Some more M/M Fiction and one not

[got_quiet]

Been reading a good chunk of books lately, much to my own surprise honestly, so here's a bunch of fast reviews.

The Hex series.

 

While I was in Japan there was a lot of down time actually, and as a result I ended up reading like 4-5 books in the Hex series, which is this M/M shifter series by the author of Whyborne and Griffin. Unlike W&G each shifter book focuses on a different pair of familiar and witch. The familiars are all people who can shift into different animals and the witches are all people working for the witch version of the NYPD. There's a plot throughline in all the stories, but for the most part they're independent and focused on a new pair each time.

 I enjoyed the series for the most part. They feel more formulaic than the W&G series, which is also somewhat formulaic but as an adventure series and less so as a romance. I'm not super familiar with the romance genre but the Hex books feel more solidly on that vein? Because each pair has to get together for the first time every book, even though the dynamics are a little different from book to book, it's always instant attraction, a little bit of dancing around, some fucking, a dramatic crisis usually meaning a fight between the MCs, and then some last panicked rushing to someone's aid in the climax. I don't mind all this so much, but I don't know if reading 4 books in a row with exactly the same narrative beats was a good idea. I was kind of sick of it after hitting the fourth and finally put the series down for a while before finally finishing that book off later.

I'm also not super into shifter stuff. My understanding is it's a massive sub genre in romance, but I don't really care about it all that much. I liked the conceit that familiars had a sort of fated connection to a specific witch, and the fact that this wasn't necessarily a great thing for a lot of the pairs. In fact one pair they were not fated.

 But anyway I suppose I'd recommend these books? They are more heavily romance but there's still well written and the historical fiction elements are also good. They just got a bit samey by the end, even though the pairings themselves represented a variety of personalities and dynamics.

 

 Prince of Air and Darkness

 

I feel like I've read this book before. It felt like the Simon Snow books, except everyone starts a little bit older. 

 You've got some dark fuck prince unseelie who is the "enemy" of the jock blond sun child but actually is secretly in love with him, and the suggestion that they are enemies is never convincing while the love part is pretty clear right from the beginning. You've got a fantasy story where everyone is some sort of fantasy creature going to fantasy college and are acting like completely normal people for the most part except they're not and of course the normal people are not involved at all and are somehow just completely ignorant of there being a college campus with fauns and fairies and ogres walking around on it. The book wasn't bad. It just didn't stand out in any way, and after finishing it and thinking about it a bit I felt like the plot was also disjointed and not particularly logical. 

The pacing is also a little weird. There's maybe three places where there's a major crisis and the two leads are in some sort of conflict, but then they're just like, well, I didn't have all the info and now that I do I'm not mad, so lets bury the hatchet. Which is why I didn't really believe the insistence by the narrative that these two were enemies prior to the book starting.

Some spoiler specific details:

I don't know if it is the writing by itself, or this "HEA Promise" that the publisher puts in front of all its stories, but there's very little suspense or emotional payoff in this book. I don't dislike happy ever afters, but being effectively spoiled for the ending doesn't seem like the best idea? I know from osmosis that romance fans are very insistent on the HEA, that it effectively defines the genre, but maybe this means that I just can't enjoy romance as a genre. I like romantic stories, and I like reading fixit fanficiton, but I want things to actually really go bad at times in the canon, not just... sort of make noises about maybe there being a risk while everyone is actually living in a safe, padded narrative. 

There were a few moments in this book where things maybe should have been more serious than they were because of this. The characters talk about severe consequences, and then those consequences are not actually there in the story. Finn wants to save his farm and accidentally destroys it, or just sucks the magical life out of it. Roarke tries to help him by basically destroying the whole crop of the entire region so that the price of his family's crop spikes up. But, the field has been destroyed. Was it just for that season or are they just postponing the disaster for a single year? Plus uh every other farm just got completely wrecked, but I guess that's ok. And for half the book Roarke is trying to avoid becoming the Unseelie Knight because it's supposed to somehow destroy you and turn you into a completely different person, and in the end Finn becomes the Knight and... nothing happens. It's fine, actually. So why was Roarke acting like becoming a knight was akin to a death sentence the whole book? It just felt like everything got resolved by the big problems that the characters kept insisting were big problems turning out to just not be big problems, actually.

While this was an easy read that I got through in a few sittings, the more I think about it the more annoyed I become, and I don't think I recommend it. Even though the characters were maybe less mature in the Simon Snow series I think it basically did the exact same type of story better.

 

Spellbound

 

It's prohibition era New York. Arthur, a rich quarterback WWI spy guy with no magic powers to speak of has a bunch of magical friends and is trying to keep superpowerful relics from falling into the wrong hands. He runs into Rory, a guy who can scry into objects to see their pasts, which provides all sorts of useful information. There's some espionage sort of plot around stealing a relic back from friends turned enemies, and that's basically it.

I actually read this a long time ago, but since it's by the same publisher as the Prince of Air and Darkness I thought it was worth a quick comparison of what I had written right after I had read it, which turned out to be almost the exact same complaints. One, that the "HEA promise" turned me off the book initially, and that there didn't seem to feel like anything consequence happened in the plot. No one did anything unpredictable, there were no serious stakes, and once the story was over it was just like,

I did like this book better than the Prince though. There is at its core a more cohesive caper plot that, despite the somewhat tepid romance and low stakes, was entertaining enough. I also liked Arthur, the quarterback, as a character. Rory was a little too childish for me personally but the size difference was at least kind of nice to imagine haha.

 

The Flaw in All Magic

 

And finally I just finished a sort of gen fantasy book that might end up being m/f in the future called The Flaw in All Magic. I was driving cross country and decided to try an audio book even though the last time I did that it almost put me to sleep. I think being trapped behind the wheel for 20 hours is the only time that I would choose to listen to an audio book, but in this circumstance it worked out pretty good.

The story is something of a murder mystery where a young man named Tane is called in to help with the murder of a former classmate. He went to a magical academy, but had no magic, and managed to fool the whole school for four years before exposing himself with his final dissertation. This got him expelled and disgraced, and no one likes him. He accidentally teams up with Kadka, a foreigner half Orc who just wants to see some magic, and ends up getting fired from her guard job for helping Tane out.

While the book basically hands you the answer to the whodunit on a silver platter within the first chapter and makes no attempt at red herrings (I mean... I assume the author didn't mean for anything to be a red herring because he was way, way obvious about the whole thing) I found Tane and Kadka's chemistry to be very good, and the worldbuilding was interesting. Rather than plopping some magical school in a mundane world this is a proper high fantasy where one nation has a lot of mages in it, and politics comes into play. I don't know if I would say the worldbuilding made a lot of sense, but it was at least new and interesting. And even though who the bad guy was was immediately evident, how Tane and Kadka got things figured out and saved the day was a little less straight forward, and didn't rely entirely on people passing around the idiot ball either.

Kadka was without a doubt my favorite part. She's massive and imposing, smart, aware of the bullshit but not pressed so much about it, and, importantly, consistent in personality throughout. Tane had an Elven ex that also joins them in the adventure, but they don't get together in the story, and while Tane sort of says he's not interested in Kadka at one point I'm kind of hoping they do get together eventually in the series because it would be nice for a woman who genuinely looks monstrous to get herself a nice little man for once. In fact the reason I checked the book out was because the cover had her on it.

So I liked this book. It is unfortunately a part of a series so the ends is all ominous "There are more of us" BS and I don't know if I liked it enough to keep reading.

 

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So that's the most recent dump of books read. I'm thinking I need to make myself a nice bookish icon now that I'm back on the wagon with the written word.

Comments

[autumndaze]

maybe tmi/tldr so feel free to ignore obvs lol

I had issues with Prince of Air and Darkness because while it was a fun book in some ways, it did have pacing problems for me. I read the whole trilogy, and liked the second book the best, and the third book the least. Book 1 was a mix.

There are plenty of HEA stories in my experience in the romance genre where bad things do happen. The HEA is meant to reassure readers that the characters can recover from it, among other things, and that there will be comfort after the storm, because life is bad enough, and dark fiction exists if you want something else. I think that maybe you should try other authors? I mean I know at least one mafia m/m novel with an HEA where the protagonist gets tortured in narrative, and I know of many m/m novels where characters are assaulted.

I would also not recommend the trilogy to people, and when talking about it I always have caveats about it (the last time I talked about it, someone else was asking in Discord if it was a good trilogy, and I explained my opinion on it). I know authors who do better fae stories and better m/m fantasy stories. But I wouldn't let it define my experience of romance. But yeah I mean if you don't generally like stories that tell you in advance what the flavor of the ending is going to be, I guess avoid them. Comparing them to the Simon Snow books is interesting... I think there's like... Simon Snow is YA and Darkest Court is New adult so they kind of target similar age brackets (maybe the better answer is to read more adult romance than YA/YA-adjacent romance)? They also kind of both feel like Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy fanfiction in different ways (and have been marketed that way at least by fans at one time or another), so I can see that.

I read Allie Therin's Magic in Manhattan series last year, and I had mixed reactions to the first trilogy. There were things I liked, but overall I don't recommend it as a trilogy. The 4th book/the spin-off series is the best of them all (and just good outright), and I think Therin learned a lot of good things from Magic in Manhattan and applied them in 4 (though I think part of it is the protagonists appeal to me more in that one). I'm in the middle of 5 now. If you struggle at all with the first trilogy, I'd honestly suggest skipping to "Proper Scoundrels". I do think that even the base trilogy is better than "The Darkest Court", honestly, (Therin's just a stronger writer than Grant imo), but part of that is because I disliked book 3 of Darkest more than I disliked any of the books in Magic. I also have a preference for adult romance than YA/New Adult romance.

Good luck with your future reading!

[got_quiet]

I've enjoyed books with romance and HEAs in them before so maybe it's just that I don't vibe with this particular publisher. If I were more deliberate in my reading I probably would be avoiding the fiction aimed at a younger set lol but I am extremely sloppy with my reading choices. I hear mention of a book and go ok sure without taking a second to figure out what it is. I think with both Air and Darkness and Magic in Manhattan I didn't realize I had picked up a "romance" book until I got to that promise from the publisher.

I didn't dislike any of those books at least, I just wasn't psyched about them either. I'll probably keep picking up similar books until I'm truly sick of them.

[autumndaze]

That's incredibly fascinating to only learn they're romances after getting the HEA promise because I'd never actually seen one on the fiction itself until looking just now (I only know it's a thing because I've listened to romance authors talk about it), but Air and Darkness is subtitled "A Gay Fantasy Romance" on iOS, while Spellbound is subtitled "A Paranormal Historical Romance". Carina Press is also generally a romance publisher. I do see the promise now in both books when looking, after reading the very obvious romance summaries for each. I would probably recommend reading the summaries first before picking them up, especially if you're not especially into reading romances, at least without looking to read romances in advance. I do get being frustrated/surprised with genre unexpectedly, but my way around that is to read summaries and reviews before actually getting the book itself, which saves me most of the time (and stopped that happening as much as it used to for me). I did recently disappoint myself with a novella I picked up because the marketing slogan sounded neat, so obviously it's not perfect lol Though that was with the writing itself, not the genre (I knew it was m/m, I just didn't realize it was present-tense and boring). I should have tried reading a sample or something first (though obviously that's not always possible, and I forget if it was in this case).

I will say Carina is one of the few still standing queer publishers in the west, so you'll be cutting a lot of books out if you avoid them entirely. I mean that's your choice, obviously, and do what's best for you, but a lot of queer authors in particular here have very few choices, even with self-pub these days, and Carina is one of the few left standing. Like Charlie Adhara, Roan Parrish, Sidney Bell, those are great authors who go with Carina at least some of the time, and Parrish and Bell especially might be up your alley. Bell's Woodbury Boys series is wonderful, and their standalone "Bad Judgment" is quite fun.

Good luck with whatever you try next!

[got_quiet]

It's not that hard to accidentally read a romance when you start a book based only on a cover and the first couple sentences of the summary! Maybe the word romance was on the cover but I didn't see it if so. I'm very good at not noticing things.

If I were spending money on physical books I'd be a little more selective, but with Libby it's like, whatever let's go! And I don't know that I've actually read anything by a romance imprint before this last batch. Maybe I have and was again just not paying attention. If it hadn't been for the HEA promise I may have never noticed that I was reading an official "romance" book. I don't think I'm so scarred by the experience that I'll avoid them in the future. I may just lower my expectations.