Harry is 300% done with Iain.

Then, of course, Iain gets himself into real trouble and some of it is accidentally Harry's fault and it takes a moment, but they come to an accord.  Harry has some Religious Angst, Iain lays down the law with "I can't be your piece when you think Jesus isn't looking, I was born this way, bitch," and Harry realizes, after a bit, that he has to shit or get off the pot.  I'll let you guess which one he chooses. 

Whereon from which, it's kind of bardic?  In the sense that there's a lot of separation, and them realizing that they just don't function as well without each other, and there's war and VENGEANCE and it's very sweeping.

I know people are very split on epilogues.  I have no strong feelings on them one way or another.  I think in some books they're fantastic.  In others, I could do without.  I wish this book had a little more of an epilogue.  It's not that the ending is abrupt, it isn't.  It's just that we've gone through a LOT to get that HEA, and we could stand to wallow in it for a bit more.

All in all though?  A++ entertainment.

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