Books Read
Feb. 21st, 2023 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietWhite Trash Warlock
This was OK. I liked the setting and the main character, but I never really got sucked in and there were a lot of things that felt clunky or awkward. Adam is a young man who's been through a lot of shit. He grew up in a country trailer. His father was abusive. He was gay, and on top of that, had the Sight, meaning he saw magic shit everywhere and had an acute power of empathy. His father disappears, likely abandoning his family, and his older bother gets him committed to an abusive troubled kids institution. Fast forward to the start of the book. Adam's aged out of the institution and is living with his aunt in a trailer. He gets a message from his estranged brother, suggesting that something supernatural is happening to his family and he needs Adam's help with it, which sends Adam to Colorado. A big ole magical organ of suck is floating over the state, and Adam gets to figure out how to deal with it, with the help of the Guardians, aka, a sort of modern imagining of Fairie.
The problem with the book was that it felt emotionally sterile. I liked the main character, and he had clearly gone through a lot in his life, and was still going through a lot, but all of the emotional work was done in the telling mode. His relationship with everyone in the book was, if you ignored what the story told you Adam was feeling, passive and retiring. His brother had fucked him over completely, based largely on his refusal to believe in magic or Adam's power, and then calls him out of the blue conceding that magic is maybe a thing and maybe Adam needs to come by and save his ass. There's no real reckoning with this reversal. Adam carries another scar from being abandoned by his other-worldly lover someone during his time in the facility, and when that character returns there's no real reaction. It's like, oh, it's the ex that caused me sever trauma and who's disappearance I've had no closure on for my entire adult life. Hi. Another character reveals a great betrayal, something that is so deep that almost everything that has happened in Adam's life has been dictated by it, and no time is spent on him digesting what that really means.
The very last major scene of the book was the final nail for me and exemplifies the problem so well I'm going to post spoilery details below.
So Adam's dad was seriously abusive, both physically and emotionally. Adam as a young boy had less of a serious reckoning with this than his older brother and mother, who took the brunt of his abuse. One day when Adam was young his father just fucked off and was never seen again. He grew up believing that his father was a warlock, that he was the source of Adam's magic, and that he had abandoned the family. So the book opens saying that Adam has been trying to track his dad down ever since he aged out of the troubled kids home and is worried that he is an important player in some nasty things he keeps uncovering.
Throughout the book Adam's father is brought up in passing, as the catalyst of the dysfunction in his family, or just idly as Adam tries to make connections between him and what's going on. But then near the very end of the book it's revealed that his brother, Bobby, and his mom, actually killed his dad during an abusive rampage, hid his body, and then acted like he had just fucked off this whole time. And during that event Bobby was convinced that some sort of magical communication had taken place between him and his mother. Despite that he refused to treat Adam's Sight as real and had him committed. As the reader we learn this through a flashback from Bobby's point of view, and do not get Adam's reaction to this news. Then, the story picks up after Adam has been told and I guess digested everyhing, and when Adam next internally refers to it he's completely emotionless about it, like ~guess that happened, moving on~.
At first I thought these moments were sort of an attempt to depict a toxic stoicism. The brothers and the mom all refuse to discuss their problems at any point really, but as the book went on my sense changed to thinking that the author just wasn't that great at writing a character driven story, and relied a little to much on the procedural elements of the plot to keep things moving.
The other major issue I had was with the romance. It lacks chemistry for much of the same reason. Some very strange shit happens and a police officer is brought into Adam's world. The two of them can also suddenly hear each other's thoughts and the officer is like, that's cool. They both sort of fall in love but it's more like two people being like... hmm, I'm in love with you now. Adam's like, really? You like me? And the guy's like, "yup, guess so." Ok then. I was never entirely sold on why the cop was all that interested in Adam outside of getting magicked into it. Their relationship is never a driving element of the plot outside of Adam trying to protect his love interest like a sexy lamp and the love interest just going along with whatever happens without worry.
The brother's relationship to his wife was also weird. You never really meet the wife, but Bobby thinks of her a little like some sort of prize for making it to the middle class and his reaction to her peril feels more like he thinks he's obligated to care about it than actually feeling any sense of concern for her well being. Honestly Adam seems to care more about her given his decision to help.
It was just a weird book. I wanted to like it a lot more than I actually did, and I sort of couldn't keep fooling myself on that once the last few revelations came out and no one seemed to really care all that much.
So This is Ever After
I thoroughly enjoyed this one. It's very tropey but with tropes I love, and it had a fun tone and sweet romance at the core of it. The writing reminded me a little of the sort of fantasy books I read as a kid which made me wonder if this was marketed as YA, and it turns out it was. Even YA can get kind of hard core at times but this is a sweet book through and through, but in a sincere way that felt kind of refreshing.
The core of the story is that Arek is fated to lop the head off of the evil king, but after that no one knows what's supposed to happen. A series of unfortunate events later and he's not only king himself, he can't abdicate without dying and he needs to find his soul mate by his 18th birthday or he will fade away (aka probably die). The entire book is him wishing that he could confess to his best friend and the party mage, Matt, but because he believes that Matt has rejected him he refuses to confess and trap Matt into a loveless union just to save Arek's life. He instead makes multiple attempts to "woo" the other party members to determine compatibility, every attempt goes horribly wrong in ways that always end up with Matt in the middle of them, and ... you kinda see where this is going. It's a straight forward, honest premise that knows exactly what it is and gives you exactly what's on the menu, which is a fuck ton of mutual pining and miscommunication. If you like to be emotionally edged by an entire novel's worth of that sort of thing this is the book for you. I did find myself internally screaming "JUST FUCKING TELL HIMMMMMM" near the end there but I did it while dabbing my eyes with tissues so the book still got me.
So yeah, fun, briskly written, very cute. I liked it. And the cover art is wonderful.
Widdershins
I was skeptical of this book because the cover looks like a hack photoshop job, but it's not bad.
This book was significantly hornier than I expected and a big change from So This is Ever After which I read right before it. The latter faded to black and only got as explicit as mentioning inconvenient boners. This book has multiple full blown sex scenes. The main character, Percy Whyborne, is an agonizingly shy nerd who works as a philologist at a museum. The museum is in the New England town of Widdershins, which, although this not outright stated, is not quite right. There's a gothic horror sheen over everything, starting with Percy's tragic backstory in which his best friend drowns in a storm while trying to get to an island he believes is the site of demonic rituals. Shy Percy gets paired up with a private detective, Griffin Flaherty, to translate a strange notebook that holds a clue to the death of the museum head's son. Griffin ends up roping Percy into the investigation more broadly, and then the book throws in some abominations, murder, undead, etc. into the mix.
The voice in this book is a lot of fun. I think the author did a good job of making everything seem a little bit like a late 19th century narrative. There are some era typical elements that I enjoy and don't often see in modern fiction nowadays, such as concern about homophobia. Percy is stressed out over being clocked for a large portion of the book, but once Griffin clearly is into him too he gets kind of desperately horny all the time lol. Can't say I blame the poor guy, having been cock blocked by society for most of his life. Griffin is an interesting love interest. He's suave and competent but Percy mostly falls for him because he's kind and doesn't immediately bully him. He's also got himself a nice bucket of trauma to carry around from being exposed to supernatural horrors and no one believing him, which is the sort of suffering that I like in my men. If they wake up in the middle of the night screaming I'm interested.
I also liked how, while Percy maybe too quickly develops a backbone, he also starts getting tempted by the dark power that they are investigating. He's been fucked over and bullied his whole life, and he starts wondering if it would be so bad to just set a few people on fire. I appreciate a character who, while ultimately nice and good, has a bit of a nasty streak that they need to contend with. The romance between the two leads was fun and also hot, the various supporting characters were well fleshed out, and I've got the second book in this series in the hold queue now.
Blood Orbit
I ended up giving up on this one. Shortly after gobbling down all the Tarot Sequence books I went searching for something new on Libby, but the search there is pretty shit and trying to find "spec fic with some good gay romance" was actually more difficult than I expected. In the process of making the attempt this book came up, and the summary suggested that maybe it was what I wanted. It's about a gruesome murder that happens in the slum of a backwater planet. A noob recruit is paired up with an inspector who has just had a freaky face cyborg thing installed and they need to solve the crime. There's a lot of politics, racial tensions, police brutality, uprisings, blah blah blah. I'm making it sound more interesting than it is.
The problems were twofold. One, the story drags out too long. The first half of the book the characters are trying to figure out who murdered a whole store full of people. This goes on for like 300 pages. And the entire time there are almost no leads. They find maybe evidence, tuck it away. They try to talk to people, no one wants to talk. They fight with the police, vague things are said. The book gives you few hints or threads to help you figure out if they're on the right track or if there's even anything resembling a suspect at any time until finally someone gives up the beans and is like, oh yeah it was our local revolutionary town square callers. That's why you haven't gotten a single clue till now, they're being protected by the community. I mean, yes, there are moments of foreshadowing, but none of it was satisfying for me.
The other problem is that this was not actually a gay romance in any way. Which, fine, whatever. I realized my error kind of quickly and was willing to give it a shot on its own grounds regardless. But there was also no relationship at all between the two main characters. Like, they barely interacted. One guy had his side of the story where he did things, and the other guy did other things in other places, and sometimes the detective gave the rookie an order and that was literally the extent of their relationship. Instead the rookie gets horny for a local girl and the private just keeps getting into little fights based around the fact that everyone hates him because he's bi racial.
I quit the book shortly after they finally sort of "solved" the case, because "who did it!!!!" was literally the only driving factor in the book, and then when I was like ah thank goodness now they will be arrested and I will move on I checked my completion and I had barely made it to 50%. I just did not care to know how this was going to get dragged out any further so I noped away.
The Handsome Prince
This was my second attempt at finding something gay on Libby and I kind of hit the bullseye this time. The Handsome Prince is basically a porn anthology centered around fantasy happy ever afters. But fantasy as in porn fantasy, not as in genre fantasy. Its short little chapters cut right to the chase, with guys grabbing dicks left and right. Some of the stories are sort of modern day, some are in a vague Europe-like area, one is Renaissance Italy, etc. There's no magic or anything, just the idea of nice scenarios where guys always get the man. The writing is exactly what I would expect from the premise. It's just good enough to be fun and hot, and is also more nifty than Ao3 in its sensibilities, which I actually enjoy at times. So yeah, if you want a bunch of in and out, no funny business, fuck, get feelings, hooray, this is that.
