Anyway! So I wanted to do a little breakdown of a sex scene that I think does an incredible job of advancing the story and revealing what’s going on with the characters. What follows here is a close read of a sex scene from Cecilia Grant’s A Gentleman Undone — what it’s doing, how it’s doing it, and why I think it works. Enjoy!

The context:

Our FMC is Lydia Slaughter, a sex worker and longtime mistress of this ain’t-shit jackass, Edward Roanoke. She’s also an extremely brilliant card shark who counts cards like crazy, and she needs a partner in crime to help her make the money she needs to attain her independence. Our MMC is Will Blackshear, a traumatized Waterloo veteran who’s trying to earn enough money to support a dead friend’s widow and child. After catching Lydia’s eye in a gaming hell, then lightly defending her honor against some ain’t-shit men (including Lydia’s partner/employer), Will enters into a partnership with Lydia: She’ll teach him to win at blackjack, and he’ll invest her funds for her.

The setup:

Lydia and Will have been at dinner with a drunk, jealous Edward Roanoke, who’s insulted both our protagonists and insinuated that they’re having an affair. (He’s not completely wrong, but!) Baiting him, Will tells Lydia to meet him in his room, and Lydia tells him—in front of everyone—that she’ll go to his room, and he can meet her there in thirty minutes.

Will doesn’t think he’s going to Lydia for sex, and he’s not even sure he should have sex with her (she’s had a few drinks; they’re in her protector’s house). But when he arrives at his room, she makes it very plain that’s what she expects and wants.

He’s falling in love with her, but can’t offer her marriage (cause of Society) or take her as a mistress (he doesn’t have the money to support her). She’s falling in love with him, but trying to protect her heart because she knows that they don’t have a future together.

Okay, let’s get into it!

She was watching him, [naked], expectant and wholly without shame, when he turned to face the room. Her eyes glittered, hard and intent.

Now. Four steps brought him to the bed. He set one knee on the mattress and her legs edged apart. Greedy impatient thing. Just for that, she could wait a bit. He bent and pressed a luxuriant kiss to her kneecap.

“Stop that.” Her knee twitched away. “Take off your clothes.”

A dictatorial drunk as well as belligerent. But to obey this command was no hardship.

He pulled off his boots and his hose. Waistcoat, cravat, braces, shirt, all over his head and dropped helter-skelter on the floor. He stood.

She shifted, propping herself higher on the pillows, angling unabashedly for a better view.

His blood thundered like a river’s rapids as he obliged her, turning himself so she could see. One button after another slipped free and the front-fall of his breeches dropped away. He undid his drawers. He looked at her.

This sets the scene perfectly for everything that’s to come. You know from the chapter previous that both of them really, really want to do this. Will thinks he shouldn’t have sex with her for moral reasons; Lydia doesn’t want to be vulnerable to Will for emotional reasons. So they’re each heading into this super horny but also holding back and trying to shape the encounter to fit their needs and their narrative.

Right off the bat, Lydia’s holding all the cards—this was her idea, and she’s the one pushing for it—and she wants to call the shots. Will tries to coax her into a slightly different sexual register by doing something more sweet than horny (kissing her knee), but Lydia immediately yanks it back into the territory where she’s comfortable: She’s in charge, it’s purely about sex, and vulnerability is not welcome.

“I think perhaps…” She bit her lip, still staring. “Um.” Her eyes came to his, soft and uncertain. “Can you go in very slowly?”

It was beautifully done. But he knew her too well. He stepped out of his breeches. “Flattering minx.” He crawled back onto the bed, parting her knees with his hands to find his place between them. “You say that to every man.”

Her concerned expression dissolved into a deliciously wicked grin. “Every man loves to hear it. Even a man who knows it for flattery.”

He couldn’t argue. He couldn’t say anything at all.

I’m obsessed with this. When I was thinking about writing a post breaking down a sex scene, this moment sprang to mind immediately. As before, Lydia’s trying to keep this encounter in a register where she feels comfortable, so she’s putting on her professional clothes (metaphorically) and playing a little game that has worked well for her in her career as a sex worker.

However, we’ve seen throughout the book that Will pays better attention than most men. Here, he recognizes what Lydia’s doing and calls her on it. He does so in a light-hearted way, then makes it clear physically that although he knows she’s doing a trick from her sex work background, he’s not put off by that or her. He thinks she’s smart and funny, and he’s charmed that she tried this on him, and charmed that he caught her trying it.

Then Lydia caps it by calling him on the fact that, come on. It totally still works on him. She’s being really winning here, and she’s also lightly reminding him that he’s not special. Throughout this scene, we’re going to see him trying to get some sign from her that he’s not just interchangeable with every other man she knows, and Lydia resisting.

With all these undercurrents, this exchange is just fun and funny. These are two people who like being around each other, who are having a good time. Sex is fun! It’s supposed to be fun!

*

I’ve not included the full text, to save space, but here follows Will making four attempts in a row to be sweet to Lydia, and she rebuffs him each time. The imagery Grant uses in this passage draws sharp contrasts between what Lydia wants and what Will wants. Her skin is soft, but her eyes “glint like agates.” Will tries to touch her and speak to her gently (“with his voice, too, he could caress her”), and Lydia “swat[s] at his hand” and tells him to hurry up.

“I’ll only linger over the parts you enjoy.” Hanged if he’d let her turn this into something quick and brutish and utterly devoid of meaning.

“I’ve told you what I enjoy. You may believe I know my own tastes.” Her voice was growing thin with agitation. She twitched like a cornered animal. “Don’t dare fancy you’ll be the man to teach me the pleasures of tenderness.” Tenderness was a rat whose neck she wrung with her own hands before hurling it over the hedge to rot with feelings.

And of course he’d fancied he’d be exactly that man. Or at the very least, that they’d do this with some acknowledgment of what had been between them. He’d already had intimacy of her in her confidences on their walk outside, in the way she’d trusted him to comfort her last night in this same bed. What on earth did she expect to gain by treating him like a paying customer now?

They are chasing after competing, maybe irreconcilable desires right now. Sex has been a sphere where Lydia can feel in control, when so many aspects of her life are beyond her control, and she really really doesn’t want to feel vulnerable right now. The dinner they’ve just been at was super humiliating for her, and she had no recourse because of her position in society. Fucking Will, and getting her way, is how she hopes to reclaim her sense of power.

Will, meanwhile, has been stung by the things Lydia’s protector said about him, and he’s worried they’re true, and he’s so worried that he’s a bad, unsalvageable person. He wants to be a person of worth in Lydia’s eyes, not just some interchangeable body. He’s trying so hard to get her to admit that he’s a person to her, and specifically a person she’s been vulnerable with; and Lydia won’t.

It’s fine to want emotional connection during sex! It’s also fine to want fun, impersonal, easy sex! Like, both of these wants are reasonable, in isolation. They’re just not reasonable asks of these two specific people in this specific moment. Which is why this scene is doing such terrific work: it’s telling us emotional information that’s particular to these characters and the journey they’re on individually and together.

He drew back a few inches and saw panic flare up in her eyes. She might want only an impersonal fuck, but she wanted it very much. “I won’t try to teach you anything. I wouldn’t presume.” He bent to kiss one nipple, just to reassure her of his lustful intent.

That last moment is so small and charming, omg.

I like this flash of vulnerability from Lydia. She knows all the reasons sex between them is a bad idea—especially the reasons why Will thinks it would be a bad idea—which means she also knows that she pretty much has this one window of opportunity to have sex with him.

“But surely there’s some ground for compromise between what you want and what I want.”

“Compromise is but an over-nice way of saying neither person gets what they want. Do that again. This time use your tongue.”

Leverage, finally. “I’ll do it as much as you want.” He retreated to knees and straight arms, too far away to do anything but talk. “After we settle how we’re both to come out of this satisfied.”

Her eyes narrowed. They shifted back and forth, reading his face. “You’ll be satisfied. Have no fear on that count.” Half promise and half threat, the way she said it. “And if you find any hungers unappeased, we’ll do it again, to your taste this time.”

It sounded… so much like a transaction. A trade. She would use him, and then he could use her. Any man might have taken his place, provided the cock was to her liking, and apparently she thought any woman would do just as well for him.

Ouch, that last paragraph hurts.

Look how they’re using satisfied here to mean slightly different things. Will wants to have sex that he finds emotionally satisfying. Lydia knows what he means, but she insists on reading satisfied to mean physical satisfaction. He’s saying, I don’t want to feel awful about this. She’s saying, Calm down, you’ll get your orgasm—which isn’t what Will’s talking about at all.

Romance uses a lot of alternating POV, which among other things, allows for the dramatic irony of the reader knowing better than each individual protagonist what’s going on with both of them. It can be done in a heavy-handed way. Cecilia Grant is doing it beautifully. In previous chapters, we’ve seen Lydia recognizing that she’s getting too attached to Will, more attached than feels safe to her, and she’s trying to pull herself back from that edge.

Will doesn’t know that, though! He only has Lydia’s behavior to go by. They’ve experienced what felt to him like intimacy, but the way she’s behaving now makes him question whether that was real, or if her treating him as interchangeable is real, and which one’s realer, and which one’s going to win the day.

He could refuse. He could clamber over her and right off the bed, to where his clothes lay discarded. I’m sorry but this isn’t what I want, he could say while buttoning his breeches over his rampant erection. She would probably throw something at him.

Stop thinking. The woman you want is underneath you with her legs apart. Why in the name of all that is holy do you hesitate? Very well, this round went to her.

Throughout this scene, Grant keeps emphasizing that Will wants Lydia physically but also wants intimacy with her; and Lydia explicitly and implicitly forecloses that possibility. One thing that makes the scene hot is that they want each other so much. They’re each keenly aware of the ways in which this is a mistake—but they’re just really, really, really attracted to each other, and they finally have attained a moment where sex is possible between them.

His eyes still on hers, he lowered his mouth to her other nipple and made a circle round it with his tongue.

She arched to meet his mouth and then sank slowly down, as he followed, until her shoulders lay flat on the mattress. “Yes,” she muttered, eyes fluttering closed. “Good. Now put your cock in me. Anywhere you like.”

Debauched past all redemption. He stroked a hand down her belly, through her maiden hair, to the place where he could make her melt like butter. “Right here is where I like.” His voice descended to a growl. “Where you’re wet for me, and hot. Spread your legs wider.”

She liked that, if he could judge by the shiver that ran through her. And, because she was constitutionally incapable of acceding to any of his commands, she did not spread her legs but rather brought them about, by some miracle of flexibility, until her ankles sat at his shoulders. His cock found the place where she opened to him and he slipped in, all the way in, with no effort at all.

Even when he’s asking her to do something she definitely wants to do, she still can’t be vulnerable with him even to the point of doing it. I love that little moment/detail.

He stayed for a moment, just so. His throat had gone tight and his breath unsteady.

Nearly a year, it had been. Some camp follower in Belgium would have been the last, an anonymous and forgettable encounter that left him vaguely ashamed and not at all satisfied. Then had come that feeling of unfitness; the fear that his darkness, his corrupted soul, might somehow leach out of him to contaminate any woman he touched.

And maybe this was what he’d needed all along. Not a pure-hearted woman who could lift him out of darkness, but one who dwelt there herself. Already corrupted to such a degree that nothing remained to ruin. Incorruptible, now, more incorruptible than the most virtuous maiden.

SUPER HEALTHY, WILLIAM.

The two elements of a sex scene are what’s happening physically and what’s happening emotionally. Grant does a stellar job here of writing what’s ultimately quite a traditional sex scene—they’re having missionary PIV sex!—in a way that’s emotionally messy as hell. Will wants to be a hero and save the day for someone. Lydia sees that so clearly in him and doesn’t want it to be the grounds of their relationship.

One reason she’s resisting intimacy is that they’re coming off a fight with her protector, and she doesn’t want to be part of a story where Will is rescuing her from another man. Who would? That story fucking sucks.

A furrow traced itself in her brow, above her still-closed eyes. “Hurry,” she said.

He could do that. He half withdrew, and pushed in hard. Her lashes trembled as her hands came up and took hold of his biceps. Again. She tipped her head back, exposing her throat. Once more. Her lips parted and he heard her harsh breaths as he worked to find the right rhythm.

“Lydia, open your eyes,” he whispered on what breath he could spare. “Look at me.”

“No. Harder.” Her lip drew up at one side to show her teeth, again the cornered animal. Her fingers dug into the bunched-up muscles of his arms.

Here we’ve got a straightforward narration of what’s happening physically, capped by Lydia again refusing a more intimate connection. Notice that where Grant zooms in on physical details, they’re almost tangential to the sex: eyelashes, biceps, throat, teeth. It makes the sex scene feel vivid and sensory without having to deal with the problem of what words to use for sex organs.

He thrust on, but desolation began to trickle through him in chilly drops, one by one from that icicle of desolation he kept somewhere inside. She didn’t care to look at him, to be with him. He’d thrown away whatever remaining claim to honor he had in order to bed this woman, and he might as well have been with a camp follower again. An imperious, ill-tempered camp follower who meant to leave no doubt of her contempt for him.

“Faster. Don’t slow down.” Her eyes half-opened and glared at him, from between her ankles, without the slightest glimmer of warmth.

Confound her drunken hostility. He would stop this. He would haul himself out of her and flop down beside her and tell her: I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you.

Any minute now, he would do that. For now he clenched his teeth to hold back the tide of pleasure and made his strokes swift and shallow.

Look how Grant is keeping us, the reader, from fully diving into this as a sex scene. This is a close close third person, and she wants our reading experience to mirror the experience Will’s having. Grant spends some time on physical pleasure, in the previous passage, but then pulls us back to Will’s mental state, which is miserable. Trickle, chilly, and icicle are all very unsexy words (no matter what Bella Swan might think). “Without the slightest glimmer of warmth” calls back that set of imagery, so Lydia’s behavior matches Will’s interior state.

The recollection of the camp follower again speaks to the idea of interchangeability that Will is trying to escape.

“I’m not your enemy. I’m not your punishment. I won’t play that part for you” lays out the stakes of the scene explicitly. Again, Lydia’s coming off a really risky decision—telling her protector that she’s having sex with another man—which she knows will probably lead to him withdrawing his financial support. She feels vulnerable on that front, and vulnerable because she really likes Will, and so she’s trying to keep the sex on the impersonal, adversarial territory that feels safe for her. This isn’t a true representation of what they are to each other, though, and “I won’t play that part for you” makes it clear that Will understands what Lydia’s doing (or trying to do).

Again, this works because it’s specific to them! From the very first moment he sees her, Will has seen Lydia (“Three of the courtesans were beautiful. His eye lingered, naturally, on the fourth.”). His awareness of who she is cuts through all her pretense. It’s crucial to their romance overall, and crucial to this scene.

“Harder. Hurt me.” Her voice was a feral snarl and her face half contorted with loathing.

“I can’t. I don’t want to.” There was a way to ask for such things, and it wasn’t the way she’d just done. He’d tell her so afterward, if she was still inclined to speak to him then. At the moment he couldn’t spare the breath.

She writhed under him and took a new grip on his arms. “You said you’d do what I wanted. My way first, your way after. We agreed.”

His patience snapped, then, and with one monumental effort he halted, half inside her. Her narrowed eyes flew wide with outrage.

Please note that Will did not say he’d do what she wanted. They did not agree. That is untrue. Lydia said they’d do it her way first, his way after, and proceeded as if that had been agreed upon. It’s another way she’s exerting control over this encounter.

“Listen to me.” His chest was heaving, and one wrong move would make him spill, but he kept his voice steady. “Against my better judgment and all my principles I am fucking you under your protector’s roof.” One great swallow of air. “I’m plowing you harder than I’ve ever plowed a woman in my life. I’ll probably end with bruises and I won’t be surprised if I make myself ill.” One more lungful. “I’m sorry it’s not enough for you, but this is all you’re getting. I suggest you find a way to like it.”

Her eyes flicked back and forth on his face, as though he were some new adversary whose measure she must take. And devil take her, she got hotter for him. She took her legs from his shoulders to wrap them round his back and tilted her hips to take him deeper. Her whole body roiled under him like molten metal in a blacksmith’s cauldron.

Hell. She’d wanted rude handling and she’d goaded him into it. She had what he wanted and he had… his cock in her wet quim. And he was too near his crisis now to complain, particularly as she’d set some muscles in there to doing things he hadn’t even known a woman’s body could do.

This is such a smart alignment of what’s happening physically and emotionally! As they’re getting close to orgasm, they’re also hitting the emotional endpoint of the scene, the thing it’s been building to all along, where Lydia “goad[s] him into” playing the “adversary” role that she’s been angling to put him in all along.

Sweet holy mother of… He wasn’t going to last. He would disgrace himself, and leave her wanting. He squeezed his eyes shut, and slitted them open again to see how she arched and gritted her teeth on his every thrust, to see the face that went with those rapturous sounds she was making in her throat. “Come, Lydia. Hurry.” The words rasped out like a death rattle. But at least he was speaking her peremptory tongue.

And this command, thank the fates, she obeyed. She whipsawed under him, head thrown back, and snatched her hand up to her mouth, sinking in her teeth to stifle her cries.

Not a second too soon. Two more thrusts he gave her before climax seized him in its unforgiving talons, bearing him up and away with no regard for his sensibilities, his better nature. This coupling had been so far from what he’d wanted, and pleasure swamped him all the same. He pushed up on straight arms, his head thrown back, and spent himself to the sound of Miss Slaughter’s muffled cries.

“But at last he was speaking her peremptory tongue”: Will recognizes that he’s lost the fight they were having about what this sexual encounter was going to consist of.

“Miss Slaughter” is so interesting. For the whole course of this sex scene, Grant hasn’t used Lydia’s name in the narration at all. Will has called her by name a few times, always in moments where he’s trying to entice her into greater intimacy. The use of “Miss Slaughter” in the narration in this moment emphasizes the distance between them—distance that she has worked hard to put there.

He’d never spilled in a woman before. A gentleman always withdrew. This ought to have been…uncharted bliss. Unlooked-for privilege. Something, anything, more than it was.

Pleasure left just enough room for that thought to sidle through. Then pleasure rolled out like a spent ocean wave and nothing rolled in to take its place. He lifted his body clear of hers and settled to the mattress beside her, limp and unspeaking and utterly barren inside. The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away. She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.

He lay on his stomach, head turned away from her, breathing slowly in and out. He had nothing to say.

I love “sidle through”! That’s a clever choice of words.

“Utterly barren inside” is doing some heavy lifting here: Lydia has been described as “barren” before, and her infertility is top of mind for Will at this moment, since he just came inside her. “Barren” also works as a contrast with the image of a “spent ocean wave” in the previous sentence, as Will contemplates how empty this all feels.

“She hadn’t said his name in the end, or if she had, she’d withheld that gratification from him by smothering the syllable with her fist.” I’m not sure Will’s gloss on the fist thing is correct! As we know, from being inside Lydia’s head in previous chapters, she resists letting on that he’s particular to her because that would be emotionally risky.

“The whole thing had been just an exercise in her pushing him away” is such a good and devastating line!

*

Why this sex scene works:

• It is incredibly specific to these two characters. From Lydia we’re seeing her enjoyment of impersonal sex, her fear of intimacy, and her need to assert control any time she feels vulnerable. Will wants to be a hero and fears he’s an awful person, and he’s certain he’s not a hero, and feels the allure of being an awful person; we’re seeing the push-pull of those things throughout. All of their actions, every single thing, arises from and reinforces what we know about who the characters are and what they need from each other at this point in the story.
• What’s happening physically is put into really nice alignment with what’s happening emotionally. The sex is building in tandem with Will’s frustration and disappointment. The idea that Lydia smothers Will’s name in her fist when she comes is a perfect encapsulation of all that she’s been holding back throughout the scene.
• Grant is doing some smart things with word choice. She chooses physical details that create a sense of immediacy and make the sex feel explicit even when she’s not being You’ve got water imagery (river rapids, dripping icicles, ocean waves) at the beginning, middle, and end. You’ve got a bunch of imagery of Lydia as a predator animal, including the “unforgiving talons” of Will’s orgasm. It all works together beautifully.
• The scene advances the story and the relationship, and more importantly, it leaves the characters with somewhere still to go. I get frustrated when sex scenes don’t do any narrative work. This one speaks volumes about where Will and Lydia are, and it sets up a ton of possibilities for where they can go next. In the next chapter, they’ll have a better sense of how to navigate each other’s desires and boundaries, and they’ll end up having more mutually satisfying sex.

This has been: Anatomy of a Sex Scene! Stop by the comments with additional thoughts and ideas about this scene, or let me know if there’s a particularly great sex scene you’d like me to cover next. I am thinking about making this a series!

The post Anatomy of a Sex Scene: A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant appeared first on Reading the End.

Except I immediately knew it wouldn’t. There are several reasons, I think, why it wouldn’t, but the big reason that jumped out at me right away is that I used to dislike spinach. It is a great misfortune to dislike spinach! Not only is spinach very healthy for you, but it is found in many delicious restaurant dishes and home cooking recipes that I might care to try. So one year, ages ago, as a New Year’s Resolution, I decided that I was going to eat a whole lot of spinach until I liked spinach. “That is crazy, Jenny,” I hear you say, but what I say to that is CRAZY LIKE A FOX, because for one thing, spinach is delicious and green leafy vegetables are the best vegetables; and for another thing, the plan totally worked. I love spinach now. I can’t believe I ever let cultural stereotypes of spinach prevent me from consuming the third-best vegetable there is. (First best is potato; second-best is Brussels sprout; I will not be taking questions.)

What I’m saying is: Sometimes you have to teach your brain how to like a thing.

In 2012, I decided that it was snobby and bad of me to refuse to read romance novels, perhaps in fact a betrayal of feminism. I had read one romance novel in its entirety at this time (The Bride, by Julie Garwood), in the very unpropitious circumstances of reading it onto a CD for my grandmother, who was blind, because she couldn’t find an audiobook of it and she really loved it and wanted to reread it. There are exactly five sex scenes in that book. I am scarred for life. I had also poked my nose into a old-school few romance novels with titles like Savage Desire (the word Savage in the title signified that one of the protagonists was going to be Native or half-Native or adopted by Natives) and found them to be about as retrograde in their attitudes toward race and gender as you’d expect with titles like that. But in 2012, I had heard enough people insist that there were good romance novels out there that I was willing to give the whole genre another go.

Here’s the thing. I did not exactly have to kiss a lot of romance novel frogs before I found my romance novel prince, but I did have to give three stars to a lot of books I didn’t know enough to appreciate yet. Or — a scenario that absolves me a little more — I didn’t know enough to guess whether I’d enjoy a given book or not based on its blurbs and comps and covers. The only variable I was actively trying to control for was feminism. I didn’t know that books could be categorized as angst or as fluff. I didn’t know about the sunshine one and the stormcloud one. I didn’t know about the Chaos Muppet and the Order Muppet. I didn’t know about the Big Mis.¹ I was like, “why are these books talking so much about the heroes being Large?” I did not have the vocabulary to describe a second-chance romance or an enemies-to-lovers romance. I didn’t have the experience to recognize that when the protagonists got to a hotel room to discover there was Only One Bed, it was both a gift and an elbow-nudge from the author.

It turns out that these things are pretty important to the experience of romance novels! There’s a reason that romance readers are fucking voracious, and the reason isn’t just that there are a metric fuck-ton of romance novels out there for us to feed into our hungry maws. The pleasure of reading romance is heavily iterative: it’s fun to discover the myriad of ways different authors have found to play with the same tropes, to subvert them or play them straight, to find new twists on them that make the reader say “oh that’s clever.” When a pair of romance novel protagonists falls asleep on the Only Bed in their hotel room, there’s a specific delight in knowing that they’re likely to wake up twined around each other and feeling some kind of way about it.²

The risk here is that treating a book like an unwanted vegetable course can be a deeply ungenerous way to read, and in the long term, it only works if it works. I have been lowkey trying to brute-force my way into enjoying the mystery genre for like five years now, and I have made very little progress. With a very few exceptions, it’s been three-star reads all the way down. I also haven’t been trying that hard, because it doesn’t mean much to me to be a mystery reader or not a mystery reader. I’d just kind of like to be able to swap book recs with my mystery-loving pals, which I can’t currently do.

By contrast, I was and am a lot more motivated to get myself into World Literature, including but not limited to literature in translation. The wonderful Meytal, founder of Women in Translation Month, helped me to be less intimidated by translated literature, while at the same time her efforts, and those of many others, contributed to producing a richer, more vibrant pool of translated literature to choose from. I used to have to be pestered to death to even consider reading a book in translation, and it was the exact same problem as I had in my early efforts with romance. Other countries, other cultures, other languages simply have different storytelling conventions, and I had to teach myself to understand and enjoy them, as well as how to identify translated works that are most likely to delight me. (I love the tradition of absurdism/surrealism in East Asian literature, but I don’t think I’ll ever love noir, no matter what language it’s written in.) I’ve plowed my way through a lot of three-star reads because the goal I’m pursuing is “comfort with a lot of different ways of telling stories,” rather than “falling madly in love with as many books as possible.”

Do you read to try stuff, or do you read to love stuff? Or something else? Or different things at different times? (Reading to get away from it all has been a significant feature of my reading life, especially over the last six years. Sob.)

The post What I Get Out of Three-Star Reads appeared first on Reading the End.

Y’all may remember me screeching and carrying on about the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and how gosh-darn fun it was despite being about a dystopian future in which a few scrappy and independent-minded escapees of government torture banded together to carve out a small space for happiness and community. Well, this is the sequel, and I stand by everything I said about Deal with the Devil and it’s true in The Devil You Know as well. This is Maya and Gray’s book. Maya is the former information courier for sinister corporation TechCorps, who was given the dubious gift of an eidetic memory and a whole host of corporate secrets. Gray is the sniper from among Rafe’s unmerry band of supersoldiers, and he is very stone-faced, and the implant that makes him a supersoldier has begun to deteriorate and will soon kill him. Plus, someone’s trafficking in cloned children, and everybody is determined to put a stop to that. Fun times all around!

When I said “fun times all around!” before, I was being flippant, and in fact flippanter than I would have been being¹ if I’d used the same phrasing about Deal with the Devil. Deal with the Devil is more of a caper, setting up the world and the characters in a road-trippy setting that’s hard not to find fun.² The Devil You Know, by contrast, addresses the aftermath of trauma and the effort it takes to find value in a self that has been so significantly fractured by the selfishness and greed of the people who hurt you.

In a world controlled by variously malicious corporations and governments, just about everyone we meet is recovering from trauma of some kind. Maya and Gray share the experience of having been molded into the perfect tools for their evil overlords, then pressed into service of a cause they didn’t believe in, for which the skill sets they were forced to possess have made them particularly suited. Though their suitability as weapons was purpose-built by bad guys, Maya and Gray still have to grapple with the ways they’ve been wielded to do harm in the past. Gray views his own impending death as a kind of amends, while Maya lives with the fear that she’ll be taken and used again in the same way she was before.

Because this is a Kit Rocha book, both those impulses translate as action taken to protect those around them who are more vulnerable. Most obviously, the trafficked, cloned children. Maya and her friends take a personal interest, given that Nina herself is the product of a prior child cloning experiment. Remembering their many losses of agency, Maya and her friends are determined to put an end to the traffic in children — of course — but also to find a safe and comfortable life for the child survivors they rescue. Rocha makes a point of the children’s agency: at one point, the little girl Rainbow is offered a new home, but she chooses to stay in the librarians’ enclave, and that choice is respected. Love to see it! Children are people too!

On the other side of the innocence/experience spectrum is the newly returned, somewhat brainwashed supersoldier Rafe’s team thought was dead. Once their medic and sworn brother, Mace now tries to kill people sometimes. Not all the time, though! Gray and Rafe and the rest of them are pretty confident they can keep Mace and his potential murder targets (who are mostly them, anyway!) safe until he’s all the way unbrainwashed; this is not an opinion warmly shared by Nina’s feral murder twin, Ava. She keeps coming around with extravagant gifts delivered with a scowl and threats to Rafe’s crew delivered with — okay, not with a smile, but certainly you imagine with a lot of teeth.

Unusually for a Kit Rocha book, The Devil You Know is low on sex, given Maya’s and Rafe’s mutual extreme cautiousness, Rafe’s impending very much death,³ and Maya’s sensory issues. (Sensory issues: You know more people who have them than you might realize!) It’s another reminder that sex scenes are a tool for telling story and building character and can be deployed, or withheld, very effectively in those two capacities. When Maya and Rafe finally do have sex, it’s not just hooray-boning, although Hooray boning!, it’s also a sign to the reader of how much their relationship has grown and how much Maya has learned to trust Rafe and even more so to trust herself with understanding and enforcing her own limits. The third book is about Dani and will undoubtedly be just wall-to-wall boning. Sex as character development! Who knew!

(The romance genre knew. For quite a while now.)

All in all, a fast-paced, emotional, deeply satisfying second outing for the series. I am already making yearning-cat noises about Dani’s book, which is probably either called Devil in the Details or Dance with the Devil, and I am choosing to live in the uncertainty of not knowing which.

(Oh shit, or Devil May Care. Or also Devil’s Advocate. Or Speak of the Devil. Help, I can’t stop thinking of titles! Kit Rocha will just have to keep writing romances in this series until they run out of idioms!)

Note: I received an egalley of The Devil You Know, whose title I forgot as I was writing this sentence because I have thought of too many devil idioms and it’s rotted my brain, for review consideration from Netgalley.

The post Review: The Devil You Know, Kit Rocha appeared first on Reading the End.

The mainstreaming of fandom has created some deeply weird ripple effects in terms of fan/creator interactions (my hot take is that we should never have wanted this, at least for the large franchises), but one of the best things about it has been that more and more authors are speaking openly about their fannish influences. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light each feel like books that couldn’t have existed without fanfiction, partly because of subject matter, but mostly because they draw so deeply from the well of joy that makes the fannish engine run.

All the Feels is a companion to Spoiler Alert, a romance novel I have recommended prolifically and at loud volume. Like its predecessor, All the Feels follows a lead actor in the television show Game of Thrones Gods of the Gates, which had some good years but is now kind of a mess because its showrunners lack vision and are mean, superficial jerks. In a mean, superficial jerk move, one of the showrunners has hired his very put-upon cousin, an ER therapist named Lauren Clegg, to follow star Alex Woodroe around and make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. This has become necessary after Alex got in a bar fight, but also because he is an agent of chaos. By contrast, Lauren is relentlessly sensible and self-effacing, though like Alex she’s trying to figure out her next moves as her life’s work implodes around her.

A Marvellous Light is a queer fantasy romance set in an alternate version of Edwardian England where everything’s the same except, unbeknownst to most, there is magic. The sunshiney, athletic, slightly laddish Robin Blyth takes a job for which he is numerously unqualified; the most pertinent of his unqualifications is that he has no idea magic exists and it’s kind of a magic-forward job. The job turns out to be its own hotbed of intrigue and murder—as Robin discovers when he meets the magical (but not nearly magical enough to suit his judgmental, Daisy-Fay-from-Gatsby-careless family) bureaucrat Edwin Courcey. Together they uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very foundations of English magic.

A Marvellous Light is notable for its inclusion of explicit sex scenes, which have always been common in romance novels (A Marvellous Light is a romance novel) but whose presence in mainstream commercial SFF is a pretty clear result of having editors, writers, and decision-makers who came out of fandom. As various genres (honestly including tradpub romance novels! and certainly including things like SFF movies; fuck you, Marvel) have become more squeamish about including sex and makeouts, it’s been refreshing to see SFF publishers shift in the opposite direction. A Marvellous Light is the latest of many recent books from Tor, Harper Voyager, and others that have included frank discussions and portrayals of sex. Yay! (Kit Rocha and Jessie Mihalik’s books are, like this one, romances, but recent books by authors like Rivers Solomon and Nghi Vo have also included sex scenes.)²

A Marvellous Light feels especially fannish in the unfussy queerness and careful building of the romance (despite being set in a historical era that was less than friendly to queer love). Marske dispenses quickly with the necessity for Robin and Edwin to conceal their sexual orientation from each other, which allows for her to explore the far more interesting question of what sort of relationship they each want from the other and–crucially–how much of themselves they’re willing to give away. The possibility of romantic and sexual attraction is flawlessly twined around the plot (plant imagery used advisedly): Robin has to spend time with Edwin if he wants his curse lifted (Robin’s under a viscerally nasty curse; I heart folk magic), giving them both plenty of time to gaze yearningly at each other’s hands and dislike each other’s unsatisfactory families.

Freya Marske is open about her background in fandom, and the DNA of fanfic and specifically fanfic sex is all over A Marvellous Light. Her sex scenes, and the scenes leading up to sex, are funny and frank (the two guys realize each other are queer because one of them finds the other one’s, like, porny pamphlet, which is extra funny if you’ve ever read any Victorian or Edwardian porn, all of which is goddamn absurd), and they do this thing that feels inestimably fanficcy to me: Marske’s sex scenes—and the book as a whole—are tender toward the realities of embodiment.

Outside of romance and fic, literature often treats bodies as pure grotesquery, a distraction from the loftier life of the mind. In the first place, I will have no truck with dualism, for it is nonsense. Secondly, this sort of thinking inevitably leads to heightened contempt for bodies perceived as unruly or transgressive, which somehow always belong to marginalized people. An amazing coincidence! And C, hating your body, and bodies generally, really sets a bitch up for failure. We do not actually possess the technology to convert you into a being of pure thought, so you’re kind of stuck with your meatsack, and you might as well be kind to it, even if you do insist on thinking of it as nothing more than the squishy, annoying vehicle that hauls your brain around.

All the Feels is similarly tender about its protagonists’ bodies, which would be par for the course in the romance genre, except that Olivia Dade’s work most wonderfully features protagonists who aren’t cast in one of the, like, three acceptable romance novel heroine physical types. Lauren is petite and round, with sharp features and a beaky nose that makes her look like a bird. As in Spoiler Alert, it’s never suggested that this makes her undesirable to Alex, nor is her body ignored or glossed over during sex scenes. It’s part and parcel of a bigger theme (in both books) of finding within yourself the ability to celebrate your own gifts and strengths, rather than constantly finding fault with your weaknesses.

Lauren is accustomed to people trying to make her feel small, and she no longer reacts to it and doesn’t want Alex to, either. All well and good, until you realize—as Alex does, almost immediately—that she’s fully internalized the idea that she deserves and should expect nothing better than the contempt and snottiness of people who will always, always put her last. On his side, Alex is perpetually terrified that he’ll disappoint the people around him, and perpetually certain that he already has. It’s easy for him to see his flaws and failure, particularly those that arise from his ADHD, but much harder for him to recognize how those same traits make him special, fun, helpful, kind.

A driving impulse of fanfic—though certainly not the only one—is the sense that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s the source of so much joy in fic, this simple idea to look at a piece of media or, you know, the world, and say, “Actually, I think we can do better than that.” Everybody can be gay! Everybody can have therapy! Everybody lives! For good and ill,³ there’s a critique baked in to what fic writers keep from canon and what they leave behind, a Marie Kondoing of the elements that don’t spark joy in favor of the ones that do.

The major characters arcs of All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are about finding ways to make use of your existing qualities and competencies in a world that’s not set up to find them, or you, valuable. The broader critique, of course, is that it’s all a trap anyway. There’s no middle ground you can find, no level of adherence to the desired standards that can exempt you from being made to feel small. Alex’s ADHD is met with contempt by—mostly jerks, sure, on page, but jerks who have power over him and are trying to persuade him to be less chaotic. Yet on the other side we have Lauren, a person defined by her ability to bring order out of chaos (that’s why she gets this job!), and it’s clear she’s been conditioned to think of herself as kind of a dumpy killjoy. The system has been set up for both of them to fail, and their emotional journeys are about carving out space for themselves and each other to thrive.

In particular, both books treat the gaze of the beloved as a kind of… I don’t know, splint? braces?, a small refuge within which the characters can begin to see themselves the way their love interests immediately saw them. As the least powerfully magical member of his family, Edwin has been subject to near-constant bullying from his siblings. He’s been convinced that his powers are inadequate, and that induced certainty prevents him from recognizing the areas in which he excels. Robin—new to the world of magic—brings a fresh perspective that Edwin allows himself, slowly, to share.

“You invented this system? You applied it?” Robin looked around them at the hundreds, thousands of books. “And you carry the whole thing around in your head?”

“I made a catalogue.” Edwin indicated a small hand-bound volume he hadn’t once touched. “And if you’re going to suggest that I was a very dull child, let me assure you that it would by no means be an original insult.” …

“Remind me not to make an enemy of you, Edwin Courcey,” he said, smiling to show he meant no sting. “I think yours is probably the kind of brain that could run a country.”

IT’S BEAUTIFUL TBH. I too would be very impressed with someone who had deduced the entire Dewey Decimal System from first principles.

I’ve been pretty critical this year of fannish spaces and racism in fandom, and I stand by those critiques. At the same time, it remains true that fandom contains a lot of beauty and tenderness and also thoughtful critique of inequitable social structures. It’s why I keep coming back to fanfic and why I probably always will. All the Feels and A Marvellous Light are both deeply engaged with the best of the fanfic ethos, and it was a pleasure to get to read them.

The post Fandom Got Its Cooties All Over Your Profic appeared first on Reading the End.

Naomi Grant has built her life around going against the grain. After the sex-positive start-up she cofounded becomes an international sensation, she wants to extend her educational platform to live lecturing. Unfortunately, despite her long list of qualifications, higher ed won’t hire her.

Ethan Cohen has recently received two honors: LA Mag nominated him as one of the city’s hottest bachelors and he became rabbi of his own synagogue. Low on both funds and congregants, the executive board of Ethan’s new shul hired him with the hopes that his nontraditional background will attract more millennials to the faith. They’ve given him three months to turn things around or else they’ll close the doors of his synagogue for good.

Naomi and Ethan join forces to host a buzzy seminar series on Modern Intimacy, the perfect solution to their problems–until they discover a new one–their growing attraction to each other. They’ve built the syllabus for love’s latest experiment, but neither of them expected they’d be the ones putting it to the test.

To nobody’s surprise, I melted like an M&M for this angry woman / soft man pairing. Ethan is a very gentle soul who just wants to achieve his goal of building a warm, inclusive congregation, and Naomi has spent years hardening her heart against other people in the certain knowledge that to do otherwise would be to allow herself to be hurt. (Again.) Their forced intimacy is of the subtype “shared project,” one of my very favorite subtypes, as it offers them the opportunity to get to know each other in a low-pressure way as they each slowly realize the other person is their ideal partner. And Danan doesn’t slack on the specifics of the project; this book is not exactly People with Jobs, but it’s at least People with Jobs-adjacent. I loved seeing Ethan coming up with ideas for his synagogue and Naomi for her seminar; to the point that I kept wishing those things were real, just so people who needed them could have access.

(My notes for the above paragraph said “prickly heroine / soft hero = GOOD”.)

The Intimacy Experiment also deeply explores the two characters’ relationship to their faith. Ethan is, of course, a rabbi, and Naomi grew up Jewish but has fallen away from the faith in adulthood. In this book, both of them are exploring their relationship not just to Judaism but to the structures of organized religion. Though Ethan knows much more clearly than Naomi what he wants from Judaism, both characters spend the book thinking through their core values and then working to find space for those values within their faith. Not to spend every paragraph being like I WISH THIS WERE REAL, but it did make me wish very deeply that there were some, like, Reform Catholicism that I could join up with. I don’t go to Mass regularly because I get tired of the Church’s hostility to so many things that matter to me, but I miss the rituals and the community. Anyway it felt like a huge piece of wish fulfillment to me, that these characters were given the space to embrace what they loved about Judaism within the context of their faith and on the terms of their faith.

As was the case in The Roommate, Danan never shames her protagonists for their careers. Naomi is comfortable with her work and proud of being a huge part of building a sex-positive porn company, and characters who feel vocally otherwise are given a thorough narrative slap for it. At the same time, the subjects of sex and intimacy are explored in a wonderfully delicate way, in the clear knowledge that these are two things that can be related, but don’t have to be related every time for every person. I loved seeing this play out in the sex and makeout scenes between Ethan and Naomi, where clearly she knows that sex with Ethan would be massively intimate, in a way that sex in porn movies has never been for her.

The emotional content of The Intimacy Experiment is so strong that it feels almost not worthwhile to gripe about minor things. There’s a bit too much faffing about on why Ethan and Naomi can’t date each other, none of which felt remotely convincing, although it did contribute to some fun moments, and I wanted them to just stop making weird excuses and date already. (Or else, of course, find better excuses.) But this is a minor gripe in what overall is an absolute doll of a book.

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

The post Review: The Intimacy Experiment, Rosie Danan appeared first on Reading the End.

To my delight, Talia stopped by the podcast to chat with me about her latest book, her love of fanfiction, and her latest DIY project (why do the British love DIY so much? can anyone explain it to me?). You can listen to the podcast in the embedded player below, or download it directly to take with you on the go!

Episode 142

Books We Discussed

Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Talia Hibbert
Take a Hint, Dani Brown, Talia Hibbert
Act Your Age, Eve Brown, Talia Hibbert

A Duke, the Lady, and a Baby, Vanessa Riley
Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall
The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri
Empire of Sand, Tasha Suri
Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri
White Whiskey Bargain, Jodie Slaughter
KJ Charles
Kennedy Ryan
Danielle Allen
Sweet on the Greek, Talia Hibbert (LINK TO THIS)
For the Love of April French, Penny Aimes

You can find Talia Hibbert at her website or on Twitter! The book again is Act Your Age, Eve Brown, and I can’t possibly recommend it resoundingly enough.

You can get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. As a brand new feature, you can also follow me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Storygraph! If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript

Jenny: Welcome to the Reading the End Bookcast, with the Demographically Similar Jennys. I’m Gin Jenny, and I’m here with Talia Hibbert, the author of a number of amazing romance novels, most recently Act Your Age, Eve Brown. Talia, welcome to the podcast!

Talia: Hi! Thanks for having me!

J: Thank you so much for coming on! I was wondering if you could start by telling us a little about yourself and the book.

T: Yeah, sure, so, my name’s Talia Hibbert, and I write romance novels. I really like biscuits and romcoms, so I’ve written a few romcoms and the latest one is Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which is coming out on March 9^th. It’s really special to me because it’s an autistic romance of two autistic main characters, and it’s enemies to lovers, which I really enjoy writing, and it’s set in a small town at a bed and breakfast, so there’s some forced proximity as well. But my favorite thing about this book is that it starts with the heroine hitting the hero with her car by accident.

J: [laughter] Have you ever hit someone with a car or been hit with a car?

T: Um, I’ve never been hit with a car, luckily for me, and I can’t drive, so I’ve never hit anyone with a car, luckily for everyone else.

J: I have been hit with a car. It was not a good time.

T: Oh my God, that sounds terrible!

J: It was terrible! I officially broke my neck, which sounds very dramatic, but it was the tiniest little—it was just a teensy teensy little break. But it was awful. I had to wear the most embarrassing neck brace for six weeks—eight weeks!

T: That is terrible. This is like a, a romcom version of hitting someone with your car, so he pops back up again. It’s minor injuries.

J: Well, I appreciated it! He does have injuries that he then has to deal with, and I was like, mm, yeah, it’s a nuisance, eh, man? Okay, so you said you liked biscuits and romcoms. What is your favorite biscuit, and what is your favorite romcom?

T: My favorite biscuit, that’s a very tricky one, but… I love cookies. I feel like in America you’d call all biscuits cookies, but—

J: We do, yeah, but I was trying to speak to you on your terms.

T: They’re very—here we only call them cookies if they’re, you know, chocolate chip or chipped with something. They’re my favorite. And my favorite romcom, I actually—can I say two? Is that bad?

J: Yes! Of course! No, you can say two. Two can be tied for—I always say two.

T: Okay, so A Duke, the Lady, and the Baby, by Vanessa Riley is historical, and there’s not a ton of historical romcoms, compared to contemporary, but it is a historical romcom in my opinion, and it’s hilarious, and I love it. And then I also love Boyfriend Material, by Alexis Hall.

J: Yes!

T: Yes, everyone loves that one, it’s—a banger. So, those are my two favorites. They’re both so funny; you know, laugh out loud, I love that.

J: Yes, they absolutely are. Actually, that was one of the things that I immediately loved about—I mean, all of your books that I’ve read so far, but Act Your Age Eve Brown especially was just making me laugh from the first page, and it just stayed really like funny and clever throughout, so, yeah, a very classic romcom, I think.

T: Yay! Thank you.

J: Well, I’d love for you to talk more about writing two autistic protagonists, because one thing that I thought was really interesting in this book is that Jacob, the hero, is autistic and that’s discussed quite early on and he’s very aware of it. Whereas Eve sort of starts to figure this out about herself over the course of the book, and by the end of the book she’s kind of like, yeah, I probably am, but I don’t need to deal with it right now. And so I thought it was interesting that you had those two very different approaches.

T: Yeah, because for one thing, there’s a huge disparity in how different kinds of autistic people are treated and supported and diagnosed. So I mention in the book that you’re a lot less likely to be diagnosed if you’re a woman, and that kind of gets worse if you’re a Black woman or a woman of color. That’s something that I’m very aware of, because I’m an autistic person and I was diagnosed very young, but it was only because of the very concerted efforts of my mum, who is actually an educator herself and works with people with all kinds of special educational needs. I was very lucky to always be supported, but I know that it’s really not the case for a ton of people, so I definitely wanted to highlight that.

But I also really wanted to—you know, a lot of the time in media, autistic people are written or portrayed by people who aren’t actually autistic, and you can really tell. Very annoying! And, you know, you end up with these stereotypes that really—they’re informed by, and then they go on to inform, the ways that autism is treated in real life. So you know, you’re more likely to be diagnosed if you’re for example a white man and then all the TV shows are about white men, so then people think only white men can be autistic, and it kind of rolls on like that. I really wanted to show that autistic people are all different and have different experiences of their autism and how they relate to the world and how they feel about it. So I felt like this was a good opportunity to do that, because these characters are so different and their whole thing comes from their being so different.

J: Yeah! Absolutely. This is such a silly question, but is singing quietly to yourself a lot really a stimming behavior, because I do that and I did not know that’s what that was.

T: [laughter] Yes, or, it—you know, it’s something that can be a stimming behavior. I’m sure some people do it and they just are doing it, but— You can definitely stim that way, and I used to do that a lot when I was a kid, and it annoyed people so much.

J: It probably annoys my friends and relations. I literally can’t stop. Among my family—I’m one of four sisters—and among my family, I’m the best at keeping secrets. I’m just a vault. But when it comes to song-related secrets, absolutely cannot ask me to do it. I just can’t do it.

T: Oh dear.

J: I was at my friend’s wedding, and she was—she told me, because she knows I can keep a secret cause we’ve known each other since we were ten, she told me that she had changed the song she was gonna do for her first dance, and it was gonna be a secret from her parents, cause they would try to convince her to change. And she was like, “okay, but, so, don’t tell!” and all through the day as we were getting ready, I would start singing it and she would be like “SHUT UP!”

T: Oh my God! [laughter] That would be a problem for me as well, definitely.

J: Yeah! I mean, it was awful! [laughter] So you said that this book was close to your heart because you’re autistic yourself and that you identify with these characters. I really loved all three of these books so far, and I was wondering which of the Brown women you identified with the most, or had the easiest time writing.

T: Ooh, that’s tricky! I think I identify with Chloe the most, just because there’s like a little bit of myself or my life experiences in all of these books, but Chloe as a character is the most like me, and maybe the person that I would get along with the most. But Eve was probably the easiest to write, because she’s just so fun and she’s so, like, she’s so accepting of everything. She’s just gonna take what comes and try her best to have fun with it, and I’m not like that at all.

J: Oh God, me neither. [laughter] So this is, like you said, this is part of a series. How much of it was planned before you started? How did it change as you were writing it?

T: Oh God, so: When I started, I knew that I wanted it to be a series. I knew the heroine would have two sisters and I wanted to write about the sisters, but other than that, I really didn’t know very much. In the first book, you kind of meet her sisters, and I set their personalities loosely from there, but I didn’t go too in depth because I knew that once I write a character from their perspective, my understanding of them changes. So I didn’t want to say, like, this character’s like this!, and then get to the book and be like, oh God, I don’t want her to be like that! I tried to keep it loose, and for that reason, I didn’t really decide on the plot of their stories until I got to the next two books, because I tend to build the plot that suits the character.

With Dani’s book, the middle book, the second book—

J: Yeah, that’s my favorite one! I love that one.

T: Oh really?

J: Yeah, I mean, they’re all great, but I really identified with Dani.

T: Well, that was like the hardest book to write, because I had this loose idea of how it was gonna go, and I rewrote it like four times and it changed so drastically. But I’m happy with how it turned out.

J: What did you start with that you had to end up changing?

T: So, the initial idea was that—I can barely remember now, but it was basically to do with blackmail.

J: Oh! [laughter]

T: [laughter] Yeah! And then I started writing it, I was like, this is kind of hardcore for a romcom! Like, maybe I should lighten it up a bit! So that changed. And I think at one point, I was gonna try and do like a virtual relationship, like that they met on camera, like, webcams? It was gonna be like a sex thing. But then I, again, I was like, this is very hardcore for a romcom. I reined it in. And then, yeah, it turned into this whole different story. Because I always knew that Dani was an academic, so then in the end, I was like, why don’t I write something that kind of stems from her job? Which is not something I typically do, which is probably why it was so difficult for me to write. But I did it! And it was fun.

J: It was great! I remember talking about that book with my podcast partner, and one of our favorite most touching moments of the whole book was when Zaf reads her academic articles! It’s like, that is so sweet! I barely read my friends’ academic articles!

T: Oh my God, yeah. I don’t—I’m terrible! I don’t read anything my friends write, unless it’s romance. Sorry, guys!

J: I understand! Well that was actually something I wanted to ask you about. I love People with Jobs as a subgenre of anything. How do you choose the jobs that your characters are gonna have, and how does the career inform the character and vice versa?

T: Well, I’m not really a People with Jobs kind of writer, because first of all, I’m really lazy and I hate research, so— I try to write jobs that I have some personal experience of, cause that makes it easier for me, but I don’t have that much work experience. So….. it’s like, I’ve worked at coffee shops, I’ve been a waitress, I’ve worked at McDonald’s, I was a hotel cleaner, I worked as a tutor, and I went to university, and that’s like it. So I’m running out of jobs!

J: [laughter]

T: I might have to start reading some nonfiction books at this point, which is gonna be excruciating. I tend to choose the job that kind of matches their personality or their goal as a person, but also matches the life—the daily life that I want them to have. For example, in Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Chloe is a web designer, and she kind of runs her own business, because I wanted her to work from home, because of her disability but also because it was like a neighbor romance, so I wanted her to be in the house all the time, ready for romance.

J: With Jacob running the B&B and Eve going to work for him, was that informed by your time as a hotel cleaner?

T: Yes! Absolutely it was. I was such like—crap! I’m running out of jobs! What have I done? I knew that I wanted them to work together, and I knew that I wanted it to be a situation where they were forced to spend a lot of time together, so I was like, they’re gonna have to live where they work. Bed and breakfast! Boom! I also really like coziness.

J: Oh God, yes, it was wonderful. They have a gingerbread festival, listeners, just so you know what to expect. Are you much of a baker?

T: No. God, no.

J: Oh, God, me neither. No, no, no, me neither.

T: [laughter]

J: My sister is making increasingly fancy cakes in quarantine. She just kind of keeps making fancier and fancier cakes, and I’m sort of at home with my, you know, books and cross-stitch, admiring her from afar.

T: That sounds ama—I’m one of four sisters, as well, and none of us can bake, unfortunately. I feel robbed now.

J: [laughter] What are your four sis—what are your three sisters’ most useful skills?

T: Let me think. Well, my older sister—oh, she has a really useful skill, actually. She’s really great at painting and decorating, so I moved house this summer and she like, painted my house. Thank you!

J: Oh, bless her!

T: [laughter] But then my two other sisters are a lot younger than me, so they have great skills, but not adult skills. They are children. [laughter]

J: So they’re pending cases.

T: Exactly. I’m sure they will be so useful in like, ten years’ time. Looking forward to it.

J: Absolutely. Do I remember hearing that you—you do DIY, right? You’re a DIY person now.

T: I attempt DIY.

J: What have you been trying in quarantine?

T: Well, here’s the thing about my hobbies. They peter out.

J: [laughter]

T: But—what was the last thing I did? Oh, this is boring. I had to—my kitchen had like this really ugly counter, and I could replace the counter, but I don’t like spending money, so I elected to just cover it with this like, paper thing that all the DIY people on YouTube use. It’s like this marble effect paper thing, but it was really hard to stick on! Like, it got bubbles in it, and you had to use a Stanley knife, and I’m very clumsy. It looks good, though. I did it. I’m very proud of it.

J: Well done! What’s a Stanley knife, as a non-DIYer I must ask?

T: It’s like a little thing that you hold in your hand and then you flick it up and it’s got a little knife bit. That was the worst explanation ever! [laughter]

J: I think I can picture it. My sister who’s good at DIY came over and recaulked my bathtub recently, and I think she had a Stanley knife.

T: Ooh!

J: I know! It was—not recaulked. I said that wrong. Re—yes! No, recaulked, I’m so sorry. I kept mixing up grout and caulk, and she kept yelling at me, and then I kept making caulk jokes.

T: [laughter]

J: But I think she had a Stanley knife to wedge in the caulk saver.

T: That sounds about right.

J: Okay, great!

T: [laughter]

J: So this series was published through traditional publishing, whereas your backlist books were self-published. How has that adjustment been?

T: I was a bit apprehensive when we started, because, you know, just because it was something I’d never done before, and I knew that it could go very badly. So my brain was like, obviously it’s gonna go badly. But actually it’s been really great! Everyone at Avon that I’ve interacted with has just been so relentlessly lovely, and I feel very lucky to be working with the people that I’ve been working with. They’ve made the whole thing just such a really lovely experience. I’m saying lovely a lot, but it’s how I feel, I’m sorry.

J: I think that’s on brand. I feel like all British people I’ve ever met say lovely a lot.

T: Okay, I’ll take it.

J: What’s the most useful edit you got from your editor for this book?

T: Ooh. Always, I feel, she’s fixing my pacing, because I have a tendency first of all to forget that time exists at all.

J: Sure.

T: Secondly to forget that like, this is a story that needs to move along. You can’t just wallow in the characters giving each other looks. You have to make things happen.

J: [laughter]

T: So there’s always a point where she goes through the whole book and she’s like, why are we still here? Can we move on? What’s happening? Can this story move? What day is it? Can you fix this? And I’m like, [sad voice] okay! If I must!

J: Well this may be completely off the mark, but um—The first joke that made me laugh out loud in this book is when Eve is thinking about journaling and she talks about a work in progress on AO3 that hasn’t been updated in years. So I’m wondering if that tendency in you is influenced by reading fanfiction, because I feel like fanfiction often tends to sort of linger in glances for a very long time, by design.

T: Yeah. I think you’re right. I love to read fanfic and I think it’s the best, so when I’m writing, I’m like, yeah! Fanfic! Drabble! This doesn’t have to have a point! And then I’m like, oh wait, yes it does! Boooooo!

J: What fandoms do you read in lately?

T: [hiss of trepidation]

J: You don’t have to say! If you’re not comfortable saying, you don’t have to.

T: [laughter] One came to mind that I am not gonna say, but— [laughter] I recently watched Yuri on Ice!!!, like the whole thing, cause everyone was saying how great it was, and they said it so much that I was like, Surely it can’t be that great, they’re exaggerating. But then I watched it and it was true! So now that I’ve finished it, I’ve just been reading like nonstop fanfic cause I don’t want to leave that world.

J: Oh, that’s fanta— And there’s a lot of, I feel like there was a real explosion of Yuri on Ice!!! fanfic.

T: Yes. I’ve been enjoying it.

J: How did you get into reading romance?

T: When I was twelve, I used to go to the library a lot, because reading was like my only hobby, cause I’ve been a giant nerd my whole life.

J: Same!

T: I was literally just going through the books, and I was in the adult section because, I don’t know, my grandma told me that I should go in the adult section. I think she was hoping that I would find grand literature, which I did, but probably not the kind she was thinking! She’s very serious. So I was looking, and there’s this like, lime-green book with a cartoon drawing of a girl on the cover, and I was like, oh! Twelve-year-old me enjoyed that imagery, so I took it out, and it was a historical romance by Julia Quinn, and I was like, wow, this is great! And then they like went on a picnic and DID IT and I was like—

J: [laughter]

T: [laughter] Oh my God! I hope Grandma doesn’t ever see what this book is about! [laughter] But yeah. It was amazing.

J: So from then on, it was just, you know, all romance all the time?

T: Oh, yeah, I was like, I need more of this. This is great. The bits that I liked in other books, just people talking to each other and having feelings, this was all that. And nothing else! And I was like, Perfect! Exactly what I’ve been looking for! And I’ve never looked back.

J: Who are some of your favorite romance novelists?

T: Oh my God that is such a hard question.

J: You can just say a few, it doesn’t have to be a comprehensive list. Just a few that pop into your head.

T: Okay. Um, Tasha Suri, I just finished reading an ARC of one of her books—

J: Ah! Yes!

T: Incredible. Incredible.

J: The Jasmine Throne?

T: Yes! Yeah.

J: I’m so excited to read that! Oh, is it good?

T: It was incredible, like—

J: I’m so excited to read it! I loved Empire of Sand, and then Realm of Ash was even better, so I just—I have—my expectations are sky high.

T: Like, I went in with really high expectations, and then I was like, oh my God, it’s exceeding my expectations! How is this possible?

J: I’m literally bouncing up and down in my chair with excitement.

T: It was amazing. Um, oh, I really love Jodie Slaughter, especially this one book White Whiskey Bargain, which is a marriage of convenience but it’s a contemporary romance, and that’s like my favorite thing but it’s really hard to find. So love that one, love her, um, Courtney Milan, obviously.

J: Of course.

T: KJ Charles.

J: Oh, I love KJ Charles.

T: Kennedy Ryan. Danielle Allen. I feel like some authors I just really enjoy, obviously, but then some authors I’m like, this is what I’m wanting my books to be like. Danielle Allen is one of those authors.

J: Ooh, that’s a great recommendation! That’s a great list, that’s a tremendous list. I think it was a good—there’s some that I have heard of and also love, and then some that I’m really excited to check out now.

T: Okay cool.

J: Is there a romance subgenre that you love reading but would never consider writing?

T: That’s a tricky one because I think most things that I enjoy, I would consider writing, but the only thing that would stop me is that it would be too difficult. For example, like I love reading romances with mysteries, but I’m not smart enough—I’m just not that kind of smart, right? I can’t do mysteries. I know I can’t do it. I’m not even gonna hurt my own feelings by trying to do it. I’m not there as a human being.

J: It seems incredibly hard. I don’t even have—I don’t even have like a good confidence that I can have a theory of mind about what people will guess and not guess—

T: Exactly.

J: —in the most basic sense, just writing an email to a friend.

T: Absolutely. Exactly. No idea what people are thinking, what they’re gonna think. I just don’t know. So it would go badly.

J: So what are some romance tropes that you really love? Obviously, marriage of convenience.

T: Yes. Love it. Also, you know, like, arranged marriage, which I feel is kind of similar, that’s also great. I really like anything that involves forced proximity. Snowed in.

J: Snowed in!

T: Woo! Only one bed, or you’re like, on a mountain for some reason and someone lives in the mountains, amazing.

J: The best thing is when some TV show or book property or podcast has a thing where the characters everyone is shipping have to go to a cabin for a bit, and it’s like, are you doing this for me?

T: [laughter] Absolutely they are. The fact that it’s like a cabin, as well. It’s never like a house. It’s gotta be a cabin because—

J: A cozy cabin, maybe it’s a bit rubbishy so they have to do some fixing up together.

T: And they like have to sleep on one bed, or in the same room cause there’s only one fire. That’s a great historical trope.

J: Oh, that’s a fantastic one. Yeah, historical seems like it would be hard to write, but it would be very to have to deal with the logistics of fires.

T: That’s another one that, like, I consider, but then I’m like, ooh, am I smart enough to do that?

J: [laughter] How did you get into writing romance? You know, how did you make the transition from reading to writing it?

T: Well, I always wanted to be a writer, just because I love books so much, and I felt like it was my only real skill. What can you do? I’m like, I can write stuff.

J: Yeah, I feel the same about myself.

T: But then at the same time I never actually managed to finish anything I wrote, but then one day it kind of occurred to me, because I hadn’t actually tried to write any romance novels. I’d written a lot of kind of YA or fantasy attempts. The idea of writing romance seemed very intimidating to me, because I enjoyed romance so much, it was very much on a pedestal for me. But then I decided that I needed to get a job, and it needed to be something that I could do from home, because of the circumstances that I was in, and I was like, okay, what skills do I have? Writing! So I decided to give it a try and like, commit to actually finishing something and to self-publish that something and kind of see what happened. And what happened was that no one bought it, but I enjoyed writing it so much that I kept going, and that’s how I got started.

J: And here you are!

T: Indeed.

J: Would you go back to self-publishing, or are you happy with traditional publishing?

T: I’m definitely happy with traditional publishing, but I’m still gonna self-publish as well, just because I feel like it depends on the book, and on how you want to release the book, and I really like both.

J: Where do you stand on the illustrated covers / clinch covers hot debate?

T: Oh my God! I don’t know why we’re arguing about this because they’re both—

J: I don’t either! I love them both!

T: That’s exactly how I feel, like, I love a classic clinch cover, because they look so good! They look so intense, they look so romance-y, I love it. I also love like, the—is it the Harlequin Desires? Have been doing amazing covers lately that are like very modern, very contemporary, but with big clinch cover energy. I love those. But then at the same time, illustrated covers are so cute!

J: The covers of this series are so cute! They couldn’t be cuter.

T: Oh, thank you! I really, really love them, and I love like how easy it is to be accurate with your characters when it’s an illustration.

J: I was just thinking, I really love the illustration of Eve. She just looks so—her hair is so pretty, and she’s adorable.

T: Thank you. I love them so much.

J: How much input did you have into what that design was gonna be like?

T: Well, when we started the series, I was kind of asked to give descriptions of the characters, but also talk about color combinations I liked, and maybe provide examples of illustrated covers that I did like versus ones that I didn’t like, you know, art styles and things? And I kind of responded with like a multi-page PDF report, which was very specific.

J: That sounds great.

T: Yeah! I mean, I think it helped, because I ended up with a cover that I thought was amazing, and I guess I was really lucky that they were so open to me giving that initial input, and then kind of off the back of that, they very obviously listened to that and listened to what I wanted and gave me a lot of options to look at and be like, okay, what do you think of these? So it felt very collaborative, and I really enjoyed that process.

J: Oh, that’s interesting. So how many—they gave you a bunch of options and this was kind of the design you went with. What were the other ones like?

T: The options they gave me were for the very first one in the series, because then from that point on it all had to be the same.

J: Right, right.

T: But um, it was like, different art styles mainly, and then once we’d settled on an art style that we all agreed on, it was different color combinations and different kind of doodles on the cover and placements and positions of the characters and things like that.

J: That sounds really cool! Um, I will say for illustrated covers, one benefit is that I—my parents are more likely to read romance novels if they have illustrated covers, and that makes my birthday present buying much easier.

T: I mean, it was an illustrated cover that kind of started me on romance. Not because I wouldn’t have been interested in a classic romance cover, but because I was twelve, so, they wouldn’t have let me take it out. Not that I’m saying twelve-year-olds should read romance, just saying I did and it was great.

J: Yeah, I don’t think they shouldn’t. I think it depends on the twelve-year-old.

T: Definitely, cause I feel like it was good for me, individually.

J: Yeah! One of my deepest regrets—I feel like I was overall a good big sister, but one of my deepest regrets is that I tattled to my parents about my younger sister reading a book with sex scenes in it, and they took it away from her.

T: [gasp] Oh no!

J: I know! I feel awful. It’s like the only time I remember my parents intervening in our reading choices, and I, I just feel so guilty about it. It was one of the Tamora Pierce books.

T: Oh wow. Gosh.

J: Yeah. But, you know, she’s forgiven me, we’re friends now.

T: Oh good.

J: So what’s next for you? You finished the series. What are you up to next?

T: Yeah! I actually just started writing my next book, like, earlier this week.

J: Ooh!

T: And I’m very excited about it. It’s a romcom again, and—yeah. I’m super excited about it, but I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, so I’m going to stop talking now.

J: Oh, okay. No, that’s fair enough.

T: [laughter]

J: Do you have a favorite among the books you’ve already published?

T: Oh my God that’s so hard. Okay. I would say that I have the books that I think are the best that I’ve written, they’re not necessarily the same as my favorites. Also, I don’t want to say which ones are the best, cause that implies that the other ones are bad, which they’re totally not. [laughter] But I would say that one book that I really love, I don’t think a lot of people know about, is a book called Sweet on the Greek, and it’s the last book in a series, but you don’t actually have to read the rest of the series. It’s basically about a professional football player who falls in love at first sight, which is like a trend in his family, with a very cynical goth who is not interested, and then he hires her to be his fake girlfriend but he’s completely making up that he needs a fake girlfriend.

J: [laughter]

T: It’s just ridiculous!

J: That’s so good! Oh my God, I love it. Well, you’re right, I hadn’t read that one yet, so I’m putting it on my list, and I will link it in the shownotes, so that everyone else can read it. That sounds amazing. That sounds like so many good tropes stacked on top of each other.

T: Well, I hope everyone likes it. I like it.

J: All right, so here’s a question. This is my last question and maybe it will be too difficult, in which case just tell me and I’ll cut it. How do you define happily ever after? Because one thing that struck me while I was reading this book, and then looking back at your previous work, I could see it as a really clear throughline, is that the thing that Eve is searching for throughout this book is a place where she can feel safe, like supported and fulfilled. And that she really hasn’t had that to date, where she feels, you know, really unsteady with her friends, and even with her family. So what makes a happily ever after for you?

T: For me, a happily ever after has to be the characters in a situation, in a space, and in like, a relationship and a support network where you can see that even if things go wrong in the future, the way they tend to cause that’s life, they will be in the right space to come out on top.

J: Oh, that’s a lovely answer! I like it so much. Well, before I let you go, so, um, my friend has criticized me for giving overly saucy books to my parents as gifts. However, my mom and dad both really love your books, and I was wondering if you would say hi to them. They’re having a hard time this week.

T: Oh my God, really? I love that!

J: My dad can never remember the names of any books he’s ever reading, so he always calls them things like Happy Happy Chloe Brown.

T: That’s amazing.

J: [laughter]

T: Oh my God! I love that so much! That is so lovely. Well, hello to your mum and dad, and thank you for reading my books, and I’m so glad you like them, and thank you!

J: Um, and before I let you go, what are you reading right now?

T: I’m reading—it’s an advance copy of a book that’s coming out by Penny Aimes, who is super cool, and the book’s called For the Love of April French, I believe?

J: Great title.

T: Yeah, it’s a great title, it’s a great book. I’m only like a few pages in, but I’m having a great time, so—

J: Fantastic. Well, I’ll have to keep an eye out for it when it comes out. Well, Talia, thank you so much again for taking the time. Um, the book again is Act Your Age, Eve Brown. We’re recording this in advance so I’m not sure exactly what date it’ll come out, but it’ll be around release date, so y’all should be able to get it right away, and you definitely should. It’s so much fun. And yeah, thank you so much!

T: Thank you! This has been super fun.

The post Episode 142 – Interview with Talia Hibbert, Author of Act Your Age, Eve Brown appeared first on Reading the End.

The Ex Talk, Rachel Solomon

Here’s a twist on fake dating I’ve never seen before: Fake exes. In order to save their small public radio station, Shay Goldstein has to team up with the pretentious hotshot at her work, a man named Dominic Yun who’s beloved of their sexist boss and can’t stop talking about his master’s degree in journalism. They’ll be working on a podcast called The Ex Talk, where two exes discuss the world of relationships and dating, as well as their own unsuccessful relationship. Except Dominic and Shay have never dated; they’ve barely even talked.

For as silly as this premise is (I say that with affection; I love a ridiculous romance novel premise), Solomon brings real emotional weight to bear, exploring Shay’s history of too-early declarations of love, Dominic’s insecurity about how to date after the collapse of his longest-slash-only relationship, and Shay’s widowed mother’s pursuit of romantic happiness with her new husband.

I’ve talked in the past about my fondness for romance novels that build a network of supportive relationships around their leads. The Ex Talk doesn’t exactly do that — it’s closely focused on Dominic and Shay — but it has a really smart twist on the isolated romance protagonists: Dominic and Shay are lonely. Both of them have struggled to build networks of friends in Seattle, and part of their budding relationship is the pact they make to go out on more (separate, unrelated-to-each-other) friend dates. It was so lovely to see a romance novel acknowledge how hard it can be to make friends as an adult, and I finished the book with the feeling that Dominic and Shay were now much better positioned to have happy and fulfilling lives — with each other, yes, but with their friends-and-relations as well.

Apart from all of that, this book was just fun. Solomon does some great banter, and the relationship is a very satisfying slow burn that hinges on a great deal of forced proximity of the “we have to get to know each other so our fake history of dating will seem more realistic to the podcast audience” genre. Shay and Dominic have lots of terrific, thoughtful, bantery conversations before they ever get down to boning, which is obviously A+ to me, a slow burn fanatic. This book was a ton of fun, and I am grateful to my lovely mum for pushing me to read it ASAP.

Sweet on the Greek, Talia Hibbert

Speaking of variations on a theme, I recently interviewed Talia Hibbert (that podcast will come out next week, in concert with her amazing new book Act Your Age, Eve Brown), and she mentioned that she has a particular fondness for one of her lesser-known books, Sweet on the Greek.

The premise is that there’s this very hot Greek retired footballer¹ who falls in love at first sight with a very gothy woman who won’t give him the time of day. Afraid that she’ll get away, Nik tells her that he needs a fake girlfriend for a week away with his teammates; he’ll pay her a hundred thousand pounds. Aria agrees. Nik does not need a fake girlfriend at all; it has all been a tangled web of lies. This makes me giggle every time I think about it.

While Sweet on the Greek doesn’t feel quite as substantial as some of Talia Hibbert’s more recent work, her strength as always is in crafting characters you have no choice but to adore. As in The Ex Talk, our heroine here tends to give her heart away quickly, and she has suffered for it in the past. A former boyfriend of Aria’s turned out to be her best friend’s stalker, using Aria to gain access to Jen, whom he kidnapped and nearly killed; and Aria’s terrified not just of getting hurt again, but of placing her loved ones at risk.

(This is a great reason for me to read the previous books in the series. I love a romance series with this kind of operatic drama; see below wherein You Had Me at Hola.)

To Have and to Hoax, Martha Waters

After oodles of people on Romance Twitter had recced me To Have and to Hoax and I had checked it out of the library after much impatient waiting, I very belatedly realized that it’s about an estranged married couple that does a prank war on each other and eventually realize they are still in love. I almost returned it to the library out of hand at this news! I am not a woman who has any truck with pranks. Even very kind, gentle pranks can end with the prankees feeling foolish and duped. Don’t do pranks!

However, in the case of To Have and to Hoax, the two main characters are both terrible at doing deceptions. While Violet and James each come up with one or two ways to trick and pester each other, there isn’t anything that I would say rose to the level of a prank — whether because they were so incompetent at executing the pranks they came up with, or because the other person immediately twigged what was happening and foiled the prank. Really it was more of your very classic second-chance romance! It’s also one of those romances where if you try to put too much real-world morality on the things the characters are doing, it all falls apart. So just do not do that! Accept the book on its own terms as a Jolly Madcap Romance! If so, you will enjoy it.

As with Bringing Down the Duke or, frankly, any first romance in a series, about 30% of my fun while reading To Have and to Hoax was inspecting the other characters to see who else was going to get their own romance. I was maybe not quite so excited about a few of these couples, but at least one of them made me perk up very much and look forward to more books by Martha Waters, even though like, Jolly Madcap Romances are probably not my top-tier romance subgenre. There was just enough true feeling and emotional honesty in this one to keep me on the hook for future books.

You Had Me at Hola, Alexis Daria

Oh my GOD I loved this book. Alexis Daria has carved out the funnest niche² in the funnest genre, writing romance novels about performers (dancers, actors) who have to navigate their public and private lives while finding love. I live for it.

This one — an absolute gem, an unbelievable treasure, I adored it — is about tele!novela! stars! Soap star Jasmine Lin Rodriguez has resolved never to show up in the tabloids again, following a messy public breakup. This is all well good until she gets cast on a TV show opposite telenovela darling Ashton Suárez. Both of them see their current show as their best chance to save their careers — it’s a bilingual romcom for Not!Netflix — so they agree to practice privately to ensure that their chemistry is the best it can be. SPARKS FLY.

I’ll be honest: I was so thrilled about the premise that I kept having to put the book down and shriek quietly to myself. Alexis Daria writes a damn good romcom, with enough soapy elements to satisfy the heart of a woman who came up watching Guiding Light and has no regrets.³ Daria’s clever about using social and psychological obstacles to keep her leads apart, including in the Big Misunderstanding moment (which is not so much a Misunderstanding as it is that one character has kept a giant secret from another character, but it’s for really sympathetic reasons), most of which arise from the very success they’re courting with their show, Carmen in Charge. I enjoyed every minute of reading this book and can’t wait for the sequel.

Two Rogues Make a Right, Cat Sebastian

When Will discovers that his oldest friend Martin is holed up miserable and sick in a London garret⁴, he promptly kidnaps him and takes him to the country for some fresh air. Prickly, broke, and unwilling to be dependent on his old friend, Martin is determined to go through with his aunt’s plan of marrying for money — no matter how much it breaks his and Will’s hearts.

Cat Sebastian fears neither death nor pain, and I know this is true because she has come on this very blog to say she loves that there’s a genre of fanfic where a character helps another character feel better about their dick. That said, her books are on a career-long trajectory of becoming softer and softer (see also her contribution to He’s Come Undone), and I think with Two Rogues Make a Right she has finally achieved a softness singularity. I, a noted angst fiend, was no proof against this much softness. In one sense there’s a plot, but the plot is mainly “how okay can things become after a very not-okay past?” and the answer is “with kindness and help to fend off structural inequities, things can become very good indeed.” It is a good message for These Times — especially because Cat Sebastian’s not ignoring the corrupting influence of money and power, nor the necessity to have some measure of those things in order to thrive.

It was also great to see a chronically ill protagonist grappling with the ways his sickness has shaped his life and will go on doing so. One of the emotional problems the book has to solve is that Martin’s awful, abusive father spent years telling him he was a burden, and it’s left Martin a) convinced he’s a burden; and b) desperate to not be a burden on Will, the person he loves so dearly. But though the narrative of burden weighs down the character quite a bit, the book gives it no quarter. There is a happy life available to Martin, in which he’s supported by kind people who care about him, and the thing he has to overcome is not his poor health but the societal narratives around poor health that have made it hard for him to accept love and support.

Which is, in fact, fundamental to my love of this book and also Cat Sebastian. The obstacles that Will and Martin must overcome for their HEA have nothing to do with whether they love each other, want the best for each other, or know that the other one wants the best for them. Some of their problems really can be solved by having a conversation, but they have to first become the person who’s able to have that conversation, and Cat Sebastian shows the hard work of reaching that point. And then they also need some source of income to live, and enough people around them who can be cool about their queerness, which are things that the author can swoop down and give them. Which she did. Five million stars.

Conventionally Yours, Annabeth Albert

Conrad and Alden have been longtime rivals at playing Odyssey for their mentor’s YouTube gaming channel, Gamer Grandpa, and they’ve both been given the opportunity to attend a massive con for their beloved game, and even compete in the big tournament. Alden is struggling to discover what he wants his future to be, while Conrad is holding on by the skin of his teeth to even have a financial future. They’re each willing to do anything to win the tournament — even take a cross-country road trip together to get there.

I! Love! A road trip! Conventionally Yours is a glorious enemies-to-friends-to-lovers road trip story, hitting all the beats you want it to (they get lost! they exchange confidences! there’s only one bed!) while delicately building up the relationship between these two characters. Alden is neurodivergent in a way that nobody’s ever been able to conclusively diagnose, and his moms have always been certain that he’s destined for great things (category: doctor or similarly prestige career). Conrad is handsome and popular and charming, but secretly he’s barely getting by. Ever since his father found out he was gay, he’s lost his family’s financial and emotional support and is working several jobs at once just to make rent. As the road trip goes on, the two begin to soften, learning more about each other’s lives, working out how to take care of each other, and giving themselves permission to be taken care of.

While a dual-POV is kind of a norm in romance novels, I find it particularly satisfying in enemies-to-lovers stories. Annabeth Albert excels at depicting how Alden and Conrad look from the outside vs how they experience their own lives and interiority. At the beginning, as you’re seeing Conrad through Alden’s eyes and vice versa, you’re well able to believe the unpleasant versions of the other person. I fucking love this kind of reminder that people look different on the outside than they really are on the inside, and honestly when it’s done well, it is one of my favorite things about the romance genre. I enjoyed this a lot (despite not understanding the Odyssey game, like, at all) and will definitely look for more in the series!

WHEW that was so many romance novels! What romances have y’all been reading?

The post Just So Much Fake Dating: A Romance Novels Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Let’s start with the romance! It’s a romance! Kiem and Jainan are a type of pairing I particularly enjoy: Kiem is all sunshine and impulse, great at going among the people and doing a very effective schmooze, while Jainan is all duty and protocal, with a keen eye for detail and a determination to do the right thing at all costs. It was fun watching the two of them learn to work with each other, and I kept thinking how satisfying they would be as secondary characters in a companion novel, where you could really see them playing off of each other and being competent as hell as a unit of two. It was particularly fun when Kiem and Jainan had the opportunity to step outside of these roles. About halfway through the book, Jainan has an idea for a mischief, and I was just delighted by it. Which I think shows the author’s success in creating these characters: I had such a clear sense of who they each were, so that when they did something unexpected, it was a special treat, without feeling out of character.

Also: The characters have hobbies!! Can the value of character hobbies possibly be overstated? Kiem loves sports! Jainan loves engineering! It’s the type of detail that makes the world and the characters feel real and lived-in, and Maxwell does a terrific job incorporating those small character beats into the plot.

The SF framework of this book is that the Iskat empire (where Kiem’s from) is trying to renew its agreements with a vast and terrifying entity called The Resolution; to get this agreement renewed, all the empire’s treaties must be approved (this is where Kiem and Jainan’s marriage comes in), and all the alien remnants must be collected up and returned to The Resolution. Fine and dandy, right? Well, I say in great seriousness, and I mean it as a compliment, the plot and worldbuilding were the cool and stylish skeleton on which to hang every trope in the book. YOU CAN FIT SO MANY TROPES IN THIS BABY. Winter’s Orbit began its life as an original story on AO3, entitled “The Course of Honour,” and it shows an absolutely warm-hearted and affectionate engagement with the world of fanfic tropes. I intended to list the tropes, but I honestly lost track! There’s arranged marriage (obv); there’s only one bed; there’s getting stranded in the snow and having to huddle together for warmth; there’s a telepathic connection situation where one of them experiences the other person’s memories… Truly, there are so many tropes.

The world of Winter’s Orbit is also casually queer in a way that felt absolutely refreshing. Kiem and Jainan’s marriage cements an alliance, and there’s no question or bother about the fact that it’s a marriage between two men. Beyond that, the Iskat empire and its affiliated countries are aware of a wide range of genders and sexualities. With a limited amount of physical description for any of the characters, Maxwell divorces gender from specific body parts, which I loved. The characters signal gender in a range of opt-in ways, mainly personal decorations, but these differ in different locales. It was wonderfully unfussy.

The next paragraph contains spoilers! Spoilers, plus my personal opinion that the book would have benefited by not making them spoilers at all!

The big misunderstanding of this romance is that Kiem and Jainan both think the other one doesn’t care for them. In this case, it’s because Jainan’s late husband, Taam, was emotionally and physically abusive, and Jainan is still recovering from the trauma of his married years. The way he reacts to Kiem is heavily inflected by that background, while Kiem, for his part, sees Jainan acting distant and takes it to mean that Jainan doesn’t like him. Although the reader is able to cotton to this secret pretty early on, it’s framed in the book as a spoiler: Kiem doesn’t know it, and Jainan never explicitly thinks about it, until a reveal about two-thirds of the way through when Kiem comes across a video of Taam shoving Jainan around.

I’m not personally wild about framing identity or trauma as a spoiler overall, but in the case of Winter’s Orbit I also don’t think it serves the story. Because the spoiler framing requires Jainan to spend most of the book not thinking about and not consciously processing what happened to him, his emotional journey lacks specificity. I can think of a number of ways that Jainan might have worked through his abuse and its aftermath, but the book doesn’t make any of those things explicit, so the climactic moments in his emotional journey felt undercooked. Plus! Moments that should have been important milestones for Jainan — such as when Kiem gets the block taken off his account, or when Jainan’s able to talk to his sister for the first time in two years — take place outside of Jainan’s perspective. It felt like a missed opportunity, both in terms of what it meant for Jainan and in terms of what it meant for his relationship to Kiem.

Note: I received a copy of Winter’s Orbit from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Winter’s Orbit, Everina Maxwell appeared first on Reading the End.

Are you salty as fuck about how Game of Thrones ended? Have you spent time surfing the “Pegging” tag on AO3? (sorry Mom that I am talking about pegging on the internet again) Do you yearn for more fat romance heroines? Cease your peregrinations, your search is at an end! Olivia Dade is here for her you with her latest novel Spoiler Alert, which is all about a fat fanfiction-writing geologist who goes on a date with the star of the biggest fantasy show of our time (who secretly also writes fanfiction). It’s not Game of Thrones! But it’s definitely Game of Thrones! Please someone page the burn ward, as I will be delivering Benioff and Weiss to them posthaste!

I am very excited about this book but will endeavor to calmly ennumerate the reasons for my joy. A of all, I loved the representation of fanfic writers. Olivia Dade is obviously a woman with a healthy Marked for Later list on AO3 if you know what I mean,¹ and it was wonderful to see not one but two protagonists for whom fandom is a joyful escape. Is it realistic? TO HELL WITH REALISTIC. I have not lived through half a year of pandemic to answer your quibbling questions about whether Oscar Isaac writes Finnpoe fanfic in his spare time (he does). April and Marcus Caster-Rupp write Aeneas/Lavinia fic for fun and I loved both that general premise and also the specific thing of the fandom believing that one specific character on the show enjoys pegging. This is the kind of fandom specificity I am here for in fiction.

Secondly, the romance was extremely lovely. Marcus and April are two people who, for vastly different reasons, have a hard time letting their guard down around new people. April has recently moved from a job that makes her miserable to one she believes will make her happy, and she’s resolved to be open about her interests, including fanfiction, but that doesn’t mean she’s not nervous about it. Marcus will, of course, risk losing all his future jobs if it comes out that he’s a fic writer, let alone one who’s been openly critical about the direction the last few seasons of his show have taken. So it’s extra great to see the characters being open and vulnerable with each other, even though you do know there is going to be a Reckoning when April eventually finds out that Marcus has an alternate identity as a close fandom friend of hers.

I also loved Dade’s depiction of one protagonist who’s fat and another who’s dyslexic. Both of them are adults who have officially figured out where they stand on weight and disability, and April in particular refuses to allow fatphobia into her life. It was great to see such a clear depiction of the fact that fatphobia and ableism are often/?always? rooted in the other person’s own issues. When April and Marcus talk about their parents’ disappointment in them, it’s clear that the parents aren’t responding to the children they have, but rather to some idea of what they wanted their own lives to be. It’s not about whether April and Marcus are happy or healthy or professionally satisfied — it’s about how they differ from what someone else, for reasons of their own, thinks they should be like.

Notably, this also means that Spoiler Alert is on the pro side when it comes to familial estrangement. I reviewed another romance novel recently that was more equivocal about the Regrets You Might Have around cutting off contact with shit family members, but Spoiler Alert comes down hard on the side of not hurting yourself by spending time with people who are supposed to love you but instead perpetually undermine you. That is my position as well! Feel free to set boundaries, beloved friends, and if your familial relationships are consistently more harmful than healing, it is a-okay to stop expending effort on them. April and Marcus know this on behalf of each other, but struggle to know it for themselves.

Furthermore, if like me you derive at least 20% of your enjoyment of romance novels from the hints that the author drops about other books in the series, you will not be disappointed in Spoiler Alert. Marcus’s co-star Alex is a loose cannon who has been assigned a minder called Lauren whom he finds very annoying OR DOES HE??? Alex also writes secret fic about his character, Cupid, getting pegged. Can’t say enough about the majesty of this character choice by Olivia Dade. I say again, TEN THOUSAND STARS, can’t wait for the sequel.

Run, do not walk, to your local book purveyor to purchase Spoiler Alert. I truly truly loved it.

Note: I received an e-ARC of Spoiler Alert from the publisher for review consideration. This has not affected the contents of my review.

The post Review: Spoiler Alert, Olivia Dade appeared first on Reading the End.

Bringing Down the Duke, Evie Dunmore

Annabelle Archer can stay at Oxford under a few, conflicting conditions. To be permitted to study outside the family home, she must send two pounds a month home to her cousin Gilbert. And in thanks to the benefactors supplying her scholarship, she must work to advance the cause of women’s suffrage — in this case, by targeting the Duke of Montgomery. The Duke, for his part, has just been tapped by the queen to map out a strategy for the Tories’ electoral victory in the next election. If he’s successful, Queen Victoria has promised that he can win back the ancestral home his father lost in a hand of cards.

(Sidebar: Bringing Down the Duke doesn’t have home reno, but home reno is one of my favorite things in a romance novel. Any time any historical romance mentions an Estate, I’m immediately recasting the book as an HGTV show in my mind. I want! To hear! About the furnishings! Oh, are there just so, so many cobwebs in this room? Let’s yeet those motherfuckers outta here and replace them with ELEGANT SATIN DRAPERIES in whatever the latest fashion is that the authors learned about in their researches. God, when will Rose Lerner write me a home reno book?)

Bringing Down the Duke is a delightful debut, with all the tropey nonsense your mother warned you about. Annabelle gets sick one time and has to stay at the duke’s house longer than expected! There’s attempts at smooching (and more??) during an elegant ball! She gets arrested for doing too much suffrage stuff, and he has to bail her out! Some good groveling! I wasn’t maybe as wild about Sebastian as a romantic lead, as he skews a teeny bit too autocratic for my personal tastes, but I am for sure on the hook for more books in this series. At one point Annabelle is dancing with a Noted Rake and she’s thinking, like, ugh, this guy’s such a rake, he’s going to try and bone me, and the Noted Rake is like “Oh so um do you know Lucie?” and Annabelle’s like “Lucie the very prim leader of our entire suffrage group, who never takes any nonsense from anybody?” and the Noted Rake is like, “Yeah, does she still have her cat?” So. You know. We have that to look forward to. I am a woman of simple tastes.

American Sweethearts, Adriana Herrera

I scarcely had time to be said that Adriana Herrerra’s Dreamer series was at an end before she announced a new book series about Afro-Latina heiresses finding love in nineteenth-century Paris. Though this links round-up can attest that I’m currently in a pendulum swing towards contemporary romance, historical romance is my first love, and it’s hugely exciting to see one of my favorite contemporary authors turning her attention to histrom.

The Dreamer series has been a real classic in the romance subgenre People with Jobs, and American Sweethearts is no exception. Juan Pablo (the last of the four best friends who came up together in the Bronx) is a baseball player, but really this story focuses on Priscilla’s career, rather than his. She’s a police office with a side hustle writing a blog and producing a podcast about race, gender, and sexuality; and her dream — though she knows it’s too impractical to pursue — is to open a community space where she can hold classes on sexuality for queer, trans, and older Black and brown people. Though she loves parts of her job on the NYPD, a lot of it exhausts her, but she’s fearful of sacrificing stability and taking risks.

Juan Pablo and Priscilla were each other’s first everything, and over the years they’ve fallen in and out of each other’s beds. But in the past few years, they’ve grown apart a little, due mostly to a huge blow-out break-up resulting from Priscilla’s unwillingness to let people take care of her and Juan Pablo’s resistance to respecting Pris’s choices when he thinks he knows better. (He wants her to leave the NYPD. I also want her to leave the NYPD, for it is terrible.) After a few years of therapy (therapy! yay!), Juan Pablo believes he can be what Priscilla needs, and he just wants to give her the space to see that.

My primary feeling about the People with Jobs subgenre is that it’s fun to see what People’s Jobs are like. However! I also like it a lot in romance because it’s awesome to read love stories about people who are very successful in their field, yet their partners are not threatened by that fact. Especially if — as here — the very talented people are women! I loved Juan Pablo’s support for Priscilla’s dreams, and of course it’s a lovely fantasy that she (or any of us) could escape the hellscape of capitalism and achieve both 1) her dreams and 2) financial security with the help of a wealthy, woke friend. Imagine such a world!

My one wish for American Sweethearts was that we could have seen more of Priscilla’s work on her blog and podcast. Juan Pablo honestly talks and thinks about it more than she does! Which, you know, I have a blog and a podcast, and they are a very lot of work. I’d have just loved to see Priscilla thinking about her writing and what she wants to say, or editing the podcast, or whatever. People! with! Jobs! Apart from that tiny gripe, American Sweethearts is a marvelous, boundary-respecting romance and the perfect cap on this wonderful series. I can’t wait for the heiresses in Paris series.

Sweetest in the Gale, Olivia Dade

After getting screamy about Olivia Dade’s contribution to the entirely marvelous romance novella collection He’s Come Undone, I was delighted to be contacted by the author with an e-ARC of her own novella collection, Sweetest in the Gale. It collects Simon and Poppy’s story from He’s Come Undone, along with two others set in the same world. The short version is that Olivia Dade has a real gift for writing romance stories that are both tender and heartbreaking. Whereas many romance novels steer clear of unfixable sadness, Olivia Dade leans into it, reminding her readers that happy-ever-afters are possible in the face of grief and struggle.

The title story follows two English teachers, Candy and Griff. Candy has always been passionate about her work to the point of throwing puppet shows to make sure everyone at the school understands that Frankenstein Is Not the Monster — but when she comes back to school after summer break, she’s muted and sad. All Griff wants is to buoy her up a little, and he has the chance to do it when they’re assigned to work on a Poetry initiative together. Poetry becomes the language in which Griff is able to support Candy through her obvious grief. “Sweetest in the Gale” is so kind about grief and its many indignities, and I loved watching Candy and Griff learn to open up to each other.

I have already nattered on about the second novella, “Unraveled,” so you may repair to my post about She’s Come Undone for my further thoughts on that. The final one, “Cover Me,” is a romance between two long-time friends who marry for convenience because one of them has breast cancer and no insurance to cover it. This is a… horribly relatable problem to have, and our country is a hellscape. Elizabeth and James have known and loved each other (as friends) for years, which is one of my favorite set-ups for a romance novella — the shorter length can be challenging if the principle characters are brand new to each other! Here, though, they have decades of history, which makes their gentleness with each other all the more lovely.

Sooooo yeah! I loved this and I would now follow Olivia Dade anywhere! I have rarely encountered a romance author who writes in such an open-hearted way (and I say that with the full understanding that romance as a genre wears its heart very much on its sleeve). It was a treat — albeit a rather emotional one — to get to read these stories.

Can’t Escape Love, Alyssa Cole

I’ve been an Alyssa Cole fan for years, and her Reluctant Royals series is my probable favorite of all her stuff (A Prince on Paper is my fave!). Can’t Escape Love is a novella in the series, and it follows Portia (the protagonist of A Duke by Default)’s twin sister Reggie. Owner of the geeky website Girls with Glasses, Reggie’s suffering from insomnia of a type that can only be cured by the voice of her online pal, the puzzle expert and live-streamer Gustave Nguyen. When she calls on him for help sleeping, he has a problem of his own: He’s been asked to create an escape room based on a romance anime show she loves and he knows nothing about, so they make a deal. He’ll talk her to sleep when she needs it, and she’ll help him plan his escape room in a way that honors the great things about the show.

As always with Alyssa Cole’s work, I enjoyed the hell out of this one! Reggie is prickly and smart and a really good sister, which are three of my favorite traits in a fictional heroine. Despite the complications of her relationship with Portia, she’s quick to leap to her defense, and the love between them is so important to her, even in a book where Portia never appears in person. I also loved the way Gus pays attention to Reggie and her needs. Any time she expresses a boundary, he respects it; and beyond that, he spends their time together observing her and anticipating what she might need or want from him. The first time they meet in person is at her house, and Gus is careful to walk next to Reggie as they enter the house, so she won’t have to worry about him being behind her. Legit, I really wish guys would be cognizant of this type of thing more often. Be mindful of the space your body occupies!, as I am constantly saying to Toddler Godson.

While I can’t speak to the accuracy of Alyssa Cole’s portrayal of Reggie’s ataxia and wheelchair use, or of Gus’s — I want to say autism?, both were handled with tremendous grace and respect. She depicts requesting and supplying disability accommodations unfussily, and both protagonists are careful to tailor their behavior to the other one’s needs. I loved it and would love to see that more often in romance novels (and all novels, frankly!).

If I had one teeny complaint, it’s that I still rarely see books that incorporate geekiness about real properties in a way that feels natural. I don’t know why that should be! It’s like, you know how animation has gotten so astonishing and we all gasped when we saw the animated water in the trailer for Frozen 2? But then as soon as a character starts running, they might as well be in an Atari game from 1993? And you’re always like, Good LORD, how have we not cracked this yet? That’s me and characters in books watching and loving TV shows or movies or books or whatever. It invariably feels a little awkward, and Can’t Escape Love was no exception.

….Also I just realized that the title is in reference to the escape room. Nice. I love it. God I love romance novel titles.

Drop a line in the comments to either:

1. Praise me for reading four entire books (wow!); or
2. Let me know what romance novels you’ve been enjoying lately.

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