J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

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. To read the review for volume three, 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.

Review: The Adventure of the Naked Guide by Cynthia Ward

This review is for the third book in the series. Read the review for book one here, and book two here.

Genre: science fiction (alternate history / lesbians but also dinosaurs)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis pansexual

Warnings: none

 

Review

Half-vampire Lucy IS BACK on another adventure with her vampire lover/girlfriend/it’s complicated. In this installment her human mother (a vampire hunter, once raped by Dracula, who is Lucy’s father) has gone missing and British intelligence has tapped Lucy, with her otherworldly powers, to bring her home. (Lucy is also related to Attila the Hun, for reference).

The Great War has a new front, however…THE CENTER OF THE EARTH! Complete with dinosaurs, mole people, and basically every piece of camp you could ever imagine (except the Martian heat rays. Those were on the Titanic in book one. Also Tarzan.). Lucy must journey inside the earth to rescue her mother from the eeeeevil Dr. Krüger and some feisty tyrannosauruses.

But her journey is not without passion! Though girlfriend/vampire Carmilla cannot accompany Lucy because Victorian Sexual Mores and Lesbians Are Evil, Lucy gets help from a very hot proto-human/mole person (it’s not quite clear) who ends up sneaking a kiss while forcing Lucy to confront her own internal homophobia.

You can’t keep a good vampire down, however, and Carmilla pops up just after the kiss, having witnessed everything and, very amused, continues to prod Lucy on her emotional journey. Then the plot shows back up, everyone gets kidnapped by the eeeeevil Dr. Krüger, there are some machine men, Lucy’s mother finds out vampires aren’t evil (which basically destroys her since she had to kill her bestie after a vampire turned her) and Lucy completes her moral journey.

Like every installment of the Lucy Harper chronicles, this book was an absolute blast. The camp is just so well done. The subtle references to Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, etc., are perfect. This is pulp science fiction the way it was meant to be. I want a dozen more of these at least, and Lucy and Carmilla better have some awesome vampire babies STAT that get to ride dinosaurs around downtown London.

And as always, the book has excellent quotable lines. My favorite:

Standing close to attractive people in a state of undress has a predictable effect on my libido.

You can visit the center of the earth on the back of any number of dinosaurs by buying the book here.

 

 

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.

Review: Fall of the Imperium by William C. Tracy

Genre: science fantasy

Pairings: m/m/f

Queer Representation: bisexuality, pansexuality, nonbinary (multiple types, including third gender, agender, gender fluid)

Warnings: none

Review

In this final book in the Dissolution Cycle trilogy, Sam journeys to a new Nether facet to learn about his two unusual house colors, Enos attempts to recover from her time with her kidnappers, and Inas grows into his Aridori body (as well as a bunch of the old Speaker’s memories). The romance between the three apprentices heats up (there’s a cute little SFW sex scene in there), and Sam learns to draw strength from his friends to help manage (not cure!) his anxiety.

Of course, all is not well in the Nether. Elgynerdeen (giant millipede things that eat Nether crystal) keep dropping out of Drains all over the Imperium. They eat anything and anyone in their path, and seem to be hell bent on something in the Assembly Hall. We also have an ancient Aridori civil war resurfacing, Sam battling with the weird voice in his head (while trying to sort out the House of Time and the House of Matter), and yeah, a bunch of teenagers running around trying to keep the adults from dying.

Fans of the series will enjoy the tie-ins to all the various novellas. Mandamon makes several appearances, as do the Pixies, and mention is made of the new species above the Nether clouds that was learned about in JOURNEY TO THE TOP OF THE NETHER (the middle grade novella).

It’s a great wrap to the trilogy, with plenty of plot threads to keep the series well alive. Tracy has created an expansive universe with no end in sight to the potential worldbuilding, and it’s always fun to play around in the giant sandbox of music-based science fantasy. And as always, the nonbinary representation remains strong. My favorite passage from this book:

Now he looked closer, Inas didn’t think the pronoun encompassed multiple personalties as for the assassins or the Accretion. Instead it denoted someone who did not belong to a male or female gender. There had been a few in his family line who chose similar pronouns, though Aridori tended to separate themselves into binaries, perhaps because being born as two instances–two possibilities unfolding–predetermined them into dual categories.

You can join the Great Assembly of Species by buying the book here!

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.

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