J.S. Fields

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January 17, 2021

Review: Heathen, vol 2, by Natasha Alterici and Rachel Deering

This review is for the second volume in a comic series. To read the review for volume 1, click here.

Genre: fantasy – alternate history

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual, cis pansexual, gender fluid

Warnings: none

Review

Aydis is back! Having freed Brynhild and spent some time in Freyja’s love nest, she now searches for Heimdall, the entrance to the land of the gods, in an effort to end Brynhild’s curse (and take out Odin if the opportunity permits). Adventures abound, including a brush with killer mermaids and a ship full of buxom lady pirates.

Now separated from Aydis, Brynhild and Freyja get their own adventures, too, with Freyja falling from Odin’s grace for aiding Brynhild and Aydis. There’s a great scene where Freyja, trying to re-entice Odin, turns into a male version of herself which was perfectly drawn and very Loki-esque.

Although this volume doesn’t push the story particularly far, the art remains enchanting and the promise of an eventual Aydis/Brynhild arc continues to tease. Like the previous volume there are plenty of bikini-tops, cleavage shots (hell, Freyja doesn’t even wear a top), and women who just don’t give a fuck. Odin is still a jerk, but he’s down an eye so hey! Things are looking up!

Volume 2 is on Amazon, and should be there for a while, though I know there is still a rights issue going on.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: bisexual, fantasy, gender fluid, lesbian, pansexual

January 10, 2021

Review: Heathen, Vol 1, by Natasha Alterici and Rachel Deering

This review is for the first volume in a comic series. To read the review for volume 2, click here 

Genre: fantasy – alternate history

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual, cis pansexual

Warnings: none

Review

Viking woman Aydis lives at a critical moment in history, where the old gods are falling away and new gods creeping in. Her people attempt to hold strong to the old ways, and are not forgiving when Aydis is caught kissing her childhood best friend. Her father is given the choice – force his daughter to marry a man, or kill her.

Aydis has no desire to marry a man. Her father takes her into the woods with her trusty (tiny) horse Saga, and exiles her instead.

Alone for the first time, Aydis sets out on a hero’s journey to prove her bravery by freeing Brynhild, former leader of the Valkyries. It is said that Brynhild can only be rescued from her ring of magic fire by someone ‘worthy’.

Aydis sees no reason why that can’t be her.

These comics came out ages ago in digital, and I backed the kickstarter also ages ago to get the rest of the volumes and the print versions. Volumes one and two just shipped a few weeks ago, and it was a delight to get to hold the artwork in my hands and take my time reading through Aydis’ adventures.

I do not generally read comics, so something has to be just right for me to buy them, especially if I intend on keeping them. Aydis is the kind of heroine I love–bumbling, willful, and sure of herself despite what society thinks. Her (eventual) affair with Brynhild is VERY slow burn, so don’t expect any action in volume one (or two, for that matter). Instead, savor the imagery and worldbuilding as Alterici and Deering take you on a savory walk through Norse mythology. There are adventures along the way, talking horses (+10), warring gods, scantily clad women in snowy landscapes (+20) and some full page illustrations that tear at your heart.

The story does not entirely focus on Aydis, and Brynhild gets a fair bit of action and agency, as does the current leader of the Valkyries, Freyja (who is very into teh sexy time). Together, the three of them eventually task themselves with ending Odin’s reign…and maybe finding love along the way. Regardless, there is eyeball squishing and giant orgies and battling the patriarchy in tiny little bras. Something for everyone!

Heathen appears to be available on Comixology right now, though I know there are some rights issues going on so I am not sure how long it will be up there.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: comic, fantasy, lesbian

December 27, 2020

Review: Escape to Pirate Island by Niamh Murphy

Genre: fantasy – pirates, lesbian on boats

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: forced removal of a woman’s clothing which exposes her gender

Review

Catherine ‘Cat’ Meadows, born a landed lady, is also a smuggler on the high seas. After her husband’s death (along with a few others) Cat becomes wanted for murder and must take passage on a ship as a cabin boy (concealing her gender…I’m fairly certain you know where my review is going from here).

Lily Exquemelin is the daughter of a landed man and a whore, and has recently been orphaned. Her father of course has left Many Debts, and Lily must clear them or end up in debtors prison. She has an old treasure map and key left from her father’s privateering days. Desperation sends her to seek out a ship she can hire with very little money, for a crew that will sail without knowing where they are going.

Only scoundrels would take such a journey, of course, just as only scoundrels would take on a cabin boy with no experience and no references. Catherine and Lily end up on the same ship, where everyone has a secret and everyone is also hunting for Mr. Exquemelin’s lost treasure. There are fifteen thousand mutinies (an estimation), character motivations switch at the drop of a hat, a kissing scene that quickly leads to some lackluster deserted island sex, and a reasonably happy ending.

This is a very hard book to review. On the one hand, LESBIAN PIRATES. Sign me up. It has all the tropes I love–the bastard heiress, the brusque pirate with a heart of gold, a little bit of cross dressing, swashbuckling, and boats. The writing is solid in terms of syntax and grammar, and I never felt beaten to death with adjectives or endless redundancy. Structurally the story was fine, with a five part act and a wide crew within a decently depicted universe.

Unfortunately, the writing felt like the author was trying to subvert tropes, but didn’t understand enough about the tropes to subvert them. Other times it felt like they wanted to lean into the tropes but not enough groundwork was put down first. Cat is our ‘top’, but alternates between rough and tumble and being a giant pushover who can’t seem to drive the plot. She spends most of the book as a plot spectator, being pushed and pulled wherever the narrative needs her to go. Lily is the femme, sometimes a Power Femme, sometimes a High Femme, dependent upon plot needs and whether Cat is topping or not.

There was little voice distinction between the two leads, and it often felt like their personalities intertwined…as if they were one character continuously split in whatever direction the author needed. It was impossible to gain a foothold into the world, and Cat’s inability to push the plot lead me to skimming most of her sections. Normally hers would be the character I would be most engaged with, but there was just so much failure. And not failure in the world, so much as just failure to act.

The book also contained the trope I hate most in the world, the exposure of a character’s gender (/birth sex) by forced removal of clothing. It wasn’t as gratuitous as in some other books since Cat IS a woman, just masquerading by choice, but Cat is still forced to be naked from the waist down right before she is whipped with a cat-o-nine-tails. Hard pass. Especially with the jeering and leering that comes along with it from the pirate crew.

(trigger warning – the excerpt is below wherein Cat’s gender is forcibly revealed)

“Remove the boy’s shirt,” he ordered them.

The men stepped forward and, to Strong’s horror, they ripped off the shirt.

They laughed and stepped back to reveal what appeared to be a boy in a girdle. 

“What’s this?” Kingsley spat, infuriated. “Armour is it? Did you hope to spare yourself the pain? One hundred lashes!” He pulled a knife from his belt and tossed it to one of the guardsmen. “Cut it off.”

Strong looked round for Fletcher. ‘Where’s the man gone?’ he thought. He couldn’t understand why he wasn’t next to hm, ready to partake in whatever action they could. 

‘Few men can survive a hundred lashes,’ he was panicking, ‘few men.’

Then suddenly there she was.

No longer ‘Jack.’ By a long way, she was no longer Jack; her hair was loose in the breeze, her eyes defiant, and her chest bare. There was no shame about her manner. She stood like a Queen of the Amazons held captive by savages.

And yes, I do appreciate that Cat owns it there at the end, but the act itself, and the threat of doing more, is just so overdone for me. Props, however, go to the author for including the first ever discussion of menstural product needs on a pirate ship that I have ever seen.

There’s so much potential in this book, and yet it really fell flat for me. I felt no chemistry between the two leads, found the writing wandered where it needed to be snappy, and was too snappy where it needed to breathe. It’s not a bad read, it’s just a boring one. An additional round of edits to trim here and expand there could have really brought this out to SHELL GAME level of awesome. Still, if you’re into lesbian pirate adventures it is worth checking out. Boring lesbian pirates are better than no lesbian pirates, always.

Grab a confusing cowboy hat (see front cover) and join your own lesbian pirate gang here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, lesbians on boats, pirate, problematic tropes

December 4, 2020

Review: The Dragon’s Lover by Samantha Sabian

Genre: romance (fantasy)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis pansexual

Warnings: implied child sex trafficking

 

Review

Dragons are a lusty lot known for grinding their lovers into dust.

 

I could pretend that this is my first foray into shifter romance but that would be a bald-faced lie. This is, however, my first f/f shifter romance.

It was exactly as trashy as I hoped it would be.

Cover

Are they two men? Are they a man and a dragon? Are they two women rendered by someone who doesn’t understand how hormones generally impact physical features? WHO KNOWS. The one facing us is definitely the shifter dragon lady, who is supposed to be A) fairly geriatric and B) buxom. The one whose back is turned is supposed to be wiry and fairly androgynous so I suppose that one isn’t too bad…except this cover steals from basically every m/m romance cover I’ve ever seen. Not a good call for marketing.

Plot

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay no seriously it tries. Raine is half Super Hot Not-Elf, Super Hot Not-Berserker (they have their own names in this), whose people were once in league with dragons and also once sex slaves. Don’t overthink it. She spends the first third of the book wandering around trying to find something the reader doesn’t know about. By page nineteen she finds a dragon lady, who promptly takes her 200-some year old virginity with a lot of phrases like ‘unrestrained passion,’ ‘overwhelming sensation,’ and ‘she moderated the size of the appendage she’d created.’

Why yes, there are magical dildos in this story. I’m so glad you asked.

The two boink a few more times (amusing, but not particularly hot with the strained prose) and then move to a remote mountain location to shack up permanently. Here, the plot finds them and drags Raine off on an Epic Quest which mostly confused me because really, no one reads these kind of books for the plot.

A plot summary from the back of the book (to prove to you I’m not making this up):

The Hyr’rok’kin, monstrous demonds of the underworld, are spewing forth from the Empty Land. Raine is called to join a band of humans, elves, and dwarves in a quest to stop the invasion. She fears no enemy, no injury, not even death itself. But something is waiting at the Gates of Hel, something that seeks to separate Raine from the dragon she is bound to for all of time.

Not mentioned is that one of the dragon’s human daughters goes with this merry band, and she ends up watching her mother, in human form, bang Raine. The mother knows she is there, too. It’s very weird (but not as weird as that cuttlefish m/m shifter book I DID NOT READ, NOPE, a few years ago).

If weird lesbian shifter camp is your thing, this is your book. I will point out that there is in fact NO lover-ground-into-dust scene (uh, reader promises!) nor are the sex scenes well written. They’re not erotic either, mostly consisting of a lot of thrusting and purple prose. The plot made me giggle, but honestly this book is just what 2020 called for.

There is a touch of surprising nonbinary rep:

“It is said,” the man said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, “that Arlanians were not truly man or woman until their 18th year, existing in a neither/nor state that was irresistible.”

A) Yes, the number eighteen was in numeric digits, not spelled out

B) Yes, nonbinary people ARE irresistible, but only once they’re of an age of consent (for future reference)

You can try to seduce an old dragon lady by pretending to be a computer model from an m/m book cover by purchasing the book here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, pansexual, romance

October 7, 2020

Review: The Winter Duke by Claire Eliza Bartlett

Genre: fantasy: sword and sorcery (YA)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, nonbinary, gay men, cis bi/pansexual (not explicit)

Warnings: none

 

Review

Ekata is a middle child in a huge, vicious royal family that decides heirship via Battle Royale. The princess has no interest in ruling Kylma Above, however, and is days away from leaving for university, where she will train as a biologist. All she has to do is make it through the crown prince’s bride selection ceremony. Her bags are packed. Her nurse is ready. Finally, finally, she has the chance to escape!

The morning after the bride selection, Ekata awakes to find her entire family has fallen into comas, leaving her the Duke of Kylma Above. Worse, her adopted brother, mysteriously immune from the sleeping sickness, wants to take over the kingdom. Unwilling to let her sadistic step-sibling win, Ekata agrees to be interim duke while she attempts to solve the mystery of her family’s sickness. But Sigis has plotted for too long to let sixteen-year-old Ekata keep the throne. The princess must weigh her desires for university, her loathing of her family and the throne, against a budding romance with her new warrior-wife Inkar and her desire to learn more about the mysterious mer-people of Kylma Below–the merpeople that may be the key to unleashing her magical abilities.

THE WINTER DUKE was a surprising YA. The start was slow, as I find with many books in this genre, but picked up steam quickly. The middle third of the book was absolutely fantastic, and the worldbuilding unlike anything I’ve come across (why wouldn’t you have an ice castle above a lake that has fish people in a mirror kingdom, I ask??). Then the back third sagged again as the book became mired in politics.

Still, despite the politics-FISH PEOPLE OMG-politics arc, what kept me reading was Ekata. I have never encountered a heroine in YA who is as brazen, confident, and successful in fantasy. I’m much more used to the trope of ‘confident and slapped down, confident and then bad thing happens,’ etc. And bad things do happen, but this was a world where, generally, when Ekata spoke, people did what they were told. And that’s because this book achieved what many do not–it is (mostly) free of patriarchal bias.

I don’t mean this in a ‘there is no patriarchy’ way. I mean it in a ‘the lead lady character is treated the same as her male counterparts.’ Most fantasy books, and some sci fi, seem to bundle sexism in with things that our heroine must overcome, and it is so tiresome. THE WINTER DUKE gives us ageism, sure, and palace politics (blurgh), but no ‘why would we listen to a little girl!?!’ BS.

And just, fucking thank you, Claire Eliza Bartlett, for that.

Other redeeming qualities of the book include the love interest Inkar, who doesn’t give a fuck about politeness and carries to axes around wherever she goes, yet looks like a confection in her dresses. +10 for YA power femme/soft butch.

Their faces ranged from bored to angry–except for one girl, the girl who’d smiled at me last night. her muscle-toned arms were bare under a green wool vest, and her dark hair had little light streaks in it, as if it had caught pieces of the foreign sun and spun them into gold. I frowned at her crest, a serpent wound in a knot, She didn’t speak–she just drummed her fingers on her belt, where two ax loops sat empty.

She smiled at me again, and my stomach flipped. She had fresh kohl around her eyes, pink on her cheeks, and red on her lips. She looked like she was enjoying herself.

She looked like she laughing at me.

—

“Salijom I command you not to laugh at me,” Inkar grumbled. I looked around, confused, then Realized that Saljo was the name of the guard. How could Inkar know his name better than I did?

Saljo snorted. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“This is awful,” Inkar said. She kicked the inside of her skirt. “How am I supposed to protect you in a skirt like this?”

“You’re not supposed to protect me,” I said. “The guards protect me. They protect you, too.”

“I do not need protection,” Inkar replied. “Except you buried my axes under an entire sheep.”

 

+20 for completely random merpeople under the castle, which I was NOT expecting and was really the best damn worldbuilding I’ve seen in a long time. My regret there is that we didn’t spend nearly enough time in that arena, instead focusing on the (tired) politics of murder monarchies. -5 for underwater fungi, since fungi are obligate aerobes, but I’ll let that slide for now (foxfire does NOT work this way…). +5 for absolute, without a doubt, lesbianism:

“Careful,” he purred.

Was he flirting with me?

Oh no.

He was flirting with me.

Still, for YA (which you all know is never my favorite), this book was a damn delight. Read it for Ekata, read it for Inkar, read it for the fish people and their magic, or read it because dudes do actually get their comeuppance, and you don’t have to wait till the end of the book to see it, either. Whatever. Click here to get yourself an ice rose and settle in for a read you’ll be delighted to share with your daughters (and other offspring, but particularly your daughters).

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, YA

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Review: Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan

January 24, 2021

Genre: science fiction - urban (also lesbians plus dinosaurs!) Pairings: f/f Queer Representation: cis … [Read More...]

Review: Heathen, vol 2, by Natasha Alterici and Rachel Deering

January 17, 2021

This review is for the second volume in a comic series. To read the review for volume 1, click here. Genre: fantasy - … [Read More...]

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