psocoptera

Copperscript, KJ Charles, 2025 romance novel. Having just read several of these I wasn't going to indulge again so soon, but then I got it from the hold queue, and then I ended up in a Direct Tire for a couple of hours and was like "am I going to use this time to make progress on the book I am bogged down in? no I am not", so here we are. This one is back to the post-WWI timeframe like Think of England (but I don't think had any character cameos)? A police detective gets involved with a handwriting analyst with supernatural-level powers of handwriting insight. I thought Charles did a nice job walking the line of "this *is* unlikely, the characters are aware of that, and in fact that skepticism drives a bunch of the plot" and "it works exactly how it needs to for plot purposes". Fun!

Wanted, A Gentleman, KJ Charles, romance. (Not actually sure if it was a novel or novella.) I'm behind on writing up books so I'm doing them easiest-post-first instead of chronologically. The publisher of a personal-ads newspaper teams up with a formerly enslaved businessman to find the eloping daughter of the latter's former enslavers, with a lot of attention to what it might have felt like to be trying to make long rapid journeys by stagecoach. Charles is so good at making her characters people (and people who I feel like I haven't met before, even if they are also tropey or types).

Rules for Ghosting, Shelly Jay Shore, 2024 novel. I was still playing Hugos hooky, after also reading two-thirds of Asunder which got interrupted when my ebook expired, but I have a paper copy as of this afternoon so expect to hear about that soon. I came across this book in a couple of different contexts (a book group I'm not in but am adjacent to was reading it, etc) and was intrigued - queer (m/m) romance, literal ghosts, Jewish funeral customs? Sure! If that sounds good to you you will probably also enjoy it, although I felt like it was stronger as a family drama in some ways than as a romance - it almost felt like some of the early "getting to know each other" scenes might have been deleted for length, since there was a kind of weird jump to them knowing more about each other than had happened on the page. Pluses: learning about taharah and shmira, interesting low-key take on including paranormal elements. Minuses: dog squick (really hard for me to enjoy a schmoopy scene of the couple kissing and cuddling if one of them just kissed his dog, ew ew ew), author mentioned in a Q&A at the back of the book that she was picturing one of the couple as an actor whose face I hate, which kind of ruined the ship for me tbh. I mean, at least I had already finished the book, but it killed any post-romance-novel afterglow. Maybe don't read the Q&A if you have any actors whose faces you hate. Could be a plus or minus: I am not qualified to evaluate how good a job Shore did writing in a trans POV, but it seemed reasonable to me? But also seems plausible that a review by a transmasc person might point out things I wouldn't catch? (Shore herself is a she/they person.)

The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.

I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.

My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho, 2024 romance novel. Cho is better known for fantasy but this is a straight-up contemporary het romance, and while I liked it a lot (and thought it was fun seeing Cho genre-hop) I would probably only recommend it to people who like het romance in general and not so much anyone who was considering whether they like Cho so much they would follow her across any genre. I, like I said, liked it a lot; I enjoy the Malaysian-English voice of her characters (here a Singaporean Chinese woman and Malaysian man living in London) and I thought the subplots about difficult family and business corruption wove together nicely with the core second-chance-romance plot.

The Earl Who Isn't, Courtney Milan, 2024 romance novel. Third of a trilogy (1, 2) of het historical romances set at the end of the 19th century in a British village of expat Asians, with Chinese and Japanese main characters. I was in a library queue for it but decided I was having the kind of week that justified an indulgent book purchase (and rereading the first two, which turned out to be useful - I would read them in order if you're interested, to see how characters get introduced). Exactly what I was looking for. I liked the couple, and this whole series has had lots of neat details about different crafts and trades. Gardening and printing presses in this one.

A Restless Truth, Freya Marske, 2022 novel, second in the Last Binding trilogy after A Marvellous Light. This series continues to remind me very strongly of certain HP stories, like, Resonant's Transfigurations or Astolat's House Proud or The Compact, except original and not retroactively tainted by association. This particular novel takes place entirely on a large ship crossing the Atlantic (a fun setting for this sort of thing, and Marske makes good use of it) and is f/f (primarily m/m writers vary wildly in how much interest they can get up for f/f - I thought Marske did great). I couldn't resist going straight into book three. :)

The Sugared Game and Subtle Blood, KJ Charles, the rest of the Will Darling trilogy that started with Slippery Creatures. I really liked these - some nuanced character work, some great moments, we continue to get various little nods to Peter Wimsey and Jeeves and Wooster, yay.

Thornhedge, T Kingfisher, 2023 novella. Spoiler cut. ( Read more... )

The Marquis Who Mustn't, Courtney Milan, 2023 novel, het romance. I loved 99% of this book, with one exception that I found upsetting and out-of-character as I had understood the character. I vaguely recall not liking her novella Mrs. Martin's Incomparable Adventure for what I think might have been similar reasons. But, anyways, aside from being thrown and put off by that one part of that one scene, I loved the characters and the way their relationship developed, good stuff.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

A Taste of Gold and Iron, Alexandra Rowland, 2022 novel. Fantasy m/m romance between a prince and his bodyguard. Sadly I think this book did not quite work. I wanted to like it - they've written some fanfic I loved (as well as a novella unrelated to this book that was fun but not outstanding), and it was clearly written to be Very Tropey. A "why can't an original story be as full of the stuff we love as fic is" book. Which I support! And there are definitely a bunch of good elements bouncing around here! Unfortunately I didn't think it quite held together structurally. The first chapter was kind of a mess - too much information too fast, too much happening too fast, what are we supposed to think of any of these characters, what is this book even about. I got put off and read two other novels before the pressure of library due dates sent me back to this one. It got better but continued to have weird tonal shifts, like, wait, is this a dark and tense hour or is it time for banter and group teasing? And then I wasn't quite sure why it stopped exactly where it did; why was that scene, that set of scenes, the resolution. I mean, okay, one set of conflicts had been resolved, but it didn't quite land for me as a romance-ending HEA, or the end didn't quite feel like it answered the start, or something. (I think in something marketed as straight-up romance we would have gotten an epilogue to do some of that work. Interestingly, the author has written an optional post-canon non-canonical epilogue on AO3, which I haven't read yet, as I wanted to write up this review based only on the published canon.)

I'm inclined to blame all of these problems on a rather fanfictional sort of problem, namely that the author has spent a *lot* more time with the characters than the reader has, and thus in any given scene always has this whole weight of preexisting love and understanding for them, they're always part of a greater context. I mean, in fanfic that isn't a problem, because the reader has the same greater context (or at least a similar one, the same canon text if not the same fandom texts), but here, Rowland mentions that they've written it over from scratch six times, and almost everything has been replaced or otherwise massively overhauled, and, like, cool, but maybe Rowland now has six books of feelings about these characters and we only get to read one? I mean, I don't know if this is making sense, obviously authors are always already more invested in and familiar with their characters than a reader can be, but, I don't know. Maybe not quite all of the right bits of the iceberg are making it to the page, to mix a metaphor horribly. (ETA: like there's bits where the characters talk about how "nobody else would understand everything they've been through together", when I didn't feel like the text really supported it feeling like *that* much. But all six versions of it, that would add up.)

Anyways this is all very harsh, when in fact I did quite enjoy quite a lot of it. I would recommend it to people who like the Barrayar bits of Vorkosigans, or who ever shipped Gen/Costis or Maia/his nohecharei, or have read multiple things on AO3 tagged "king and lionheart", or have a fealty kink and know this about themselves and yet somehow none of the aforementioned applies. I will almost certainly read Rowland's *next* romance - it will be interesting to see what that is, whether it's a followup about these characters, like Foz Meadows is doing with the Strange and Stubborn Endurance sequel, or a standalone about different characters like Everina Maxwell is doing (those being the obvious comps; it's an exciting time for sff m/m romance). I just... I just want slightly different editing choices to have been made, here, and that's frustrating. :/