psocoptera

The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.

I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.

My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho, 2024 romance novel. Cho is better known for fantasy but this is a straight-up contemporary het romance, and while I liked it a lot (and thought it was fun seeing Cho genre-hop) I would probably only recommend it to people who like het romance in general and not so much anyone who was considering whether they like Cho so much they would follow her across any genre. I, like I said, liked it a lot; I enjoy the Malaysian-English voice of her characters (here a Singaporean Chinese woman and Malaysian man living in London) and I thought the subplots about difficult family and business corruption wove together nicely with the core second-chance-romance plot.

The Earl Who Isn't, Courtney Milan, 2024 romance novel. Third of a trilogy (1, 2) of het historical romances set at the end of the 19th century in a British village of expat Asians, with Chinese and Japanese main characters. I was in a library queue for it but decided I was having the kind of week that justified an indulgent book purchase (and rereading the first two, which turned out to be useful - I would read them in order if you're interested, to see how characters get introduced). Exactly what I was looking for. I liked the couple, and this whole series has had lots of neat details about different crafts and trades. Gardening and printing presses in this one.

A Restless Truth, Freya Marske, 2022 novel, second in the Last Binding trilogy after A Marvellous Light. This series continues to remind me very strongly of certain HP stories, like, Resonant's Transfigurations or Astolat's House Proud or The Compact, except original and not retroactively tainted by association. This particular novel takes place entirely on a large ship crossing the Atlantic (a fun setting for this sort of thing, and Marske makes good use of it) and is f/f (primarily m/m writers vary wildly in how much interest they can get up for f/f - I thought Marske did great). I couldn't resist going straight into book three. :)

The Sugared Game and Subtle Blood, KJ Charles, the rest of the Will Darling trilogy that started with Slippery Creatures. I really liked these - some nuanced character work, some great moments, we continue to get various little nods to Peter Wimsey and Jeeves and Wooster, yay.

Thornhedge, T Kingfisher, 2023 novella. Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )

The Marquis Who Mustn't, Courtney Milan, 2023 novel, het romance. I loved 99% of this book, with one exception that I found upsetting and out-of-character as I had understood the character. I vaguely recall not liking her novella Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure for what I think might have been similar reasons. But, anyways, aside from being thrown and put off by that one part of that one scene, I loved the characters and the way their relationship developed, good stuff.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

A Taste of Gold and Iron, Alexandra Rowland, 2022 novel. Fantasy m/m romance between a prince and his bodyguard. Sadly I think this book did not quite work. I wanted to like it - they've written some fanfic I loved (as well as a novella unrelated to this book that was fun but not outstanding), and it was clearly written to be Very Tropey. A "why can't an original story be as full of the stuff we love as fic is" book. Which I support! And there are definitely a bunch of good elements bouncing around here! Unfortunately I didn't think it quite held together structurally. The first chapter was kind of a mess - too much information too fast, too much happening too fast, what are we supposed to think of any of these characters, what is this book even about. I got put off and read two other novels before the pressure of library due dates sent me back to this one. It got better but continued to have weird tonal shifts, like, wait, is this a dark and tense hour or is it time for banter and group teasing? And then I wasn't quite sure why it stopped exactly where it did; why was that scene, that set of scenes, the resolution. I mean, okay, one set of conflicts had been resolved, but it didn't quite land for me as a romance-ending HEA, or the end didn't quite feel like it answered the start, or something. (I think in something marketed as straight-up romance we would have gotten an epilogue to do some of that work. Interestingly, the author has written an optional post-canon non-canonical epilogue on AO3, which I haven't read yet, as I wanted to write up this review based only on the published canon.)

I'm inclined to blame all of these problems on a rather fanfictional sort of problem, namely that the author has spent a *lot* more time with the characters than the reader has, and thus in any given scene always has this whole weight of preexisting love and understanding for them, they're always part of a greater context. I mean, in fanfic that isn't a problem, because the reader has the same greater context (or at least a similar one, the same canon text if not the same fandom texts), but here, Rowland mentions that they've written it over from scratch six times, and almost everything has been replaced or otherwise massively overhauled, and, like, cool, but maybe Rowland now has six books of feelings about these characters and we only get to read one? I mean, I don't know if this is making sense, obviously authors are always already more invested in and familiar with their characters than a reader can be, but, I don't know. Maybe not quite all of the right bits of the iceberg are making it to the page, to mix a metaphor horribly. (ETA: like there's bits where the characters talk about how "nobody else would understand everything they've been through together", when I didn't feel like the text really supported it feeling like *that* much. But all six versions of it, that would add up.)

Anyways this is all very harsh, when in fact I did quite enjoy quite a lot of it. I would recommend it to people who like the Barrayar bits of Vorkosigans, or who ever shipped Gen/Costis or Maia/his nohecharei, or have read multiple things on AO3 tagged "king and lionheart", or have a fealty kink and know this about themselves and yet somehow none of the aforementioned applies. I will almost certainly read Rowland's *next* romance - it will be interesting to see what that is, whether it's a followup about these characters, like Foz Meadows is doing with the Strange and Stubborn Endurance sequel, or a standalone about different characters like Everina Maxwell is doing (those being the obvious comps; it's an exciting time for sff m/m romance). I just... I just want slightly different editing choices to have been made, here, and that's frustrating. :/

Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, Ashley Herring Blake. I wanted to read this because I liked the previous one (here), but then on page three the eponymous Astrid starts thinking about how she can't wait to remodel a local historic building by replacing the cherry wood wainscoting with white shiplap, and I completely ceased to experience this book as a romance novel because I was too concerned about whether the love interest would also manage to save the building. I mean, usually romance is very relaxing to read, because you know the couple is going to end up together, and it's just a matter of how the story unfolds to get there, so I was entirely unprepared for this level of tension from this reading choice. I tried to cheat and see if I could get back to reading the story the author had intended - I have it as an ebook and my entire search history is, like, "shiplap", "cherry", "wainscoting", "wood", "woodwork", "painted" - which did not really find me an answer, and then I skimmed and jumped around a bunch, and it sounds like there is a whole battle between the romantic leads over competing visions for the remodel, but the compromise still involves painting the existing built-in bookshelves, and grey walls, and an inexplicable fixation on sage green, and there's a whole scene about smashing the old kitchen cabinets with sledgehammers, and dumping old clawfoot tubs in a dumpster, and, you know, fuck this shit, this is supposed to be pleasure reading, I don't need to read about the gutting of a historic home/inn from a perspective that does not use the word "restoration" even once. I guess there's also a couple of ladies and they have hot sex and fall in love? And good for them? But definitely do not read this book if you have ever loved your original unpainted wood trim or hate the hideous greyification of contemporary interiors.

His Sacred Incantations, Scarlett Gale, second half of that fantasy het romance duology. I liked the climactic fight against the necromancer, thought the denouement was a bit dragged out (and got so earnest as to be cringey in spots). Still, fun, I'd read more by her.

Glass Today by American Studio Artists, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This is the catalogue from a fantastic glass show I saw at the MFA in 1997. I checked it out because I was thinking about Carol Cohen's "Little Compton" from that show, as I sometimes do, and learned online that Cohen had died in 2020 (at the age of 81, and also apparently her studio was in Cambridge - I wonder if she ever did open studios? that's a missed opportunity), and then I couldn't remember the artist who did my other favorite piece from the show. And then when I got it from the library I was reminded that the reason I hadn't bought it in the first place back in 1997 was that neither of my favorite pieces was pictured. (Also I was in college and museum stuff is always so expensive.) But it was kind of fun to flip through and see works I recognized from the MFA that I had forgotten I had first seen at that show, and lots of works I didn't remember at all. Anyways, here's "Little Compton - MFA visitors may catch the similarity to "The Vineyard", which the MFA commissioned from her because people liked "Little Compton", and which was on display near one of the staircases in the wing that has the bookstore for quite a few years. And my other favorite piece was Jay Musler's "Cityscape", which might actually be a series of similar works, but I think this photo is pretty close to my recollection of it.

(I wonder how many little pieces of paper or txt notes I have somewhere, with "cohen little compton" or "musler cityscape" on them, from forgetting one or the other and then figuring it out again? Like the other day I managed to google up Shaggy's "Boombastic" as the song from the jeans commercial - my brain likes to cough up the "mister lover lover" bit as a very brief earworm, and I would swear that it had been driving me nuts for years (and I couldn't recall if it was actually a jeans commercial or an MTV station tag, which didn't help the search), but for all I know I've figured it out and forgotten repeatedly. The Memento life, sigh.)

(The full explanation for why I'm so obsessed with this 1997 glass show involves Objectivism and my college ex and a long argument about Rodin's "Eternal Springtime" and a bigger ongoing argument about orthodox Randian benevolent-universe romantic realism vs. artists (particularly contemporary artists) doing 1) depictions of tragedy or ugliness and b) art that falls somewhere between figurative art and abstraction, like, semi-representational, which is where some of my personal favorite art lives. Like "Cityscape", which is, on the one hand, a bowl that to some people is just a bowl, and on the other hand in person a glowing crater and an utter gutpunch about the horror of war/the atomic bomb. Or like certain of Arthur Ganson's work, like the one with the artichoke petal, or the wishbone. (I haven't been to the MIT museum in years, I wonder if he's added anything new there...) Anyways, I'm not saying art singlehandedly saved me from Randroidism, but it was certainly a crack in the glass, so to speak.)

(These parentheticals are becoming much longer than the actual post but I'm also wondering now how long it's been since I've added anything to my mental list of favorite art. If I go to list things it's so much from college - who was the last new favorite artist I discovered? Anything from my 30s even? (Note I am now 45.) Hm.)

Delilah Green Doesn't Care, Ashley Herring Blake. Contemporary romance, 2022. I tend to favor historicals over contemporaries, but I saw a friend rec this, and the cover is great, like, how do you look at that and not want to see these ladies sort it out. I really liked it, so, yay covers and friends with good taste. Reminded me a bit of Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me (one of my all-time favorites) and LaVyrle Spencer's Spring Fancy, which, yes, I *would* like to read a queer readalike for every het romance novel I've read more than once, that sounds fun! If the romance industry wants to cater to that I could make them a list! (Someone should do one of the Jude Deveraux plots with twins...) Anyways this has Complicated Family Feelings and great chemistry between the leads and now I'm like 97th in a library queue for the next one.