AT LAST it is Millions Book Preview O’Clock wooooo!

Brandon Taylor really really REALLY did not enjoy the new adaptation of Persuasion. I do not have a dog in this fight.

“One of [Elon Musk’s hobbies is that he sometimes likes to pretend that he will acquire public companies…. This is an expensive hobby!” Matt Levine explains what’s going on with Elon Musk and Twitter.

On Costco and the immigrant experience.

Ed Yong is, thank God, back once again to explain what we need to know about the BA.5 variant of horrible stupid COVID.

This article about the politics of English in India is fascinating and has definitely made me want to read the author’s whole book.

Thanks to Strange New Worlds, Star Trek feels like Star Trek again. This is not an argument I can personally weigh in on, as I am working my way through DS9 at the moment and have not yet gotten to the new shows. But it seems right.

“I don’t know how else to explain it, they just clean the way you clean in a kitchen.” The Bear gets Chicago wrong, but it gets restaurant kitchens so right.

This Vulture interview with the subtitlers for Stranger Things fails to capitalize d/Deaf appropriately, but it’s still a very interesting look behind the scenes at what goes into the art of subtitles.

Pop culture is reevaluating Tracy Flick. Not me, though, I was always horrified that people acted like she was the villain of that movie. Like, wtf.

Ravynn Stringfield was not nourished by academia, but by the presence of Black women in the world of comics.

In case you’ve missed the wild and wacky world of Funny Girl‘s recasting, here is an explainer of what is going on.

In this thread, Alexis Hall answers every question Carrie Bradshaw asks in the original Sex and the City.

“People don’t die for no reason; Aquarians just occasionally get reckless on the freeway. Simple.” A story about doing astrology.

Here are some extra-good books by indigenous authors this year.

The head of the New York Antiquities Theft Task Force has some surprisingly insightful things to say about how to be a good person. Also lots of good, juicy art theft details.

Speaking of Interesting Jobs, I’m obsessed with movie sound design, and this article on Foley artists FED MY SOUL.

David Treuer’s Austrian father viewed America as a land of rescue and safety; for his Ojibwe mother, it was a land of injustice.

Rolling Stone reported on bot activity in favor of the Snyder cut (and what Zack Snyder had to do with it). Gita Jackson responds, noting that despite higher-than-usual bot activity, fandom is QUITE capable of being terrible organically (and, in this case, they were).

When your coauthor is an AI.

Happy Friday, friends! In case you didn’t click that last link, I will leave you with a piece of AI-generated writing; may it blossom weirdly in your souls. “The moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”

The post Really the Millions Book Preview This Time: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby felt terrifyingly topical when I read it in January of this year, and then it just got more and more and more topical somehow. It’s about two Black siblings, Ella and Kev, who each have special powers. Jumping around in time, Riot Baby shows us a dystopian America that’s functionally just… America, and Kev ends up incarcerated for living in the world while Black. Using their powers, Ella and Kev pay telepathic (?) visits to each other, as well as to a number of scenes in America’s racist history, and search for ways to bring the whole racist system down.

Tor’s novella line continues to publish absolute bangers, and Riot Baby felt like a gift in a year when America has felt even more like a dystopia than usual. Its leaps through time are deliberately disorienting, so that the reader is never quite allowed to settle into any certainty about what the book is going to be. Instead you’re carried through time and space in a sort of grand tour of American oppression. Riot Baby is imaginative, strange, dizzying, exhilarating.

Butterfly Yellow, Thanha Lai

I can’t remember who recommended Butterfly Yellow to me, but it was this wonderfully quiet and careful YA novel about a Vietnamese girl who comes to America in search of her little brother, from whom she was separated during the Vietnam War. She’s certain that he’ll be delighted to be reunited with her, but instead she finds that he’s comfortable in his new life with his adoptive parents. Hằng befriends a cowboy named LeeRoy and sticks around, patiently trying to rebuilt her relationship with her brother.

Because we see Hằng so much through LeeRoy’s eyes, I kept thinking that she was younger than she was, so it threw me off a bit when she develops a romance with LeeRoy. And overall I think Butterfly Yellow feels slightly more middle grade than YA. Aside from that small area of disorientation, though, it was a book with a great deal of emotional depth. No matter how much we want easy answers, such answers aren’t forthcoming. Instead, it’s a story about perseverance in love and finding joy in an imperfect world.

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

On a grim day in January, I opened my mail to find an ARC of Harrow the Ninth, upon which I shrieked like a banshee and dived into it with an enthusiasm. Gideon the Ninth, you’ll recall, was the lesbian necromancers in space book, and this is the middle book in the series. We follow Harrow as she struggles with her imperfect Lyctorhood and her fractured memories of what happened at Canaan House.

This book is bonkers. It is bonkers. Every choice that Tamsyn Muir makes in this book is bonkers. It is a symphony of what-the-fuck, with every instrument playing a perfect, terrifying what the fuck variation, and all I could do was let myself be swept along by it. I know that some folks have said they found this one a harder read than Gideon — in Gideon the Ninth you’re in Gideon’s head enjoying her irreverent take on all the horrifying blood and murder events, whereas in Harrow the Ninth you’re living with Harrow’s rage, grief, and self-loathing. So I hope it won’t make me sound like a callous monster when I say I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book. I was grinning from ear to ear every time I opened it. I cannot wait for the third one.

Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

WHEW did somebody say “mastery of the novella form”? I got Empress of Salt and Fortune as an ARC and was not immediately sucked in after reading the first few pages. Then on a Saturday I was like “I’m going to dedicate some actual time to reading this bastard” and sat down and read it all in one sitting. It’s the story of cleric Chih, who is collecting stories on their travels through a country that has been shaped by a powerful empress. They encounter an old woman who used to serve in the royal palace, and settle in to hear her version of the empress’s rise.

Just, wow. I absolutely loved this book. I am not one for secondary world fantasy, usually, but Vo builds her world around material culture: the tooth that was part of the gown the empress wore when she came as a bride to the palace; the dice that she used to play games and cast lots; a map of pilgrimage shrines throughout the empire. The things are the hook into the story of this empress, and the story is about women’s rage. It’s about the refusal to accept the oppression and denial your life has given you, and the overlooked ways women use to communicate among themselves, using tools that powerful men can’t be bothered glancing at twice.

I still don’t quite know how Vo managed to pack so much worldbuilding, emotion, and plot into 118 pages, but I do know that I’m excited for her future career and inevitable superstardom in the world of SFF.

The Good Luck Girls, Charlotte Nicole Davis

ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE YA!!!

Every year for the last few years, there’s been at least one YA novel where I was like “this is just a good fucking adventure story, what a pleasure, what a dream,” and as I look back on them, they are all, one hundred percent of them, road trip adventures. So in case there was any lack of clarity about what I like and whether I am predictable, the answers are road trips and yes, I am very predictable.

The Good Luck Girls tells the story of a group of girls fleeing from the brothel to which they were sold as children, trying to escape the consequences of a patron’s death. They are seeking asylum in a place they’ve only heard about, a place that for all they know doesn’t even exist — but they have to try and get there, or else resign themselves to spending their lives being hunted by the raveners who have been tasked with finding them and punishing them.

As dark as this premise is, Davis does a terrific job of writing a book that doesn’t feel doomed, yet also doesn’t gloss over the genuine trauma these girls have been through in their lives. Aster is determined to get all her friends to safety, whatever the cost to her; she’s smart and resourceful and angry and driven, and I cherished her. There’s a slow build-up of grudging respect between her and the house favorite at their brothel, Violet, which of course I adored, and the stakes of their road trip escape remain high, high, high, so there’s this lovely release of tension any time they have the chance to stop and rest and be happy for even a short time. And the set-up for book two just really thrilled me. Can’t wait for more!

The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Whoever decided to get Paul Lewin to do the cover for this book deserves a trophy. Also, I love Paul Lewin’s art. One of my goals for this year is to read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, not just because I need to read more of Octavia Butler’s work, but also because if I like it then I can maybe buy the editions that feature Paul Lewin’s fancy, gorgeous covers.

Anyway, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games digs deep into major fantasy properties to explore the ways Black characters in those franchises have been used and abused by both the stories themselves and the audiences who received them. Thomas is a terrific, insightful cultural critic, and her work is particularly notable for how clearly she loves these properties and wants better for them. Her readings of the texts and their audiences enriched my understanding of these books, movies, and TV shows, and I’m so excited for whatever this author plans to do next.

Norma Jean Baker of Troy, Anne Carson

Before *waves hands* all this, I attended a conference at which New Directions had a booth, and you just wouldn’t believe the shriek of joy I emitted when I realized that Anne Carson had a new book. Anne Carson is the translator, poet, and genius behind If Not, Winter (an amazing translation of Sappho) and Nox, a book-in-a-box I incepted myself into being able to afford the first year I lived in New York.

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy combines the story of Helen of Troy with the life of Marilyn Monroe, whose name before fame was Norma Jeane Baker. It’s expectedly strange and funny and devastating.

In ancient Greece you use the verb [I am too lazy to recreate this in WordPress], which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum, and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

Anne Carson is a queen on etymology. If you liked the above quotation, I refer you to Nox, which does a lot of this kind of thing.

Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Remember when I was lowkey obsessed with Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri’s debut? Well, in an exciting twist, I loved Realm of Ash even more. It maintains the same Angry Girl / Soft Boy romance dynamic, but dials the anger and the softness up by several notches.

Even saying that feels like a disservice to Realm of Ash, because it ignores the absolutely wonderful worldbuilding and plot work that Tasha Suri is doing. It’s the kind of sequel that Diana Wynne Jones would write, where the book is set in the same world under (some of) the same set of assumptions, but it’s far more of a companion novel than the type of sequel where you’re like, aw, yeah, gonna get some answers now. Realm of Ash is about the crumbling Ambhan Empire, and the efforts of a widow and a prince to understand the limits of their forbidden magic.

I just… I loved this? Again I say that I tend to struggle with secondary world fantasy, but authors like Tasha Suri and Nghi Vo seem determined to undermine my carefully established opinions. Tasha Suri comes out of fanfic, and you can really tell by the way she makes relationships so central to her plotting. I loved this book, and I cannot wait for Suri’s 2021 book The Jasmine Throne. I love her.

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

This round-up includes three nonfiction books (unless you count the book of poetry; in which case, four), and I stand by all of them. Because Internet is a linguistics book about the language of the internet, and it’s 24-karat gold in my opinion. Gretchen McCulloch talks about all the things you’d expect, like the development of emojis and the reason why memes work or don’t, as well as a whole slew of things you wouldn’t, like how Arabic-speakers convey the Arabic alphabet on Twitter and why old people use so many ellipses in their emails.

If you’ve ever been like “I am extremely online, but why?”, I highly recommend that you read Because Internet. It won’t explain why you are so online (who could?), but it will describe your life in terrifyingly accurate terms.

The True Queen, Zen Cho

I could just as well have put The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water on this list, because Zen Cho blessed us with two new releases in the last two years, but The True Queen was the one that I really loved. This may reflect my general preference for the novel-length format. The True Queen is a follow-up to the 2015 Sorcerer to the Crown, and I loved it so so so so so much. It’s set in an alternate version of the nineteenth century, as Sorcerer to the Crown was, but it focuses much more on people who aren’t English. Yay!

I love Zen Cho for so consistently writing books that could have been dark and grim but are, in fact, funny and light-hearted. In these quarantimes, it feels like a particularly revolutionary writing choice. The True Queen deals with a lot of heavy themes (imperialism, family conflict, etc.) in a way that isn’t too grim but also doesn’t feel like a cop-out by the author. I just truly loved this book, as I have all her books to date. I had so much fucking fun reading it, and in a year where fun was few and far between, I value that so so so much. ZEN CHO.

The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Yes, I was furious at the offhand way in which NK Jemisin dismissed New Orleans in this book, and yes, it made me cry on podcast. But apart from that gripe, which while not minor to me was minor in terms of the space it occupied in the book, I really loved NK Jemisin’s latest novel. It’s about the city of New York becoming sentient, manifesting itself in the avatars for each borough, who must come together to fight against an evil white Lovecraftian tentacle creature.

In perhaps the clearest measure of success, The City We Became made me feel agonizingly homesick for New York City. I was supposed to visit it in 2020! Reading this reminded me so keenly of what the city is like, in all its boroughs, in every iteration, and I just got really fucking emoshe about it. NK Jemisin’s writing is typically beautiful, her plotting typically tense, and I was left with a mighty yearning for more of this series.

A Song Below Water, Bethany Morrow

It’s the misogynoir fantasy novel of your dreams! Tavia has known for years that she’s a siren, and she knows that she must be careful never to reveal what she is. Living in the city of Portland, she has plenty of opportunity to see the kind of oppression faced by other Black people, especially Black women, especially sirens. In the aftermath of a siren murder trial, Tavia learns that an idol of hers is also a siren, and she begins to understand that she has no alternative but to use her voice to pursue her values.

I loved the worldbuilding in A Song Below Water, and I dearly hope that Bethany Morrow has plans for more books in this universe. Though Tavia struggles mightily with understanding what it means to be a siren, sirens are not the only magical being in this world. I would love to see books that deal with other kinds of magic and their implications — not least because Tavia’s beloved sister Effie has secrets of her own that are uncovered in the course of the novel. I love sister stuff! I love it! And this book is about sisters who are absolutely ride-or-die for each other, which was great to see — I love a complicated sibling relationship, but I also love the kind of relationship that’s all about love and loyalty.

Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Mirabile, Janet Kagan

Okay, I confess that this one’s on me. My aunt has been trying to get me to read Mirabile for, like, six years, and every time I was like “oh yeah yeah I’ll get to it for sure” and then because I couldn’t easily access the book, I did not for sure get to it. Last year, my aunt totally got me by just lending me the mf book, so it was either I read it promptly or I became one of those people who borrows a book and never remembers to return it. And y’all know I refuse to be that person.

Mirabile, which was published in 1991, is about xenobiologist (?) / xenoecologist (??) Mama Jason, who is responsible for researching and keeping under control the many mutant life forms that inevitably arise on the planet colony of Mirabile. This is a novel in stories (not usually my favorite thing), most of which were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction before being collected in novel form, and each chapter deals with a specific life form, from the Kangaroo Rex to the Loch Moose Monster. It’s the kind of low-stakes SFF novel that I’m constantly searching for: Though Mama Jason is tasked in some ways with the survival of the colony, there’s never any real question that she’ll succeed in her endeavors. She has a funny, wry narrative voice, and it’s overall just great to see an older woman protagonist in SF. My aunt was right. I should have read this sooner.

Part two is coming your way soon! Probably!

The post All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1 appeared first on Reading the End.

October Reviews

Well, obviously the biggest deal this month was that Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief came out, but I believe I have flailed about it sufficiently in its own post. I also read and adored Romina Garber’s werewolf YA novel, Lobizona, which has a pleasing amount of sportsball and camaraderie even if I had a few notes about it. In romance, Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert was exactly what I wanted in a funny, fannish, fat-positive romance — easily going to be one of my favorite romance novels of the year!

October Books I Didn’t Review

The Dark Tide, by Alicia Jasinska, was a cool f/f take on the story of Tam Lin, with sea monsters! Well, one sea monster. It also contained magical dancing and a complicated sibling relationship, so it was a terrific fit for me. I enjoyed it but maybe didn’t love it — I didn’t have as strong a grip on the characters as I would have liked. That said, Jasinska was doing some really interesting relationship work among her characters here, and the book emphasizes how people can disappoint you without its having to mean that they’re worth having in your life. Which is always nice to find in a book!

Solutions, and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh, is a new book by Allie Brosh! You know how I feel about Allie Brosh! I would give a major content warning for sibling suicide in this book, but I think Brosh speaks about the loss of her sister with insight and compassion (for herself, for her sister, for her parents). I’m so happy Allie Brosh is still out there making art, and I’m thrilled to have this book. (When I say “have,” I don’t actually mean “have.” I bought it for my aunt for her birthday and then read it before I gave it to her.)

The Perfect Assassin, by K. A. Doore, resolves its mystery in a way that made me sad. The book was enjoyable, and I liked the world (so much sand!), but I am an old weary lady, and in this old and weary year, I can’t live with books that resolve their mysteries this way. Highlight if you’re curious: The love interest WHO I GOT INVESTED IN turns out to be the killer, goddammit. It’s not an objectively bad plot device! It just wasn’t what I wanted this month.

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, by Alexis Hall, is an eldritch fantasy Sherlock Holmes adaptation featuring a lady Sherlock character and a very dear, straight-laced Watson. For a Sherlock Holmes adaptation, this wasn’t bad for me! The Sherlock character was too much of a jerk for me, including sometimes too much of a jerk to the Watson character, BUT I adored the worldbuilding and would totally read more books set in this world. Other folks have noted that there’s not a ton of plot to the book, but to me it felt like a video game plot, and I was all on board with wandering around exploring the world.

At Night I Become a Monster, Yori Sumino, translated by Diana Taylor, turned out to be an allegory. I do not like allegories, and I felt a bit tricked at the end to discover it was an allegory all along. This is not Yoru Sumino’s fault. It is a matter of personal taste.

The Best Fic I Read on My Kindle

As I have mentioned here before, I have an absolutely disgraceful Marked for Later list in AO3. I don’t even want to talk about how many fics are on it. One of my problems is that I’m perpetually marking novel-length fics for later and then never reading them, but I believe I have found a solution. I have a new Kindle (acquired from UnclaimedBaggage.com, which I recommend if you want the ease of a Kindle without giving money to dumb Jeff Bezos) to which I have transferred alllllllllll of my novel-length marked-for-later fics. It’s working great! I read not one, not two, but six of them this past month!

My favorite of these was a lettered fic (can’t go wrong with lettered!) called “Away Childish Things.” It’s a Harry/Draco fic wherein adult Harry gets de-aged to ten, with all his ten-year-old mindsets and memories, and Draco has to figure out how to un-de-age him while also taking care of the ten-year-old child he finds himself set with. I thought the portions where Harry is a kid were less successful than the rest of the fic, but I was entranced from the point where Draco finds the fix. I couldn’t put it down! lettered is such a good writer!

Reading Plans for November

My biggest plan for November is Emily Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, which has been duly procured for me by my library system. I’ve heard wonderful things about this book, and its interior design is so gorgeous that I looked up the designer to see if she was on Twitter so I could pay her a compliment about it. Love the paper, love the font, love everything. The book is about a cursed girls’ school that’s having a movie made about it. Sounds fine! Nothing bad has ever happened to anyone who was making a movie about a cursed place!

Also on the docket is Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, which I did not realize is a whole-ass multimedia experience. It’s full-color throughout, with documents and photos and footnotes, and if you thought I was excited about this book before, you should have seen my face when I opened the physical copy and realized what I was in for. It’s going to be a DOCUMENTARY BOOKS-ASS MONTH.

In highly anticipated fantasy novels, I’ve got Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer and Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild; and in romance novels, I’ve got Roan Parrish’s Better Than People which is about a stormcloud book illustrator who falls for his ?hopefully sunshine? dog walker, and Alexis Daria’s You Had Me at Hola, which features telenovela stars. Mmmmm, such good reading ahead of me.

What have you been reading this month? How excited should I be for Plain Bad Heroines?

The post Farewell, October! appeared first on Reading the End.

Alexis Hall is one of my favorite romance writers currently working, and the chief reason amongst a large group of reasons is his deftness with articulating messy, complicated emotions and power dynamics. As I was putting this post together I took a break to reread his book Pansies, which remains one of my top five romance novels and is, accordingly, among the books I shove at romance newbies to get them in on the genre. And it’s just, truly, so great to read books that honor and acknowledge emotions without giving a pass to people for letting their emotions drive them to make poor and hurtful choices.

Someone I either follow on Twitter or know in real life said recently¹ that the best thing about fake dating stories is the part where the one person gets to (metaphorically) slap shit out of the other person’s horrible family. And that is the truest thing I’ve ever read on this here internet, and let me tell you, pals, Boyfriend Material fucking delivers on that front. There are not one but two scenes of horrible families being horrible and the protagonists having to defend each other, and it’s so good for me I wish it could be distilled and bottled and I would drink it every night and then advance to putting it directly in my veins. No, there are not specific parents of people in my life that I would enjoy to be very angry at. This is all purely hypothetical.

Oh, they also have to share a bed, for reasons. This book has all the tropey nonsense your mother warned you about.

Boyfriend Material features an adorably zany cast of characters, all of whom Alexis Hall gives space to be worthwhile. Luc has a posh colleague named Alex with no sense of humor to whom he tells jokes every morning just to see how his colleague will manage to not understand them. His mum has a best friend called Judy who goes on trips to inspect bullocks and prize roosters and then comes home to eat Luc’s mum’s indefensible curries. At times the characters are perhaps the tiniest touch too zany for my particular taste, but on balance I was more charmed than bothered.

“I don’t know [your father] but he’s a big advocate for restricting the right to trial by jury so I have a sort of professional interest.”

“That sounds like him. Talks about it round the dinner table all the time. Says they cost the government a huge amount of money, that people are only in favour of them because of silly sentimentality, and they spread tuberculosis.”

“I’m not sure,” said Oliver, “but I think you might be getting jury trials mixed up with badgers.”

Alex snapped his fingers. “That’s them. He can’t stand the things. little black-and-white furry bastards causing unnecessary delays in our already overstrained criminal justice system.”

Plus, of course, I continue to feel immensely fond of Alexis Hall for his obvious affection for regional British weirdness. Luc has another coworker who is Welsh, who — well, I will just let you read the book and discover it for yourself. His Welsh coworker appears to be ridiculous and then turns out to be great, a classic Alexis Hall move. And if you find yourself generally touched by that, I would love to recommend his earlier book Glitterland, in which a grumpy posh man falls for an Essex lad. As a former Essex girl, I endorse Glitterland.

I wasn’t wild about the way the book frames Luc’s relationship with his dad. His dad shows up out of the blue, having abandoned Luc at age three and never looked back, asking for a relationship now that he has cancer and is going to die. Oliver and Luc’s mum both advocate for Luc to accept the dad’s overtures, even though both of them are well aware that it’s likely the dad is just going to disappoint Luc again. I was… not wild about this. I do not believe that you have obligations to the family that ditched you, however sick they are. If you have been ditched by a family member and they come back wanting a relationship now that they’re dying and you want to give it a try, absolutely 100% go for it! But if you don’t want to give them that space in your life, it’s fine to not. Instead Oliver implies to Luc that he shouldn’t “abandon” his father, as if it’s possible to “abandon” someone you’ve never had a relationship with. I wish that had been framed differently.

Apart from that gripe, my only tiny wish was that the book had gotten into Oliver’s Issues slightly earlier than it did. As an avowed devotee of a Chaos Muppet / Order Muppet pairing, I was deeeeelighted with the central relationship of Boyfriend Material, and as I rounded the 80% mark around 10:30 at night (this is very late to stay up if you are me), I was thinking “How pleasing, and now for the denouement.” This was a FOOLISH expectation by me. In the remaining 20% of the book it suddenly gets very very “actually people who seem to have it super together are sometimes/often/always dealing with their own dysfunctional shit that needs to be worked through too,” and poor old Oliver has to really, properly start facing up to his issues around self-worth and control. As a control freak with self-worth issues, twas unexpectedly confronting, though beautifully and perfectly handled, to the point that I got a bit teary. Only I’d have loved for Luc to have been dealing with that stuff a bit more earlier on, to make the relationship feel a bit equaler a bit sooner.

All that said, one of the reasons Alexis Hall is among my favorite romance authors is that his books are angsty, yet soft, which is pretty much my sweet spot. Luc and Oliver each have their own dysfunction, the kinds of things that arise from what life does to us all, and the arc of the book is not so much learning to set those things aside as it is learning to live a life informed, not controlled, by them. Hall is reliably awesome, and Boyfriend Material is no exception.

Note: I received an e-ARC of this book from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall appeared first on Reading the End.

First up: Roller Girl, by Vanessa North. Tina Durham is a recently divorced former sportsing champion¹ who gets a crush on her new plumber, Joe (short for Joanne). Through Joe, she gets involved in a local roller derby team, and they fall in lurv.

F/F romance novels do not get nearly the love and attention of their het and M/M counterparts, and it’s a damn shame. Roller Girl was the sweetest romance novel I’ve read in a while (except see also Looking for Group, below), and it was wonderful to see a trans protagonist who’s already gone through her transition and is trying to figure out life on the other side; who receives courtesy and not persecution by the people she’s out to; and who gets a happy ending with a super-nice romantic partner. And she gets to be awesome at roller derby at the same time!

If you have other roller derby romance novels to recommend, please do so in the comments. I have been starry-eyed over roller derby (concept of; I do not want to play it; I am weak and unsportsy) ever since the excellent Ellen Page movie Whip It.

Next up: Alexis Hall’s latest, Looking for Group. This one’s about a university student named Drew who develops a crush on a girl (he thinks) in his World of Warcraft guild. (It’s not called World of Warcraft in the book, but I am very clever and figured out that it’s basically World of Warcraft.) When Solace turns out to be a guy called Kit, Drew has to sort out his feelings about Kit, his own apparent bisexuality, and his relationship to the world of gaming.

Alexis Hall is great at making me feel feelings using only his words — the emotional truthfulness of his romance novels is always what keeps me coming back. Looking for Group was no exception. It starts with, and continues to include, some very dense passages where the characters are playing Pretend World of Warcraft — I have never played a video game a day in my life (except, like, Mario Kart or Guitar Hero very occasionally, both of which I’m terrible at), so this was a hurdle I had to clear to get to the meat of the book.

But! If you can hang in there (and consult the gaming vocab glossary at the back of the book), it’s well worth it in the end. Hall deals with Drew’s college-student-ness so incredibly well — the way each half of a friendship can perceive each other and the friendship in unrecognizably different ways; that thing where you will lounge around with a group of people for hours/days trying to figure out what the next activity of the friend group will be; the difficulty of incorporating a new partner into an established friend situation without friction. It’s a genuine dear of a book.

Okay, on to the Scots! I am sorry that I said “ugh” in the post title. I am not mad at real-life Scots. It’s Scottish romances I can’t abide, which is why it took me this long to read the newest Sarah MacLean book, even though she’s one of my fave romance writers. Reluctant Duke Warnick comes to London under duress, having discovered that in addition to all his holdings, he’s inherited a ward named Lily — who appears to have been Ruined and now requires Saving. He’s determined to get her respectably married, guess what they fall in love, not a spoiler, you already know what romance novels are.

Luckily for me,² the Scot isn’t all that Scottish. I had to skip past some moments where his heart and dick swelled because his lass was wearing his tartan (vom), but apart from that it was mostly okay. Per usual, Sarah MacLean is funny and feminist, and it’s always fun watching her characters unravel their emotional dilemmas.

(Her sex scenes can get a teensy bit schmoopy, if that’s a thing that bothers you. I skipped some bits. Tartan, and such.)

What about you, my loves? Read any good romance novels lately? I am always open to recommendations!

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