Tag: lgbtq

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Review

“The Velvet Rage”

Alan Downs

Somehow I thought this book was a history of the gay rights movement, and I didn’t so much as read the subtitle to disabuse myself of that notion, so once I got into the book proper, it was a heck of surprise. Although, really, “the book proper” is the wrong way to put it, because, out of everything, I found the preface to be maybe the most powerful part. It certainly made for an effective hook!

For the majority of gay men who are out of the closet, shame is no longer felt. What was once a feeling has become something deeper and more sinister in our psyches—it is a deeply and rigidly held belief in our own unworthiness for love. We were taught by the experience of shame during those tender and formative years of adolescence that there was something about us that was flawed, in essence unlovable, and that we must go about the business of making ourselves lovable if we are to survive.

It was at about this point in the book—you know, a handful of pages into the preface, not even the introduction yet, that I realized I may have been wrong about what the topic of the book was.

Very few of us feel the shame, but almost all of us struggle with the private belief that “if you really knew the whole, unvarnished truth about me, you would know that I am unlovable.” It is this belief that pushes us, even dominates us with its tyranny of existential angst. In our own way, young and old alike, we set about the business of “earning” love, and escaping the pain of believing we are unlovable. It is this damned quest that pushes us to the highest of highs, and simultaneously brings us to the brink. This is both the creator of the fabulous gay man and his destroyer.

The thing that it brings to mind most, for me, is my favorite article of political coverage I have ever read—that description of Pete Buttigieg as the Best Little Boy In The Whole World. And it really is the same concept:

What would you like me to be? A great student? A priest in the church? Mother’s little man? The first-chair violinist? We became dependent on adopting the skin our environment imposed upon us to earn the love and affection we craved. How could we love ourselves when everything around us told us that we were unlovable? Instead, we chased the affection, approval, and attention doled out by others.

I’ve selected quotes, almost exclusively, from the preface. It was unquestionably the most powerful part of the book, and, again, an immensely effective hook. Which isn’t to say that the remainder of the book had no value—it’s just less quotable, and less immediately impactful. It’s a great example of one of the key points the book makes, actually: here’s the problem, and here’s the much more drawn-out solution. As with most things, solving the problem is a lot harder than just identifying it, and is the sort of thing that takes lots of small changes over a long time.

All in all, I am very glad I read this book. It opens with so accurate a summary of the gay experience that, as I said to someone, “I thought I was going to read this book, but instead it read me.” Or, to go with the more memeable syntax, the text message I sent to someone with the first quote, above: “this book walked into my living room and shot me”

If any of the quotes above hit for you like they did for me, go read this book.1 Right now. There’s no immediate, change-your-life-by-snapping-your-fingers advice in there… but 1% better, every day, adds up real fast. Or, as the last line of the book says:

I invite you to consider making a change for the better.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Flash Fire”

TJ Klune

I mentioned in my review of the first book that opening with a salvo of self-insert fanfic is a powerful way to begin a book, and apparently the author agreed, because this one opens with a full-on broadside. And out of that cringe frying pan, and into the awkward fire of a teenager being caught, mid-makeout-session, by his dad. Oof.

Nick, the protagonist, remains categorically the best take on a teenager I’ve ever read. No other superhero media captures quite the degree of astonishingly bad decision-making provided by the average 16-year-old boy. Peter Parker has his one dramatic character moment early in every reboot, and then after that he’s a mature adult? I’m gonna need a story arc explaining that along with the walking on the ceiling, the spider bite also magically fixed the mess of hormones that is Being A Teen, because I refuse to believe how stupid he isn’t most of the time. Nick, though? Nick is an ongoing disaster, and it’s hilarious. I had to put the book down just to laugh, multiple times.

It helps that he’s got a good support network, because just about every character that’s there is wonderful. His friends are just as hilarious, the parents—and, good lord, I’m suddenly feeling my age as I write this—are very relatable as they roast their kids for the aforementioned very bad decision-making skills, and there’s a few new characters that show up partway through that make it just that much more fun.

I picked this up within a week of finishing the last one, which I highly recommended, and I’m gonna highly recommend this one too. My biggest complaint is that it’s the second of three books, and the story arc has a distinctive Empire Strikes Back feel of “oh, this isn’t getting wrapped up well by the end of the book, is it” throughout. But then, I picked up the third book at the same time I was grabbing the second, so it turns out I’m pretty well-prepared for that.1

I loved this book as much as I did the first one. Obviously, start with the first book, but, y’know, go ahead and grab the second too.2

  1. That isn’t the only parallel to cinema that’s present in the meta-level; the book also has a post-credits sting that hit me like a truck, in the same way that some of the Marvel end-credits scenes just locked me in for watching the next one in the franchise. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Extraordinaries”

TJ Klune

Starting with an excerpt from the egregious self-insert fanfic that your protagonist is writing sure is a powerful opening. Imagine getting hit by a fully-loaded semi truck, carrying exclusively cringe. A bold statement, which nearly got me to put the book back down again; my high school experience was bad enough on its own, and I’ve never felt the need to relive it while adding extra awkwardness.

That said, I managed to convince myself to power through, and I’m glad I did. I have to give bonus points to whoever picked the tagline on the cover—“Some people are extraordinary. Some are just extra.”—because it really explains what the protagonist is like. He’s extra. He’s also the most authentically high school character I’ve read in a while, because oh my god is he an idiot. Most of the plot of the book is “him failing to notice very obvious things, and coming up with incredibly stupid plans.”

What makes the book is his friends. Gibby is positively delightful—she spends most of the book, fully in the know on everyone’s secrets, and mostly using that to laugh at everyone instead of actually helping. A quote:

“Yes,” Gibby breathed. “Yes to this. Yes to all of it. Oh my god, yes. This is so stupid. I can’t wait. White people are freaky.”

She’s living her best life.

The other thing that kept me interested in the book was that I couldn’t quite figure out all the secret identities. There’s just enough twisting to keep you wondering up until the book decides it’s time for you to know, and while it was fun to sit there in the knowledge of how well I’d narrowed down the pool of options while Nick—the protagonist—hadn’t actually figured out there was a pool of options, it was also fun to be unsure.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It took me a bit to get into it, because wow is the poorly-written fanfic at the start a tough sell, but once it got its hooks in I couldn’t put it down. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“In Deeper Waters”

F.T. Lukens

I picked this book up from a Pride shelf at a used bookstore—and yes, that’s a bit of a peek into how much of a book backlog1 I have at any given time, given that this is getting published a month before Pride. And really, I grabbed it because it looked kinda cheesy.

And hey, guess what, it kinda was! But in a way that’s exactly what I wanted from it, exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It’s a cheesy little YA romance novel, with a bunch of high fantasy going on as the backdrop, and I’m so, so glad that things like this exist. Because boy, am I ever tired of the plot of an LGBTQ novel being that They Are LGBTQ. Once or twice, that’s an okay plot, but after that, it’s just repetitive. In this, it’s not at all a thing; from the beginning, Tal’s big brother is absolutely accepting of his bisexuality. The only way it appears at all is that it gives him a broader range of options to embarrass his little brother with by asking if they’re his type.

There’s a post somewhere out there where somebody rips into homophobia in fantasy and science fiction. The gist of it is, ‘you can imagine {insert fantasy trope} but you can’t imagine people not being assholes?’

That’s what this is. Someone said “y’know what, I’m making an entirely fictional setting. Why would I bring that aspect of reality into it? How would that make the story better?”

The cover art is very pastel, and so is the book. For all that there is an actual plot to it, I came to the end feeling like I’d had a hug. This book is kind. I loved it. Go read it.2

  1. A booklog, if you will. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Scarlet Odyssey”

C T Rwizi

Pretty much any piece of fantasy I read that has magic in it, I wind up trying to figure out the rules of the magic. Because, sure, it’s magic, but it has to have a system underlying it—otherwise nobody would be able to actually use it for stuff! A lot of the time, for the sake of the story, the rules basically boil down to “magic does whatever the plot needs it to do,” which admittedly isn’t not the case in “Scarlet Odyssey,” but there’s also very clearly a set of rules for how it works.1

But what I really loved about this set of rules, what really captivated me, is that it isn’t magic. It’s a sufficiently advanced technology. And it’s masterfully done. Ra featured a magic system that just is programming, including very clear connections to how *nix works. “Scarlet Odyssey” has hints of how it works that make it feel distantly related—more of the “this is how the abstract concept of computation works” than “this is how most computers on Earth work.” That makes it a lot easier to buy this as not a completely alternate-world history, but actually a far, far distant-future bit of science fiction. (Personally, my theory is that the reason they all worship the moon and regard it as the source of the magic is that it is—a moon is a handy place to put some machinery a couple ticks up the Kardeshev scale that you’re gonna use to customize the laws of physics for a planet.)

So, a couple hundred words in to this review, I’m clearly enamored of the world building. And, wow, I’ve barely scratched the surface; there’s a whole rich history, multiple civilizations, the actual details of how the system of magic works… it feels big and storied. Historic.

Worldbuilding aside, I also really enjoyed the story.2 Salo makes for an interesting protagonist, and the jumping between different characters’ perspectives is well-done, providing their different views of how the journey is going, as well as their own stories. Frankly, by the end of the book, it feels a bit like a D&D campaign group—each of the characters is totally unique, and a fight between them and a big group of Generic Evil Minions Plus One Big Bad feels like it fell right out of the Dungeon Master’s Guidebook. They’ve each got their own story, and while Salo is clearly the main protagonist, the story they’re writing together isn’t just about him.

We’ve also got a really great villain in The Handmaid, though I’ll admit I did spend a bit of time being very confused because I hadn’t realized that The Handmaid and The Enchantress were two different characters. Pay attention to the chapter titles, kids, they’re meaningful!

Overall, I absolutely loved this book. I feel as if, here at the end, I should be doing some kind of caveat, but it really directly hit everything I want from a book! It’s not even failing the Russo Test!3 I recommend the heck out of “Scarlet Odyssey,” give it a read.4

  1. Said rules aren’t particularly clear, as there’s at least six kinds of magic, but also maybe a seventh, and also that’s only the ones practiced on this continent, and there’s a whole other family of magic in the other continents? There’s a lot going on. ↩
  2. I could’ve done with more than around 1/2 of a plot thread being tied up by the end of the book, but they’ve gotta get me hooked for the remainder of the trilogy somehow. And, to be fair, if things had been cut down enough to fit the whole trilogy’s plot into one book, it would’ve either been a terrifyingly large book, or lost a lot of the detail that I enjoyed. ↩
  3. In point of fact, it passes it with flying colors. Identifiably gay characters? Salo’s subtle, but his uncle and uncle’s husband, less so. Not defined by that character trait? The uncle is a fierce warrior, and Salo’s own queerness is honestly easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention to how he interacts with the guy he’s trying to hide his crush on/from. Integral to the story? Yeah, I’d say the main character is pretty integral to the story! ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Capricious: Gender Diverse Pronouns”

ed. A.C. Buchanan

Like I mentioned in my most recent read of an anthology, I’m used to them being centered around a specific theme. In this case, the theme is pretty easy to see, and also pretty vague, overall—I think the core concept was “at least one person in the story uses pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers.”

Which gave the authors a lot of room to play around, and it wound up being a really cool variety of stories! From distant-future sci-fi to swords and sorcery, there’s some interesting things that happened in here.

The one that stands out the most, that I feel I’m going to have to go back and reread once or twice more to really wrap my mind around it, is the story of someone moving to a new country and learning the new language. At first, the pronoun bit is easy to miss, until it becomes important to the story: their home country—and, more importantly, their native language—doesn’t have gender as a concept. The character mentions a total of 9 pronouns in their language, which I believe are I/me/mine, you/you(?)/yours, and they/them/theirs. Which is, itself, already an interesting concept, but to make it even more so, the new country they’ve come to has at least three genders, and a gendered language to boot, bringing them to a total of 45 pronouns. (I didn’t count all of them, but think of things like, several different versions of the second person!)

It’s a really effective story; none of the three genders aligns with the masculine/feminine that we’re used to, and so, as the reader, I wound up latching on to the protagonist’s genderless way of speaking, because it’s more familiar. And we get to be confused and frustrated with them, because what the hell are these three genders? Why are there so many pronouns? Why does this language gender the word “you,” for crying out loud, obviously the second-person pronoun refers to the person you are speaking to… and, hey, actually, now that we’re thinking about this… why do we apply gender to things it doesn’t need to be applied to? Why is it so important to us?

That’s what made that story, to me, the best out of the anthology. It gave me a new way to look at an issue that, frankly, I thought I already had a reasonable grasp on. There’s absolutely value to that.

And hey, there’s a bunch of other stories in there too! Some of them thought-provoking, some of them fun, some of them heartwarming; as I said, a very impressive variety. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Song of Achilles”

Madeline Miller

It may be possible to read this book without knowing how the story has to end. I suspect it’s not possible for anyone raised in the global West, and even outside of that, by the time you know enough English to read this book, you’ve probably picked up enough cultural background knowledge to have a good idea. The phrase “Achilles heel” isn’t exactly uncommon.

With that foreknowledge, the entire novel feels like a growing weight, the crushing inevitability of that end coming towards you. It’s the sound of rushing water as your paddle-less boat approaches the falls; the growing vibration of the rails you’re tied to as the train approaches.

The rending heartbreak of one of the most beautiful love stories I can remember ever reading. So much of this stories is about Achilles and Patroclus growing up together and falling in love. Their first kiss is another inevitability by the time it arrives, something you’ve been waiting for for what feels like months—that just-out-of-reach realization, the word hovering on the tip of your tongue, and then the satisfaction of grasping it.

Truth be told, I haven’t finished the book yet. I’m nearly to the end, and as I’ve done many times while reading, I have to take a break. Set it down, and give myself time to process the feeling of grief coming in all out of order.

This may be one of the greatest books I have ever read. For someone who grew up reading Greek mythology, it was entirely predictable, and yet so very new. A breath of fresh air, and the pounding weight of a waterfall, crushing you down into the deep, cold water. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please, read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Outside”

Ada Hoffmann

Two books in a row that get a lot of use out of the word ‘heresy,’ that’s a bit of an odd coincidence.

I also quite enjoyed this. Midway through I texted a friend of mine that I could very clearly see one of the influences of this book—Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. I stand by that. It took a bit of hand-waving about the way AI works, but Hoffmann found a reasonable explanation for why AI would bother keeping humanity around. Frankly, it’s one of the good outcomes; sure, we’re basically cattle, but hey, at least we’re wagyu.

And that, right there, was what made the setting so fascinating. Humanity as the tame feedstock for the AIs, which went ahead and declared themselves Gods. (And, yes, they are referred to with the capital ‘G’ throughout.) They are the Gods, and they grant us useful technology like interstellar travel and clean energy, but we’re also kicked back to 1950s computer technology, because anything more modern gets too close to their turf. And that’s where the use of ‘heresy’ comes back into play.

It gets more interesting than that, but that’s also getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll stop there.

One other thing to note that I quite liked about the book was how well it fit in a diverse cast. The protagonist is neuroatypical, and her love interest is a woman—a fact which is, in fact, never remarked upon by anyone. To borrow a meme, this is the future liberals want.1

All in all, I found this to be quite a good read, and do recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Another thing I’ll stand by. Seriously, go read Superintelligence – being feedstock, after our death, for the AIs is pretty close to the best-case scenario for humanity. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“A Fall in Autumn”

Michael G. Williams

One of the reviews I saw for this book called it something along the lines of “a private eye novel without all the toxic masculinity,” and that’s what sold me on reading it. What kept me reading, though, was the absolutely wonderful world building. It’s thousands of years in the future, and there are passing references to legends of space travel, and references to the collapse of our current civilization, lost knowledge of the ancients, all that. But the single line that most sold me on the whole thing was a passing reference to “Arthur Kennedy and the betrayal of Camelot”. Given a couple thousand years, even with written history, it absolutely makes sense that two legendary figures would get merged together.

I really enjoy things like this; I like science fiction where a lot of different things have happened, with one Big Deal technological change that gives us all sorts of implications to explore. If I had to track it down in this one, I’d say there were two things: CRISPR allowing for genetic modification, and a nuclear war that was small enough not to cause nuclear winter, but large enough to EMP everything digital to oblivion.

All in all, this was an excellent read, and I highly recommend it. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Innate Magic”

Shannon Fay

There’s… a lot going on in this book, and having given myself the chance to sleep on it, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Even trying to make a pros and cons list hasn’t helped much. Pro – interesting system of magic. Con – weird theological angle. Pro – bisexual protagonist, yay for representation! Con – save for a single passing reference in the epilogue, all the homosexual relationships portrayed are various forms of abusive. Pro – several interesting female characters whose stories I’d like to learn more of; con – I can’t recall them, at any point, passing the Bechdel test.1

At very least, though, I can’t say the book wasn’t interesting. It took quite a while to really grip me, but by about halfway through I found myself loathe to put it down. Which, in retrospect, is the same way I tend to feel about Diana Wynne Jones, and she wrote some of my favorite books I’ve ever read, so… I suppose, by that metric at least, I enjoyed it.

A confused little review here, but as I said, it’s at very least an interesting read. Check it out.2

  1. Admittedly, I wasn’t keeping an eye out for it, and am now trying to recall from memory. I suppose there’s a scene where two of the aforementioned interesting female characters discuss one’s past, but it’s mostly in the context of her father, so… ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Floodtide”

Heather Rose Jones

The introduction to this book was familiar enough that I did a quick search and found out I’ve read another book in this universe.1 I may go back and reread that one now, in fact, because I think that “Floodtide” did a better job of introducing the system of magic in a way that makes sense to my brain.

It’s also, largely, a much more human-scale story. The protagonist isn’t changing the world, she’s just trying to get through life, finding a little bit of happiness along the way. Sure, she has friends changing the world, living a grand, romantic life, and she’s determined to help them do that as best she can, but she’s still… a regular person. Sometimes, it’s nice to read things like that — it’s what got me watching Agents of SHIELD back when it first aired, after all.2

It reminds me, a little, of the idea of a space opera. There’s all sorts of large-scale things happening in the backdrop, but the actual core of the story is about the characters and how they’re doing, why they make the choices they do, that sort of thing.

I’m not certain how well I’m selling this book, but I did quite like it. Give it a go.

  1. That was more than three years ago, now? Somehow, in my head, none of my ongoing projects have actually been ongoing that long, and yet, here I am, several years into writing little book reviews. ↩
  2. And, y’know, once Agents started being about saving the whole world instead of just, y’know, regular people trying to exist in a world with superheroes, I gave up on it. ↩
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Review

“Catfish Lullaby”

A.C. Wise

About 2/3 of the way through this book, I wound up texting a friend, “I didn’t want t get invested in this book, because it’s creepy, but here I am, queueing up the nightmares.”

And, really, that’s a great summary of the book. It’s definitely creepy, but it’s also enrapturing. Think of… a swamp. It’s a place of decay, and death – but also, full of so much life. Beautiful, and terrible; ancient, but always changing. That’s how the story feels, all the way through.

In short, it’s excellent. Not too long a read, so not too long a review, but I quite liked it. Check it out.

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Review

“Wayward Son”

Rainbow Rowell

I enjoyed “Carry On” so much that I immediately picked up the sequel and read through it. “Wayward Son” is also a fun read, but not nearly as strong as “Carry On” was; “Carry On” is a conclusion and a beginning, while “Wayward Son” is… the middle book.1 It feels like it’s trying to progress the arc of the story, while still leaving enough un-finished for there to be a properly conclusive sequel — to the degree that the “ending on a cliffhanger” doesn’t actually add much more “well, guess I need to read the next one to see how this ends” than the book already had.

Still, there’s a lot of fun worldbuilding going on — an actual proper treatment of what the United States is like in this magical world, unlike Rowling’s utter disregard for… our entire culture, really.2 It honestly leaves me wanting to see other countries in this world, as well. Anglocentrism fits something that started as a Harry Potter parody, but now that we’ve established that Magical Britain is Britain and Magical America is “America, but more libertarian”, I’d love to see, like, Magical Brazil. Magical China. Fill out the world a bit more — what sort of international laws are there governing magic? How does the rest of the world deal with the fact that the Magical United States has no government, and the only thing keeping magic from going viral is that all the magic-users are secretive by nature? Lord knows that won’t last.

I’ll wrap up my rambling here, though. It’s an alright book; I think my main issue with it is timing. If I’d been able to go through all three in the series in a row, I suspect I would’ve enjoyed it a bit more — there’s a lot of set-up for the next book, but now, instead of getting to carry right on to the pay-off, I’m just stuck waiting. So, y’know, maybe wait until next year, but then read it.

  1. Literally so: there’s a third book in the series, scheduled to be released next year, which is explicitly billed as “the third and final book in the Simon Snow series.” ↩
  2. The Fantastic Beasts film actually did an alright job of portraying my country, it feels like, but every aspect of the magical school she tried to describe as our equivalent to Hogwarts is extremely “I don’t get America.” We don’t do school houses, and you really think we’d have a single school? (I must admit, I really love watching Europeans be utterly unable to grasp just how big the US is.) ↩
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Review

“Carry On”

Rainbow Rowell

I keep going back and forth on whether or not I think this book is a parody of the Harry Potter series. On the one hand, it really obviously is – magic school in Britain, Chosen One, mysterious villain, rival from Old Money.1 But it’s doing so much more than just poking fun at these things that have become tropes; it has its own story to tell, and a system of magic that honestly makes more sense than anything Rowling ever accomplished.2

But a good part of my enjoyment of the book is also in the contrast with Harry Potter. What if Harry and Draco had been roommates? (And yes, it’s magic, so we do get to say “they can’t just strangle each other, the school has magically-enforced rules about that.”) What was Draco thinking when Harry was doing the “I have to keep an eye on him at all times” thing in their whichever-th year?3

The opening couple chapters are a delight to read. It’s the start of the school year, which makes for a very clear narrative beginning point… except it’s the start of Simon’s final school year, and he’s been a Protagonist all along, so we’re coming in very much in medias res. The amount of “as you know, Bob” is kept very low, which makes it a fun puzzle of “what all Insane Bullshit has he survived so far?”, and I’ve always enjoyed a game of “what’s the setting.”

Suffice it to say, I heartily recommend this – I’ve been trying to reduce the number of books in my to-read pile, but the moment I finished the book I immediately ordered the sequel, so here we are. If you at all like Harry Potter, and want something without the… tainted association of Rowling, please do read this delightful book.

  1. For reference, the titular character, and all the adventures that he went through prior to “Carry On,” made their original appearance in a novel centered around someone’s enjoyment of We Can’t Call It Harry Potter Because Rowling Has Lawyers For That, so it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of clear similarities. ↩
  2. There’s rules! Actual rules, explicitly stated, about how spells are created! And they aren’t “yeah there’s an insane AI somewhere running things, it thinks making us make those noises are funny and rewards us with making stuff happen.” It’s all I ever wanted. ↩
  3. For reference, here’s how I summarized that to my friend, while I was reading: “Harry is over there like ‘he’s gotta be up to something!’ Draco, meanwhile, is like ‘please, I am a fifteen year old boy, I need five minutes of Alone Time to deal with a… personal matter.’” ↩
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Review

“The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus”

Ginn Hale

I remain a complete sucker for good worldbuilding, and this is a very fun world that Hale has built. Gilded Age America, but with magic around, things went a bit differently – not least of which being that a magical war cracked the continent in half, leaving California an ocean away. In the meantime, magic has been severely regulated, and oh, don’t forget the automatons everywhere. It’s an interesting place.

And that’s without touching on the protagonists, who have an astonishing amount of backstory for such a short book.

It’s a short read – took me less than an hour, once I’d gotten invested – and I heartily recommend it. Give it a read.