Think of England

[psocoptera]

Think of England, KJ Charles, gay historical romance novel, although an interesting one because it's entirely from one character's POV, which is not standard for genre romance, although it is for fic. And honestly this reads like the best sort of slash, and I very much suspect Charles of being in/from fandom. (Which I always feel compelled to repeat is a compliment when I say it.) I don't quite think this was a fileoff, but there were a lot of little echoes of various fandom-fave pairings... Watson's psychosomatic knee injury, Draco's snark, all kinds of Gryffindor/Slytherin clashing, or maybe they're Aubrey and Maturin, or, I don't know, whoever your favorite Sweaterboy and Absolute Nightmare are (as per this essay describing queer pairings in terms of the unhappily normative one and the lonely outcast one). Anyways I love this sort of thing and ate it up with a spoon, ymmv. (Note that our POV dude starts out holding, in an unconsidered way, many of the standard British-white-dude bigotries of the 1904 setting; I personally wasn't bothered by his homophobia/anti-Semitism/etc as that clearly wasn't the opinion of the *text*, and as we went on were explicitly opinions held by The Bad People And Not Good People, but, again, ymmv.)

ETA: I was reminded of my observation from reading Hamilton's Battalion that work partnership substitutes for marriage as the queer romantic narrative closure in historical settings and hey look at that.

Comments

[oracne]

I liked this one, too.