Tag: LGBQT

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths (Mystery)

Writing: 3.5/5 Characters: 4/5 Plot: 4/5

Another fun, twisty mystery by Elly Griffiths of Ruth Galloway fame — number 3 in the Harbinder Kaur series. Harbinder — our 38-year old diminutive Sikh lesbian — has just made Detective Inspector and is now in charge of a London based Murder Investigation Team.

A great first line (in the prolog) appears to be a confession of guilt for a decades old murder. This is rapidly followed by the school reunion of a high achieving group of friends who were all affected by that long ago death. The long awaited “fun” evening ends in the death of one the group — his body found in the school bathroom with cocaine dust around his nostrils.

A nice, convoluted mystery with plenty of interesting characters. What I found particularly fun was Harbinder’s inner monologue regarding her new subordinates, witnesses, potential suspects, and surprising love interests. While always behaving professionally and never losing her cool, we are treated to her irritation regarding arrogant attitudes, bimbo responses, and one particular subordinate’s oft repeated macho stances. I thoroughly enjoyed this insight into an honest and human interior in contrast with a professional and impassive exterior.

Thank you to Mariner Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on November 15th, 2022.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Fiction)

Writing: 3/5 Plot: 3/5 Characters:2/5

Not sure why this book is so popular — the writing was abrupt and cliched, the plot predictable, and the greatest insight any character came up with was “family is so much more important than wealth and fame.” Well, duh.

OK, that’s a lie. I do know why it’s popular. It’s easy to read, there is plenty of money and glamour and, of course, the real story behind all those husbands! If you like reading People magazine you’re going to love this! There is also a big LGBQT theme serving as a good reminder of what life was like when there were few professions where being “out” wouldn’t result in that profession being yanked away regardless of your talent / merit / success. We still have problems today, but nothing like what people in that community faced before.

For me it was just kind of trash literature without the requisite (IMHO) happy ending and feel good vibes. The big reveal at the end didn’t work for me — too pat, too unbelievable in many ways, and simultaneously too predictable.

I don’t write many negative reviews — maybe 3 in the past 5 years? If I don’t like a book, I simply stop reading it. And this isn’t a fully bad review. The writing is readable, the characters obviously weren’t meant to be deep, and the plot does keep you reading. It’s just disappointing in face of its popularity and not the kind of book I would normally waste my time reading…

Conversations with People who Hate Me by Dylan Marron (Non-fiction)

This is an extremely well-written, thoughtful, and reflective book that tackles the Hate pervading the internet in the form of nasty ad hominem attacks on anyone who has had the guts to post an opinion. Dylan collected many such disturbing posts in his Hate Folder, and then proceeded to create podcasts where he talked to (some of) these people in an attempt to find common ground for conversation.

He takes us through the process, starting from his own gleeful participation in the internet’s “holy trinity of cynicism, apathy, and dismissal” as he plays the shame game himself, through to his own hurt and betrayal as his posts / podcasts incurred various incarnations of “die you #)()(#@,” attacks, and finally to actual recorded conversations with those of his detractors that were willing to engage (and were clearly not dangerous or severely unbalanced).

He promotes empathy and conversation as an antidote to Shame — one of the big weapons in the snarky attacks on … everything. Lucid writing, good reflection on his own role, no rants, clear thinking, and a willingness to shut up and listen. For me his messages were not necessarily new but were refreshing and his experiences were enlightening (I spend a lot of time on the internet but very little engaging with anonymous strangers — a few months of the vitriol on NextDoor during the early days of Covid cured me of that habit). My only disappointment was that while he did a great job remaining open and listening to those who had called him names and (obviously) held very different views, there was never a point at which I thought he was listening to their actual views with an open mind. He lowered the anger thermostat and was able to see these strangers as human — and get them to see him that way too — but he remained firmly entrenched in his own view of the world as ever. To me, real conversation MUST include people being open to the idea that the other person may have good, rational reasons for having the opinion that they do and learning from that.

Still, this was an easy and engaging read and did get me thinking. I would love to see more conversation, discussion, empathy, and open mindedness on the internet. When did it become cool to be jaded, nasty, and cynical? When did hope and optimism become naive and stupid? Maybe we’ll learn that in book two. 🙂

Some good quotes:
“In the politically fractured climate of 2016, I saw the term used mostly by conservatives against people like me, which is to say politically correct internet users who vocally advocated for social justice. It was a way to mock those of us who talked about things like feelings and respect and safe spaces and pronoun and trigger warnings.”

“And what I had perceived as ‘hate’ was often discontent expressed hyperbolically.”

“Just as I have found that conversation is the antidote to both the game of the internet and the sport of debate, I also see it as the most potent antidote to shame.”

“Without the ability to keep up with the latest shame army, I am more able to take stock of what I actually think rather than defaulting to the opinion factory of social media.’

“Was seeing my conservative guests as human some sort of ideological treason?”

“In trading nuance for easy coins, complexity for simplicity, was I the social justice advocate I thought I was, or was I simply playing one online?”

“..I was a brown, Mohawked, pearl-earring-wearing gay guy whose tank top revealed an upper body that clearly screamed, ‘Chosen last for dodgeball!’”

“Was it because apathy, snark, and sarcasm were more in-keeping with the onslaught of bad news that dominated our news cycle? Did public expressions of joy undercut the severity of the unfolding sociopolitical mess? Whatever the reason, I had to figure out how to maintain my success on a platform that would shun me for daring to express my true self.”

Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on March 29th, 2022.

The Heron’s Cry by Ann Cleeves (Mystery / audio book)

This is the second book in Cleeves’ new Two Rivers series. The series is already slated to follow predecessors Vera and Shetland into (my) favorite British mystery shows.

An elaborately staged murder — the weapon, a beautiful piece of glass crafted by the victim’s daughter is the first murder to intrude on the idyllic North Devon countryside, but it won’t be the last. Detective Matthew Venn — calm and focused, works with colleagues Jen Rafferty (a now-single mom of two who left Liverpool and an abusive husband to come to Devon) and Ross May, a local boy.

I haven’t read any of Cleeves’ earlier books, but I have watched all of the mini series. What I really liked about reading (listening) to this one is how much depth her characters have. I liked that all the background and ongoing personal lives were integrated into the action — which after all is what life is like. I particularly liked that her characters have depth but are not overflowing with repetitive faults, as in so many of the newer TV series — I suppose that’s to make us readers / watchers happier about our own faults but I would prefer to engage with realistic characters who work to improve themselves than with screw ups who make me feel better about myself.

This was an audio book — the first I’ve ever reviewed. The reader — Jack Holden — was excellent. He read at exactly the right pace (so many readers are simply too slow), a lovely British accent, and good at doing the various accents and voices so that it was always clear who was doing the speaking. I’m not a huge audio book person — I read so fast that an audio book just takes far too long — so I’m very picky about readers and this is one I’d be happy to listen to again.

Complex characters, twisted plot, beautiful environment — I’m definitely going back to read book one and look forward to the ITV series.

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E Harrow (Speculative Fiction)

Writing: 4 / 5 Characters: 4.5 / 5 Plot: 4.5 / 5

I had such fun reading this book — clever and funny with plenty of gender benders, surprise twists, and sass. Short, too, at only 128 pages.

Zinnia Gray of Ohio is the Dying Girl. Afflicted with GRM — a malady that always kills before its victims reach 22 — she has become obsessed with all things Sleeping Beauty (a girl with very similar problems). What follows is a funny and piercingly acute adventure through alternative narratives where an array of women try to alter the “crap” storylines they were given.

It’s a brilliant modernization, magnification, and multiplication of Sleeping Beauty stories, all come together with the spare prose and humorous asides that I love in Harrow’s writing. Some of the references to academic takes on folklore and feminism crack me up while simultaneously getting to the point of what is truly important. A favorite line referencing a female character with a sword: “I know they promoted a reductive vision of women’s agency that privileged traditionally male-coded forms of power, but let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.”

Great characters that I liked a lot, no BS, plenty of adventure, some cool self-reflection and growth (always enjoyable), and plenty of gender norm challenges that are playful rather than strident.

Harrow is right up there in my must-reads list.

A couple of other fun lines:
“My only friend in this entire backwards-ass pre-Enlightenment world is about to be married off to a sentient cleft chin.”

“We might not be able to fix our bullshit stories, but surely we can be less lonely inside them at the end.”

Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 5th, 2021.

The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont (Memoir)

Very well-written memoir about the author growing up in a dysfunctional family full of mental illness and big-time secrets. Raised as a Catholic, her discovery that her parents and aunt were instead Jewish holocaust survivors was the subject of her first book — After Long Silence (1999).  The Escape Artist starts with the aftermath of the previous work — estrangement from her family and an invitation to her father’s funeral only to find that she had been cut out of his will with the phrase “as if she had predeceased me.” The narrative bounces between 1965 and the present (well-labeled and easy to follow) and follows the wild dynamics of a sister who is alternately her best friend and a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy person vowing to kill her. While the first book uncovers the Catholic / Jewish secret, this book uncovers a second large family secret (which truthfully is not the main purpose of the book and is not over dramatized in any way — it’s just something we find out / figure out near the end). The primary focus is on her relationship with the family, particularly her sister, and her own slow self-discovery of the person she wants to be.

I enjoyed reading this book — it was well-written and the characters were deeply portrayed — intentionally from the author’s perspective. Exactly my kind of memoir where the author makes plain her interior logic, experiences, and even her own doubt as to what actually happened vs what she remembers happening. My only complaint might be that it was a tad too long — I was ready to be done about 40 pages from the end. I admit that there is also something that disturbs me about one person writing a memoir that exposes the secrets of others. There was a good reason her family did not want people to know they were Jewish and I can see being equally unhappy about the family exposure in this book.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (Fantasy / Literary Fiction)

Writing: 5/5 World building: 5/5 Plot: 4/5 Characters: 3.5/5

A compelling and intricate urban fantasy that explores the myriad ways stories pervade our lives. The narrative is “gamer style” — space and time gateways, bizarre characters and messages, and mysterious options for the traveler. Theatric and literary references abound — and there is no filler — every sentence counts in this elaborate and labyrinthine tale.

Our main character is Zachary Ezra Rawlins — two months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, the son of a fortune-teller, and a graduate student doing a thesis on gender and narrative in gaming. He is gay (or as his friend Kat says, “orientationally unavailable”) and a nice love story forms a narrative arc through the adventures, intrigues, and quests in the book.

It’s all story — no real messages, the characters are all interesting though not terribly deep (they are all seeking purpose — who isn’t?). The world is fascinating, the pacing is perfect, and the writing flows. Great for fans of Harrow’s Ten Thousand Doors of January, Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and Setterfield’s Once Upon a River.

I liked the writing a lot but didn’t find a lot of specifically awesome lines — here are some quotes to give you a flavor of the writing:

“Much of it revolves around an underground library. No, not a library, a book-centric fantasia that Zachary missed his invitation to because he didn’t open a painted door when he was eleven.”

“Zachary takes out the book. He turns it over in his hands and then puts it down on his desk. It doesn’t look like anything special, like it contains an entire world, though the same could be said of any book.”

“Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”

“He tells her about moving from place to place to place and never feeling like he ever belonged in any of them, how wherever he was he would almost always rather be someplace else, preferably somewhere fictional.”

“The pay phone next to me started ringing. Seriously. I didn’t even think those worked, I had them categorized in my mind as nostalgic street-art objects.”

“I accepted because mysterious ladies offering bourbon under the stars is very much my aesthetic.”

“Sometimes life gets weird. You can try to ignore it or you can see where weird takes you.”

Non-Binary Lives by Jos Twist, et al (Non-Fiction)

An interesting collection of essays by and about non-binary persons. From wikipedia:  Non-binary is a spectrum of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine — ‌identities that are outside the gender binary.

Most of the authors are living and working in the UK, though a few were from other countries. My impression is that most are therapists and / or gender study students or professional academics.

While a few of the essays proved to be overly jargonistic or borderline offensive (one railed against the “ableist, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremist, cisgenderist dominant society” and another kept mentioning “toxic gender binary notions”), most were well-written and explored aspects of the non-binary gender concept that were new to me. Many examined the intersectionality of being non-binary within different cultures or religions as experienced by (for example) a Vietnamese Confucianist, a Jewish feminist, a Quaker, and an Hispanic. One essay explored the effect of motherhood (via the traditional biological pathway) on someone who self-identified as non-binary.

I was naively surprised by the references to infighting between differently gendered groups. Said one author: “…the phenomenon of self-identified transsexual folk who are vehemently opposed to non-binary as a concept as they feel it undermines the realness of their own identities. The vitriol they express is nearly as bad as the right-wing opponents of ‘gender ideology’ who are freaking out about the end of gender and gender roles.” Another bemoaned the fact that as a non-binary person, they were no longer able to benefit from the many women-only groups and privileges they had been enjoying. They had been happy to be part of women’s theater companies who were “dedicated to presenting lesser-told stories” as compared to the more “mainstream” companies, “dedicated to working their way through the safe Western dramatic canon of plays by dead cishet white dudes,” and were now unhappy to be automatically lumped in with the outsiders.

I’ve been fascinated with the concept of gender and gender fluidity ever since reading Gender Mosaic by Daphna Joel and Luba Vikhanski, and I enjoyed many of the essays in this book. They forced me to examine my own perceptions and actions: Why do I care what gender a person is? Or whom they prefer as a sexual partner? And yet I notice that if I can’t tell at a glance, I spend time trying to figure it out. For some reason I feel I need to know. Does this mean I treat people differently based on gender or simply that I have a great need to keep things categorized in my head? I have no idea!

I do know that I am greatly in favor of more inclusion in society, but not at the expense of other groups. Let’s hear more stories and give more opportunities to previously unrepresented groups — but why is it necessary to exclude people simply because some perceive them to have been part of a “privileged” group? Today’s white, cishet, men should not have to suffer because in the past *some* white, cishet, men benefited at the expense of other groups. And why on Earth would we want to belittle the great works of the past simply because their creators were white men when there were others at the time who did not have the same opportunities? Shakespeare’s plays are still amazing as are the works of Mozart, Rembrandt, and Sir Isaac Newton. Let’s work on making the world a place where we can have more greatness, not less.

I hate identity politics, and I’m happy to say that most of this book was focused more on individual experiences and perceptions than on politics. Worth a read if you’re curious about the concept.

Thank you to Jessica Kingsley Publishers and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 21st, 2020.

The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead (Children’s Fiction)

10-year old Bea has largely adjusted to the big changes in her life — 2 years before her parents divorced so that her father could be the gay man he had always known himself to be. Bea alternates living with each parent day by day and weekend by weekend. Now her father and his boyfriend Jesse are getting married and Bea might be getting a sister — something she has always wanted.

While not as creative as some of Stead’s earlier books, this is a well-done dive into the experiences of a young girl struggling to understand the massive changes in her life. The book serves as an excellent template for how to handle a divorce. The eponymous “List of Things That Will Not Change” is for Bea when she finds out about the divorce — my favorite item: “We are still a family, but in a different way.” And indeed, that is how they behave.

Bea also sees a therapist — Miriam — and the advice she recollects at various points is clear and useful. I’m not a big fan of therapy, but I found this summary of the process and techniques for Bea to be excellent. This would be a useful book for both the target 8-12 year olds and their parents. If I had one small complaint about the book, it is that the focus is all on Bea and the new life of her gay father. Her mother doesn’t get to have much of a new life and although portrayed lovingly, doesn’t get a lot of air time (and she deserves some!).

Thank you to Wendy Lamb Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on April 7th, 2020.

Right After the Weather by Carol Anshaw (Literary Fiction)

Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book will be published on October 1st, 2019.

Writing: 4/5 Plot: 2/5 Characters: 3/5

Cate is a single, forty-something, lesbian, set designer in Chicago whose friends and colleagues have largely moved on. It is 2016 — Cate’s ultra-paranoid, thrice divorced, ex-husband is shacking up in her extra room; she is struggling to end an ongoing affair with a married woman; and a new girlfriend she sees as her best shot at adult stability is exhibiting questionable ethical behavior. In this setting she simultaneously experiences the “worst event and biggest break”: she rescues a friend during a violent and traumatic home invasion and is offered the chance to work on an exciting off-broadway play.

The book is beautifully written and the characters (especially Cate) are portrayed with great depth. While being a lesbian is not the point of the book, Cate’s queerness (her selection of term) informs a great deal of her thoughts and actions. There is not a lot of action — the home invasion takes place about half way through the book and itself takes up few pages. Instead, it is a thorough portrayal of her life — thoughts, actions, interactions, and world events — during a few months late 2016 / early 2017. I appreciated the scenes about her theater work (I wish there had been more) and the writing is really excellent, but for me there was not enough insight or character change to warrant the book length (without any compensating action). Things moved on in a very slow-paced, realistic, and ultimately unsatisfying, way. I found Cate to be a weak character, still struggling with the same issues (all completely under her own control) at the end of the book as at the beginning.

This book does have great lines — here are a few:

“Living casually in the moment seemed so vibrant, but has left her looking over her shoulder at a pile of used-up hours and days, hearing the scratchy sound of frittering.”

“She has come to understand that room temperature in the demographic she aspires to is a more personally controlled business.”

“The other customers exist somewhere else on the dining matrix, all of them in parallel, convivial but hushed universes.”

“Now, though, the cat’s out of the bag. Now the cat is hopping all over the place, demanding attention.”

“A heavy, standing ashtray is surrounded by a population of emphysemic ghosts.”

“Something delicious about all the secrecy. Now everything’s so in the open, we’re free from fear and oppression, but we’ve traded up for being commonplace. Queer’s as boring as straight now.

“She understand she has arrived on another side of everything. No one is over here with her.”

“Everything about him is aimed at the greater good, but in matters of personal kindness, he often comes up short.

“Her thoughts these days are not her friends. Which doesn’t keep them from stopping by, particularly at night when she is too tired to fight them off.”