J.S. Fields

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September 1, 2020

Review: Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

Genre: fantasy: superhero

Pairings: none

Queer Representation: nonbinary, bisexual woman (potentially pansexual), gay man, trans woman

Warnings: none

Review

Anna works behind the scenes as a villain tech–mostly in spreadsheets and data management. She’s low level and she likes it that way, though persistently getting short run jobs and ending at the temp agency every month is a touch grating.

During one of these no-name, low-level support gigs, Anna ends up as collateral damage when a superhero smashes her legs in simply for existing. Recovery is hard, she can’t work, and living with her best friend June is…less than perfect.

Depression sinks Anna into numbers. She likes numbers. They’ve always been her friend. Bored and in pain, Anna starts looking up how much superheros actually cost, in terms of broken buildings and broken people.

She posts her facts online.

People get interested.

Her big break (second, technically, if you count her legs) comes from Leviathan–a chitinous supervillain with a lot of money and a big, big dream. His grudge against Supercollider (the golden-haired Superman of this universe) is legendary. Anna, wanting to impress her new boss (and not lose her fancy new apartment), digs down deep, building up mass amounts of data on the world’s superheroes.

With Leviathan’s resources and her (super?) brain, they decide to rid the world of its monsters, one superhero at a time.

And Anna is really fucking good at her job.

~~

OMG THIS BOOK. It only crossed my radar because Seanan McGuire threw her arc at me and told me I needed to read it. It got lost in my ARC pile for months, then COVID hit and I finally started working my way through. WOW AM I GLAD I DID.

This is…not your standard superhero story. It’s not your standard villain story. It’s an amazing morally grey story about the costs of villainy and heroism, and how sometimes you just fucking want to eat a decent sandwich.

The book has a slow start, much like Anna’s life. It meanders. It false starts. It’s irritating enough to almost put down but Anna as a character is compelling and endearing, and, much like her best friend/roommate June, you sort of keep plodding on.

Then it hits you. BAM! Like Supercollider on a bender. All the emotional backstory and drudgey work pay off in this moment of triumph when Anna is hired by a Big Bad. And you’re so caught up in the thank god something is happening that you can directly empathize with Anna for not really caring that yes, Leviathan is evil and yes, her work is assisting that evil. Her life is moving, and it’s moving forward, and you know what? Fuck Supercollider anyway. Fuck him and his chiseled jaw and maybe fuck his longtime girlfriend (oh wait no, that’s a plotline for later in the book) for just tossing around humans like stale bagels. Anna earned this. Anna deserves this.

And just like that, you, dear reader, are also a villain.

It’s all action and emotions from there on out. Anna forms a nerd team of data specialists. Anna acquires data. Anna is really fucking good at her job. Superheroes start to fall, but in delicious, backhanded ways that are really more unraveling their lives and sense of selves than shooting them with a heat ray. It’s so good. And with each takedown, Anna slides a little bit deeper into Evil, and so do you.

This book is a 2020 must read, shitshow of a year or not. It’s filled with great lines:

I found myself hoping I wouldn’t see her back, that she’d get a good assignment and have a long lifespan (though I realized with a small pang that would mean I wouldn’t get to look at her well-muscled arms again.)

great tropes, great costumes, great emotion:

“My husband. He couldn’t deal with the career change,” he said, “He wanted to be respectable. He liked that. He liked waving me goodbye, waiting for me to come home.” His big hands were cupped around his glass. There was a noticeable callus on the ring finger of his left hand, where he must have worn a ring that was slightly too tight for his thick fingers.

“Why’d you put on a black cape?”

He bared his teeth. “The usual. Saw too many good men denied promotions or benefits. Too many honours given out to some powerful fuck’s idiot kid.”

and so much grey morality. It’s got some great sexual tension between Anna and Quantum Entanglement (I would LITERALLY MURDER someone to get a sequel where those two get together in a horizontal fashion), great boss/employee dynamics, and a best friend breakup narrative that will sear your soul.

HENCH comes out September 22, 2020, but just like…just go preorder it now. Join the forces of ‘we don’t really have the stomach for violence but the villains do have better dental’ by preordering here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: bisexual, fantasy, gay, lesbian, nonbinary, pansexual, superhero, trans

January 25, 2020

Review: Beggar’s Flip by Benny Lawrence

This is a review for a second book in a series. To read the review for the first book, click here.

Genre: fantasy – low

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual, cis gay man

Warnings: racism presented as in-world problem, racist language, implicit racism in the narrative. Deep misunderstanding about how fungi work

Review

In this (much anticipated) sequel to SHELL GAME, Pirate Queen Darren must return to her home of Torasan Isle and mop up the mess her father created. Darren was permanently exiled from Torasan, however, and returning, especially with a female lover, is not going to go over well.

Lynn, Darren’s ‘slave girl,’ is plagued by horrible flashbacks and nightmares of her step mother and the abuse she suffered in book one. Lynn knows Darren has to go home and become the noble she’s long tried to deny existed, and Lynn must find the strength within herself to let Darren go–even if it means losing her forever.

BEGGAR’S FLIP picks off right where SHELL GAME leaves off, once again transporting the reader onto the high seas with all their favorite crew members. Darren is still a foul-mouthed do-gooder running from her past, and Lynn is still a bossy little sub in the hero making business. FLIP forces both of the heroines to begin confronting their past trauma: for Lynn, her history as a serving girl and the relationship with her half sister, and for Darren, her exile.

The book begins with Darren learning of the death of her father, and watching her oldest brother die, in short order. She also learns of a traitor on Torasan that she is tasked with unmasking. Though initially unwilling to return, Lynn insists that she must, more to gain closure and heal old wounds more than anything else. Also, things are getting heated between Darren and Lynn’s sister on the lead ship, and there are only so many noble arguments Lynn can take.

Eventually, of course, Darren consents. We all know who is in control of this relationship.

Darren is greeted with open arms at her return to Torasan Isle by yet another brother (Milo), who has assumed control. Few of the siblings her age remain, except for one younger sister who seems particularly prickly. Darren is offered a chance to help rule (under Milo, of course), and a hand wave for past discretions. Her pirate fleet is useful, and her brother has big plans to bring Torasan back from the brink of economic and social disaster.

But people are starving in the streets. Darren’s father has bankrupted the isle and revolution is in the air. When the people rise up against the nobles and Darren is captured, imprisoned, and tortured, it is up to Lynn to once again enter into the land of nobility, save her hero, and do what must be done for her sister, her sister’s lover, and the people of Torasan Isle.

There’s a bit less swashbuckling in FLIP, and a lot more political mechanization. Romance, too, is pushed to the side in favor of character backstory development and focus on a few secondary characters, primarily Lynn’s sister, Ariadne, and her lover, Latoya. It’s still a great adventure, and a few nice BDSM lines are snuck in here and there to remind you of the flavor of SHELL GAME (and as with the previous book, there is no sex on page).

The biggest problem with BEGGAR’S FLIP comes in how it deals with in-world racism, and implicit racism. There were a few problematic elements in SHELL GAME, but they were small enough that, while noteworthy, did not substantially detract from the book. In BEGGAR’S FLIP the racism cannot be ignored, and in fact is dragged into the spotlight in several areas, where Latoya is mocked for her skin tone and size by other characters (the ‘good’ characters refute the overt stuff, it should be noted).

The issues here are more in how problematic elements are portrayed. Homophobia is presented as an in-world issue as well, yet none of the lesbian characters are subjected to anything near as pervasive and derogatory as Latoya. Lesbianism is also not called out at basically every opportunity, unlike the two characters with darker skin, who, the reader is reminded constantly, do not look like everyone else.

His saddle-brown face was flushed with anger. (note that the white characters seldom, if ever, get their skin tone mentioned. This is known as white default)

Compounding that is basically every description or scene with Latoya, wherein it is mentioned that she is black, or very tall, or very muscular, or very strong, or some combination. Or that she feels little pain. While this bias is implicit more than overt (and it is clear the author is trying very hard to give Latoya agency), it falls squarely into problematic tropes of consistent othering, magical negroes, sassy black woman, and the tropes of black people being valued for their strength and physical fitness (see essays here and here), as well as the dominant black woman trope.

I could see Latoya already, looming head and shoulders above the rest of my sailors as they cleared the decks. The coil of chain draped over her shoulder was smeared with bits of things that I didn’t want to think about.

“Sand ape.”

“You think that’s actually a woman?”

“I think you’d have to shave it if you wanted to know for sure.”

“I dunno if shaving it would help. Probably isn’t much of a difference between a gorilla and a brown bitch, once you take off the hair.”

Latoya smashed her fist down on the rail with a shattering crack, and wood splinters flew.

I jumped. I challenge you not to jump when someone of Latoya’s size starts breaking things near your head.

Some other minor quibbles came up, more dealing with a lack of research more than anything. It should be noted that placing moldy bread on an open wound is a great way to get an even worse infection and potentially die of sepsis.

“She scraped the mould off the bread, rubbed it on a rag, tied it against the sore, and then she pulled out a pallet and made me take a nap…And do you know, when I woke up, I felt better.”

The recurring discussion of using moldy bread to heal infections (instead of leeches and such) is deeply problematic, in that A) bread molds from several thousand different fungi; B) penicillin is derived from just a few species of Penicillium; C) Penicillium is a HUGE genus; D) it takes thousands of cultures of the right species of Penicillium to make enough penicillin to fight an infection; D) penicillin is a fungal secondary metabolite that is secreted by certain fungal species. It has to be extracted off a substrate. You could shove three whole loaves of moldy bread into an open leg wound and it still wouldn’t be enough penicillin to do anything. Anything.

Bows have not, nor have they ever, been made from rotten wood. Traditional bows, especially those made from yew trees, were made from the heartwood/sapwood interaction zone. Tree heartwood is dense and rigid. Tree sapwood (usually a lighter color) is springy and soft. With the heartwood on the inside and the sapwood on the outside, the bow has strength and elasticity. Sapwood is not rot. Sapwood is a normal part of the tree. Rotten wood, especially white rotted wood, does not bend–it breaks apart into mushy white strands.

“But let’s say you’re making a longbow. The best longbows come from yew trees that are rotten on one side. The other side, the good one, has to hold the tree’s full weight, so the wood there gets denser and stronger.

This is also not how reaction wood works, for the record. Wood that grows in a tree in response to lean, or stress like identified above, is actually very poor quality. Depending on whether it is a conifer or a deciduous tree, it lacks various layers of the wood cell wall and its microfibril angles are all kinds of screwed up. Reaction wood also has much more longitudinal shrinkage than regular wood. It is terrible for building anything, especially something you want to have strength.

Despite all of this, BEGGAR’S FLIP has all the fun quips and dialogue we’ve come to expect from Benny Lawrence, and is worth a read even if it gets filed under ‘problematic favorite.’ SHELL GAME remains one of my all time favorite books, and I would definitely read another in this series.

Regon liked breasts, Ariadne had two of them–relationships had been built on less.

Ah, but the best relationships are built on exactly that!

You can tie yourself to a mast of a pirate ship and hope for a very hot pirate queen lover by buying the ebook here and paperback here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: bisexual, gay, lesbian, pirate, problematic tropes, reviews

April 28, 2019

Review: Fruits of the Gods by William C. Tracy

Genre: fantasy (high/epic)

Pairings: f/f, f/m

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, trans, cis gay men

Warnings: (as listed on the book jacket) abuse, rape, mutilation, torture, incest

Implied Tropes Later Subverted (but important to note anyway incase of trigger): lesbian after rape, magical travelers, Kill Your Gays

Review

Disclaimer – I worked as a CP and sensitivity reader for this book. I am more intimately familiar with its content than most books I review

Sisters Belili and Kisare, born slaves, find a magical box with a strange seed while out working one night. Determined to change their fate, the sisters escape from the orchard and, with the help of another group of outcasts, learn to use their own magic to bring back the gods who once ruled the land.

Epic fantasy is rare in small press, which is why I always get so excited when I find it.

FRUITS is a blend of the grit from GAME OF THRONES and the regimented magic system of any of Brandon Sanderson’s work. It paces much more along the lines of STARLESS by Jacqueline Carey, and has elements seen in many small press SFF titles, such as deeper introspections.

The POV is pretty tight for epic fantasy, juggling only between Bel and Kisa. This takes out the elements I find most irritating in epic fantasy–the constant head hopping–and allows for a steady pace as the sisters move from journey to final showdown at the palace.

The secondary characters get ample ‘screen’ time in the book, from the charismatic Hbelu, prince of the Asha-Urmana, to the delightedly subversive Ligish–a slave turned spy. Keeping with epic fantasy tropes, the good people versus villains are clearly delineated, and our villains are the mustache-twirling level of evil that can be really nice to read–especially when they get their just desserts.

FRUITS has trigger warnings, and with good reason. Some caustic themes are explored in the narrative, and some problematic tropes are presented (and then subverted), including a ‘kill your gays’ fake out (unreliable villain diatribe, don’t worry, no queer people actually die!), a ‘caravanner’ stereotype, dealt with through larger worldbuilding, a piece of which is quoted below:

(here Kisa describes the ‘camp’ of the Asha-Urmana (caravaners), which is nothing of the sort)

The construction was finer than the master’s house, and the boards on the upper portions of the dwellings were coated with a clear varnish that kept the original glow of the wood. The stone at the base looked like polished marble, and Kisare wondered where they quarried it. The stone at the Aricaba orchard was gray and drab granite. This marble fit together so tightly she could see no crack between the blocks. The streets were similarly made of flat fitted stones. 

It’s worth noting, however, that the rape and incest portions take place entirely ‘off-screen.’

For queer content, the book has a nice romance line for Bel and Ligish, though they do meet through a shared trauma, so keep those trigger warnings in mind. Queerness is canon in the world, and plenty of instances are described through basic worldbuilding, such as:

“Once we get you better clothes and a little paint for your faces, you will have half the population of Karduniash falling over you.” She leaned in closer. “And I’m not just talking about the men.” She laughed at Kisare’s expression, but Bel looked thoughtful. “The capital is a lot different from a mountain orchard.”

One of the major secondary characters is a trans woman, and her identity is neither brutally revealed (so help me if I read another ‘clothes get ripped off and oh so-and-so is a different gender oh my! book I will scream), nor more than a blip on anyone’s radar. Gender as a whole is dealt with well, and I am particularly fond of the scene below, where Bel is trying to figure out which of the ruling twins is the man and which is the woman:

“So this is the pretty one,” the one on the right said. Belili used the last of the prunus juice, held under her tongue, to look at the person’s throat. Female. Then the other was the male twin.

I’m a sucker for a clearly defined magic system (which is why I read Sanderson), and the fruit magic tied to hair color really worked for me. Like any good magic system, the benefits and drawbacks are well defined, and it is a delight to watch Bel and Kisa discover not only their own colored hair (all non-magic people are blonde in the book and slaves’ hair is bleached weekly to hide any magic hair they might possess) but their ability to wield the godfruit.

The sisters’ interactions, from loyalty to bickering and back again, came across as particularly authentic. Though the two must rely on each other to survive, old slights still crop up and, as they are worked through, help round out the characters. It’s also really nice to see an epic fantasy lead set that isn’t a m/f love interest set, or a group of men/elves/orcs/dragon slayers, whatever. And even with two female leads there is no backbiting and cattiness–just two sisters who need each other, love each other, but also really don’t like each other sometimes. Just like real life.

Lovers of Brandon Sanderson’s MISTBORN trilogy, GAME OF THRONES (yes, there is incest between twins!), and epic fantasy that doesn’t need a whole new language to function, will enjoy FRUITS OF THE GODS.

You can get your own malus fruit and join in on the adventure here by preordering!

Tracy’s website

Tracy’s Goodread’s page

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, gay, lesbian, reviews, trans

April 21, 2019

Review: Yule Planet by Angel Martinez

Genre: science fiction (novella)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, nonbinary, cis male

Warnings: none

Review

Sofia can’t wait for her exciting vacation to Yule Planet – a Christmas wonderland of snow and ancient traditions. During transport to the planet, however, a malfunction in her pod maroons her in an isolated snow drift. The ‘natives’–convicts on work release–rescue her but they’ve got to finish their run before they can take her back to the resort and her long awaited vacation. Much hilarity and mayhem ensues, as well as a sweet romance.

YULE PLANET is another holiday novella by Angela Martinez, who got on my radar after I read SAFETY PROTOCOLS FOR HUMAN HOLIDAYS. YULE PLANET lacks some of the humor of SAFETY, but has much more adventure and fun, feathery dinosaur pets. The romance, as always, is well paced, and the sex scene satisfying without bogging down the short narrative.

There’s an added dimension to this book that comes from Sofia’s background as a logistics accountant and the management of the Yule Planet corporation, lends excellent tension to what could have been a simple romance plotline (not that I don’t enjoy a simple romance, mind). Helping reform a problematic organization, getting to ride a tame and pet-like chionisaurs, a hot make-out scene in a small shower–all blends together into another delightful and fluffy holiday short.

You can book your own vacation package on Yule planet in ebook here and paperback here. Chionisaur rides extra.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: gay, lesbian, nonbinary, reviews, sci fi

March 3, 2019

Review: An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Genre: fantasy – portal fantasy

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: pansexual, cis lesbian, cis gay, aromantic, agender, trans

Warnings: none

Review

Saffron Coulter, a mild-mannered but angry sixteen year old girl from Earth, has had enough. Between the sexual harassment from the boys at her school to the uncaring faculty, Saffron’s biggest wish is that someone would just stand up to all the BS. Someone other than her, that is.

During a particularly nasty encounter with a schoolboy, Saffron is saved by the unknown Gwen, a woman with a mysterious past. Saffron ends up following Gwen to a more secluded area of the school–mostly to thank her–when a portal opens. And Saffron, being done with boys and high school and Earth, hops right in.

What follows is a twisting, engaging if not sometimes confusing, adventure through Kena–a magic using world teetering on the brink of war. Gwen, the worldwalker Saffron followed through the portal, must bring her up to speed on a very complex social hierarchy and several religions lest Saffron get herself killed through simply existing. As happens in these types of books, Saffron soon becomes ensconced in the war and ends up a key player in the final battles.

Format

I have mixed feelings about this book. The beginning is strong, and Saffron a sympathetic protagonist. Her motivations for going through the portal make a lot of sense and her first day or so on Kena has a lot of strong action. The setting is delivered well, the secondary characters are charming and delightful and cruel, and enough tropes are employed to help the reader feel comfortable in the world before they have a lot of information.

Where I struggled was with the swapping third to omniscient voice and the number of characters who got to wield either or both.

In some places, the POV switch is indicated by a line gap. In some the head hopping happens simply between normal paragraphs. There never seemed to be a reason for why narration changed, and it didn’t seem to follow the character with the most agency or interesting happenings, either. Due to the sheer volume of characters that were allowed a POV, I soon lost interest in a sizable section of the world.

The amount of time spent in Saffron’s head is excellent, and helped pull my interest back in every time she was on page. However, the extensive worldbuilding and political mechanics were beyond the scope of one book or at least, beyond the scope of Saffron’s understanding and therefore also beyond the reader’s.

Because I was so invested in Saffron and Zech (a younger girl who ends up in a sort of mind-meld with Saffron) I persisted through the book. The back third was mostly delightful, and the action, especially when the group hit the queen council and Zech and Saffron had to go through trials, was by far the best part. The final battle as well was very well done and the book had a fantastic, melancholy-but-still-happy ending.

It is saying something, however, that I skimmed pages and pages of this book, and almost the entire princess storyline (after her introduction, when it was clear she would only be annoying) and still felt like I didn’t miss anything. The ending made perfect sense and the final battle was still very compelling. As AN ACCIDENT OF STARS skims close to high fantasy, I wonder if it wasn’t shooting for world-as-character levels of description, and just fell a bit short.

Some excellent parts

I enjoyed that Saffron is Australian, which isn’t a POV I get to see a lot of in mainstream fiction. The racism of the teachers and Saffron’s own internal racism are addressed on page, and that was wonderful. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a fantasy that called out the implicit bias of its characters so directly:

“Not seeing Viya as a queen because she’s not white is racist,” she whispered into the pillow. “I’m being racist.”

British racism was also touched upon:

She didn’t say, ‘the police wouldn’t look for me when I vanished, because they didn’t think a missing black woman mattered.’ She didn’t say, ‘my parents convinced themselves I’d run off with a boy I was too ashamed to bring home, and when I came back, the second thing they asked was if I’d had an abortion.’

The trans rep was also fantastic, which isn’t surprising since the author is genderqueer. The ‘alikrevaya’ (trans) are seen as a natural variance and allowed to declare themselves however they wish. The worldbuilding of a culture of trans acceptance was so seamless that it actually took me a few pages to realize what the author was talking about. Also, they have sex-affirmation magic. Fantastic.

“It means she was born with her body and spirit in conflict, so the priests of Kara used the sevikmet to reshape her.”

“Bodies are bodies, and hearts are hearts. The priestess hood admits women only, though flesh plays no role in such determinations;”

Overall, AN ACCIDENT OF STARS is strong portal fantasy with solid queer rep and a sweet f/f line. The action scenes in particular stand out, although the book would have benefitted from some tighter 3rd limited.

To go through your own portal to Kena, buy the book here in print and here in ebook.

~~

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Filed Under: book review Tagged With: agender, aromantic, fantasy, gay, lesbian, nonbinary, pansexual, portal fantasy, reviews, sci fi, trans

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