J.S. Fields

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March 13, 2021

Review: Uncharted by Alli Temple

Genre: fantasy: pirates / lesbians on boats

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, nonbinary

Warnings: none

Review

Once upon a time Georgina (George), a minor noble, had a BFF in the form of a lower class little girl who liked to get up to all kinds of adventures. Then George’s father goes and dies and George is sent off to school. No longer bringing in money as a companion, her BFF is dressed up as a boy and sent out to sea to make money for her family.

Fast forward. The kingdom is in distress from taxation and other noble issues. Women are deeply repressed. George tries to help by acting as a low-level spy which everyone seems to know about and no one much cares. There are fancy dresses involved. Anyway. Her brother is kind of an ass and engages her to the eeeeevil prince because Money, and George must of course, say yes because, again, Money.

But lo! Danger is afoot! For the dreaded pirate Cinder roams the oceans and seems to really like attacking this little kingdom. On an outing with the prince, Cinder attacks near the dock and George is taken prisoner on her pirate ship, away from all her fancy dresses and parties and horrible marriage prospects.

Cinder is, of course, the old BFF (if you didn’t get that from the prologue, you don’t read enough lesbian pirate adventures) but is really bitter. And George is really naive. And the prince is really angry. He wants George back so he can publicly murder her and get a lot of sympathy from the people. Cinder wants George to realize how privileged she is. George just wants off the damn boat. Hijinks happen, cannons are fired, dresses are made and destroyed, and Cinder is everyone’s favorite saucy pirate captain trope. HEA and yes, the prince gets what he deserves.

 

This book was… you know when you go to the fair and you just really want funnel cake? It won’t keep you full but damn it you want it and it’s so damn delicious. This book is funnel cake. Will it stick with you long? Probably not. But it’s a known commodity of tropes and archetypes and it is indeed so damn good. George is a bit irritating at first but she has a reasonable character arc, and Cinder is everything I’d want from a lesbian pirate love interest. The prince is perfectly mustache-twirling evil, the side characters are diverse, and there’s a reasonable amount of backstabbing and criminal overlords. +10 for rollicking adventures on the high seas!

It does have a few drawbacks, like the setting. The Kingdom of Redmere is deeply patriarchal and homophobic, which I don’t generally like in my books since I have to live that every day. It kind of takes away from the ‘escapism’ of fiction. But it’s well done and it does make the ending that much more enjoyable. For a taste:

“It’s not true!” the man shouted from the back of the wagon. “I’ve done nothing wrong!”

“That’s what they all say,” a man near my right shoulder muttered to no one in particular. “I heard they actually found him in bed with another man, No shame. No deniability. Disgusting.” He spat on the ground.

~~

It wasn’t always like this. At least, that was what the old women who sat on stoops and old men who hunched over cups of strong tea would tell you. They’d say that, in their youth, Redmere had still been poor, but people had been free to dress as they pleased and earn a living any way they could, even if women had usually raised the children while men had made most of the money.

Then the king had come. He was a younger son, and he’d poisoned his brother to take the throne. He said the country needed change, a return to something he called “societal order.” Under his rule, laws were passed to define classes and the appropriate roles of men and women, and for a while, it worked. People felt they had a purpose. But the king over-reached, declaring war on neighboring kingdoms, costing Redmere in both gold and lives before he finally retreated to his palace.

But it’s also filled with Deep Lesbian Melodrama, such as lines like:

She put a hand on the wall as she reached the door that led to her bedchamber. Her whole body sagged.

“Sleep well, princess.”

Didn’t she know I hadn’t slept well since the day she’d left me?

And there is dress seduction which is one of my favorite fantasy tropes. If you can seduce a woman while you dress her, you get the A+ gold unicorn badge

Lou helped me dress. The neck and shoulders of the dress were covered in heavy gold embroidery and bright beads and stones that trailed down flowering sleeves. I lifted it, and the front floated away from the back. A line of ribbons dangled from the separate halves on each side.

“Let me do it for you,” she said.

I would be the first to admit I wasn’t very wordy. I’d spent the better part of my life trying not to be noticed in a very small country with little access to what lay beyond its borders.

But even I could tell I was being seduced while being dressed at the same time.

(it’s a great scene so I won’t spoil it for you)

UNCHARTED offers trope-filled lesfic pirate adventure along with fancy dresses and solid nonbinary rep. Whether you’re more of a swashbuckling pirate or a femme princess, you’ll find much to love. See if you can get yourself kidnapped by The Dread Pirate Cinder by buying the book here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, nonbinary, pirate

February 20, 2021

Review: Isle of Broken Years by Jane Fletcher

Genre: science fiction – time travel / fantasy – lesbians on boats (pirates)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: rape taunts (it IS a pirate book after all)

Review

Like all of Jane Flecther’s books, please pay ABSOLUTELY NO ATTENTION TO THE COVER. This book is GOLD and so help me I will pay for the next cover myself can we please get this woman covers that properly showcase her work!?!

Ahem.

Catalina de Valasco is on a galleon, headed for the Americas to meet her rich husband (whom she has never met). Pirates attack! The cabin boy of said pirate ship is Sam, our dashing tomboy lesbian love interest, cleverly disguised (or so she thinks). Anyway. The crew is slaughtered but finding a lady in a fancy dress, they realize hey, ransom! Sweet! So they change course and head for the Bermuda Triangle (stay with me).

So it’s hard, right, being a pirate that likes ladies? I mean, you’ve got one ON YOUR SHIP but your captain won’t let you rape her because they she isn’t worth as much money. Not all the crew agree with this financial plan, and several attempts are made, which Sam cleverly foils with chickens. We are not yet to the major plot twist. Hang in there. They sail through the triangle as they try to go somewhere that will pay ransom for an annoying, high-bred Spanish lady. There is weird weather and there is a mutiny etc. Sam, Catalina, Catalina’s (very gay) manservant Alonzo, and some of the would-be-rapists are stranded on an island where robots try to kill them. Yes. Robots. Strap in.

Welcome to ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME without the BS colonial narrative and obvert racism. The few that survive the first robot attack are found by other island survivors and taken to a safer location, where they learn that the island is (wait for it) a Greek/alien invention (Catalina reads Greek, conveniently!) and moves through time. The current refugees come from different cultures, times, and places, and make for a fantastic back up crew. The goal – to get off the island without being killed by robots, or minotaurs, or weather. Secondary goal – can Sam get together with Catalina, or will Catalina’s crushing upper class eighteenth centuries Spanish morals get in the way? And why is Alonzo trying to kill Sam? How would you expect a meeting of modern day lesbian millennial to go with said eighteenth century closeted lesbian?

WELL YOU GET TO FIND OUT.

Catalina is….kind of over the top and it’s kind of perfect:

Catalina tightened her jaw and drew her shoulders back. The blood of kinds ran in her veins. She was a true daughter of Spain, who could trace her ancestors to El Cid, and beyond. Whatever else, she would not let this rabble see fear on her face. They deserved nothing by contempt, and that she would grant them, in abundance.

Sam is the standard ‘my dad didn’t know what else to do with me so he dressed me as a boy and took me to sea’ trope–pirate with a heart of gold, loves the ladies, etc. The ‘pirate’ part makes this difficult, of course, noting Catalina’s attitude towards pirates, per above. As a fun twist, the pirate crew all think Sam is a ‘backdoor man’ because he doesn’t visit the whorehouses with them. In a +10000 for Fletcher, Sam’s gender reveal does not come from her shirt being torn open. Instead, the more modern people on the island have no trouble seeing she’s a woman dressed as a man and just flat out ask her. Sam has no issue adopting this very upfront attitude:

She turned to Sam. “And you are?”

“Sam. Sam Helyer, I was cabin boy on the Golden Goose. The ship has sunk, and I’m the last survivor.” Sam hesitated, as if making a decision. “So I’ve missed my change to tell my cremates I’m not a boy. Probably just as well. I don’t think they’d have been happy about a cabin girl.”

While people around her laughed, Catalina needed long seconds to be sure she understood what Sam had just said. But there could be no doubt. She was dimly aware of Alonzo at her side giving a low growl. Mostly, Catalina just felt her jaw drop open.

Per usual, I have quibbles with how the binder is addressed:

Babe picked at the band Sam had wrapped around her breasts. The binding had been necessary when she was passing as a boy, and she had kept it for comfort when running and jumping.

If every author could just come and sit next to me for a quick second – IF A BINDER IS TIGHT ENOUGH TO PROPERLY CONCEAL BREASTS, IT IS NOT COMFORTABLE. Maybe for a few hours. DEFINITELY not for running. Those shits constrict the HELL out of your lungs. Running in a binder that tight is a good way to pass out. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.

Okay, binder grump aside, you should buy this book because, at the very end when they’re trying to battle a robot minotaur, they have to use lightsabers.

Yes. You heard me.

“The only thin we have that stands a chance of hurting the Minotaur are these plasma blades.”

Uh huh. Call them ‘plasma blades.’ We all know what’s going on. Time Island has alien tech and LIGHTSABERS. LESBIANS WITH LIGHTSABERS WHO WERE PREVIOUSLY ON BOATS.

you are welcome. It has a happy ending and no lesbians are eaten by fish robots.

Get your own lightsaber and try to find Atlantis by buying the book here. Don’t feel bad if you have to rip the cover off to keep it on your bookshelf. Still very much worth it.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, lesbians on boats, pirate, sci fi, time travel

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

February 22, 2020

Review: Compass Rose by Anna Burke

Genre: science fiction – dystopian, pirate, lesbians on boats

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: implicit racism in the narrative, racist language not refuted in-narrative or by authorial voice

Review

The year is 2513. The apocalypse came and flooded the Earth. Land is scarce, the navy rules, and most people live on boats, either as part of a naval force or as a pirate.

Rose is a member of the Archipelago fleet (a navy fleet). She’s a big rule follower, clearly likes in-charge women, and doesn’t mind the company of the ladies. When Admiral Comita sends her on a daring mission – to infiltrate the pirate ship Man-O-War, Rose has no option but to accept.

And oh, lesbians. This is the pirate ship of your dreams. It has a hot lesbian pirate captain. It has a ragtag crew. It has danger! Power play! Hot kissing scenes! Seeeeeecrets! Racism!

Damn it.

This could have been the perfect book. And it almost was. God, the chemistry between Rose and Miranda is hot. HOT. Their eventual sex scene will leave you unable to work for the rest of the day. You will. not. recover. There’s political intrigue and beautifully rendered worlds and three-dimensional characters. There are Lesbians. On. Boats. I mean, I literally don’t know what else to ask from a book, except maybe that it check its implicit and overt bias at the door.

So, let’s lay it out, incident by incident.

Our opening scene is Rose being assaulted by Maddox, a large, brown man.

I didn’t have to look far. Maddox’s large bulk towered over me, a bead of sweat dripping from his crooked nose to the floor….Maddox’s chiseled chest glistened in the light of the bioluminescence, the genetically modified algae that flowed through the light tubes of the ship casting blue shadows over his brown skin. I entertained myself with a fantasy of plunging several sharp objects into his over-developed pectorals, but kept my mouth shut.

Unsurprisingly, the skin tones of the white characters are seldom, if ever, noted (our MC is brown skinned as well, which is noted early in the book. Annie, a secondary character, is noted as having ‘dark’ skin. These are the only skin descriptors we get. I am left to assume all other characters were walking skeletons with some musculature, and no skin at all). This is known as white default. But more of an issue is the trope of large, black and brown men, especially very toned ones, being a threat. I could link about this ad nauseum, but here is a good place to start. This is another beautiful article.

So, we started the book off on the wrong foot. Sometimes things get better! Sometimes it’s just the one instance and the rest of the book is fine.

Sometimes it gets a lot worse.

On page 33 (print edition) we get our first racially-charged descriptors.

He had a flat face with a flatter nose, and his dark hair was slightly gray at the temple. The woman beside him was only slightly less intimidating, with biceps that were at least as thick as my thighs.

And I might have ignored it except we don’t get a name for said character right away, and by pg 35 we get:

“Are you a navigator or an engineer?” Flat Nose said with a sneer.

And it continues for several pages. Flat nose, of course, is a racial description for black people and some Asian people. Adding to the flat face makes this a clear Asian stereotype with very unfortunate implications. There are so many better ways to describe people of color that don’t involve radicalized, weaponized descriptors. Writing With Color is always a great reference, and great place to start.

And it’s just…so infuriating because this is otherwise such a monumentally great book! How can you not love a pirate captain who spouts lines like “I could take you any way I wanted you.” I mean, yes, please. Please.

Finally, we have our villain, Ching Shih.

Yup. Not even going to bother with a link on that one.

The fundamental difference between implicit bias and overt bias is that overt bias comes with intent while implicit does not. Not having intent, however, does not absolve someone of the damage caused from racism, whether implicit or overt. The coding, both implied and implicit, of all the major ‘problem’ characters (Maddox is brown, a stuffy, gruff guy is Asian, the biggest ‘villain’ of the piece is also Asian) is a bad trend. Yes, our MC is also brown but with the white default at play, we are still in a very white world, where most of the PoC are villain coded.

And that’s not okay.

So while this book could have easily been absolutely magnificent, and in many ways it was, that doesn’t mean we should overlook the bias, or not discuss it. PoC deserve to have representation in books, and they deserve that representation to be good representation, where they get to play the full spectrum of roles, from villain to hero and everything in between. The queer community has been active for years in discussing queer-coded villains and homophobia. As a community we owe it to our intersectional queer people, and the PoC community at large, to voice our concerns over other forms of bias, not just the ones that affect the white parts of our community.

You can purchase COMPASS ROSE and try to navigate the minefield of bias to get to the freaking amazing sex scene here.

 

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: dystopian, lesbian, pirate, problematic tropes, sci fi

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

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