A Lady for a Duke

A Lady for a Duke, Alexis Hall. Regency romance by the author of Boyfriend Material. Queer m/f - the lady is trans, was the duke's best friend, she has let him think she died at Waterloo in order to start living as a woman, but he's got PTSD from the war so she can't just abandon him. Hall said in a note at the end that he wanted to write a historical romance "in which the fact that the heroine is transgender is not the main source of conflict or narrative tension", which I am not sure whether I think he did or not, depending on how he meant it. There was not conflict *over the fact of her transness*, like, the truth of her gender was not in question, but I thought her transness was pretty central to the arc of the relationship? Like, she definitely wasn't *incidentally* trans, it felt pretty front and center to what kind of relationship she thought she would or wouldn't be able to have with the duke. Some of which I found interesting - the way, in this society with very rigid gender roles, her having formerly been living in a male role gives her this whole body of shared experience with the duke in terms of male pastimes and then the war, and then moving to a female role opens up possibilities of emotional intimacy and vulnerability, like, some neat exploration of masculinity there. (Some of which I found less interesting, like the "but I can't have babies" thread, which, okay, yes, this is set in a society with an emphasis on "continuing the male line" but as a 21st century person I was impatient for them to get to "adoption is cool actually".) Anyways, I didn't think it was perfect, I had a hard time with suspension of disbelief early on over how long the duke could fail to recognize his best friend even in a dress and makeup, and some of the emotional throughline felt a little muddled in terms of how many different emotional beats were supposed to be happening in one scene. But I am very interested in the project of different ways to queer historical romance. (And I liked the way the big sex scene played out, I thought it was nice to see the question of who penetrates or is penetrated put on a separate axis than gender.)

What Moves the Dead

What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher, 2022 novella. Vernon doing "Fall of the House of Usher", which I don't think I've ever read (or could even have told you was Edgar Allan Poe, necessarily - possibly I might have guessed the Sleepy Hollow guy (Washington Irving) or Nathaniel Hawthorne (maybe mixing it up with "House of Seven Gables", which I also haven't read). Anyways, I can't tell you how it reads if you're less ignorant of classic literature, but for me I really enjoyed it! Some great body-horror and speculative biology. (And I am totally with Vernon on her clean room thoughts in the author's note.) Recommended if you can deal with body horror around spores/infection/that sort of thing. I think I'm putting this one on my to-nominate list.