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Books Read
Feb. 21st, 2023 08:11 pmWhite Trash Warlock
( General impressions )
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.
( Spoilery stuff )
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
( Read more... )
Widdershins
( A story about undead horrors and also a bunch of sex. )
Blood Orbit
( tl;dr it kind of sucked. )
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.
