J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

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.

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.

 

 

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.

Review: Shell Game by Benny Lawrence

Genre: fantasy – low

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: none

Review

He said, “My name is Hasak, and I am going to rule these islands.”

She said, “My name is Darren, and I am going to punch you in the nose.”

So begins one of the most enchanting and erotic lesfic books I have ever read (and erotic without any actual on page sex, either!) Darren is a (not great) pirate, hell bent on stopping other (not great) pirates/warlords from continuously plundering little villages. She’s also a noble–outcast from Torasan Isle for daring to fall publicly in love with a woman.

That first relationship ended badly, as they tend to do. Now, with no home and no wife, she sails the seas with a ragtag crew, looking for assholes to punch and fishing villages to save.

Life continues to chug along at a normal pace until Darren stumbles into a fishing village that has just had enough.

The fishing village where I lived was nothing special–just a bunch of mud huts and a fishing skiff or two. And yet four raiding parties had invaded it in the past three days. The first set of raiders took all the young men, the ones with the muscle to work the oars of a warship. The second set took all the men older than twelve and most of the women as well. The third set took what food was left: sacks of flour and jugs of oil and piles of dried fish. The fourth set wasn’t very impressive.

With every island out for itself, the commoners are caught in between warring nobles, and their populations are dwindling.

Lynn, resident of said fishing village, knows an opportunity when she sees it. She challenges Darren, looses, and ends up literally tying herself to the mast of Darren’s ship, insisting Darren kidnap her and keep her in chains or, at the very least, ropes.

If you’re seeing the BDSM vibe already, good work.

Darren has no fucking idea what she has inadvertently signed herself up for. She’s crap at relationships and almost as bad at being a pirate. Lynn, on the other hand, knows exactly what she wants, and is hell bent on molding Darren into the hero pirate queen the world needs. Getting Darren to admit to her penchant for some kink in the bedroom is a nice bonus.

Darren eventually learns that Lynn has a dark past herself, it turns out. One that only a pirate queen can save her from.

SHELL GAME is pirate fantasy at its finest. There’s swashbuckling rogues, political intrigue, fantastic pacing, romance, and one of my favorite tropes: lesbians on boats. The characters are three-dimensional and it takes very little time to gain investment in the two leads.

The romance is hot. Hot. Hot enough that even though you never get any on page sex it doesn’t matter because you know what they are doing. The dom/sub relationship between Darren and Lynn is by far the best I’ve ever read in fiction, showcasing how the power dynamics should work, the role of consent, and the role of respect.

More than once, in some desperation, I wondered whether I would have to keep her in a small metal box to protect her from the others. But Lynn never allowed me to protect her. She had a sharp tongue and a level head, and a strong sense of pride, and she gamely took on the job of carving out her own place on board [the] ship. She did let me show her what parts to kick on the human body to inflict maximum pain, but that was about the limit of what I was allowed to do.

The banter alone is enough reason to read the books. Some favorites:

And every time, I would whisper, “You know, I’m not really a pirate queen.”

And every time, she would whisper back, “Do you honestly think that anyone can tell?”

—

They say he foamed at the mouth while he was fighting, and each time he impaled one of his victims, he let out a shuddering pant, as if he had just–well, you know.

—

He moved, but as he moved, he muttered, “Your slave is going to kill us for leaving you.”

“It’ll be good for you,” I called after him.

“What? Being killed?”

“It teaches humility.”

—

Iason was on his feet, screaming to everyone and no one, “Kill her! Kill the bitch!”

It’s always the same. Just once, I’d like someone to point at me and scream, “Giver her a foot massage! Give a foot massage to the bitch!”

—

And of course, Burke occasional slings some life truth in the narrative, such as:

I would like to pause at this point to share something about women that it took me a very long time to learn. If your girl tells you that she has a headache, she is sending you a message in code. The message is that she wants to play a game, and the game is called, “Figure out what is bothering me by reading my mind.” If you fail to guess right, you lose. If you do guess right, you still lose, because you should have known that something was bothering her before she said anything. Either way, be prepared to set aside a couple of hours for back rubs and apologies.

SHELL GAME is an absolute pirate delight. There’s really no excuse not to read this book, unless you’re a asshole noble, or an abusive step mother, or just plain dead inside. Join Darren and Lynn on the Badger in ebook here and print here.

 

To read the review for the sequel, BEGGAR’S FLIP, click here.

Review: Rescue Her Heart by KC Luck

Genre: science fiction: space opera romance

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian. cis pansexual

Warnings: homophobia (by a character), attempted sexual assault

Review

Captain Nat Reynolds is a workaholic space ranger. Catherine Porter is an eighteen year old down-on-her-luck waif with a dilapidated ship and not a penny to her name. Asteroids happen and Catherine gets stuck on the ice planet Hoth (not really its name but same idea) and needs some serious saving. Catherine thinks she’s straight. Nat definitely isn’t. They end up in a hotel room together. You can guess how it goes from there.

Also space pirates.

RESCUE HER HEART is romance with a light sci fi flavor, but definitely can be classified as ‘lesbians in space’ due to several space scenes. The plot follows well-established romance lines and employs a number of lesbian tropes such as soapy sex scene, age gap, and coming of age sexual awakening.

The book begins by establishing Nat as a battle-worn space ranger whose only love is her job. She’s never taken a vacation, which is critical information for her spending spree a bit later in the book.

An asteroid field strands Catherine on an ice planet and space ranger Nat comes to her rescue–a rescue that of course involves getting naked for warmth.

Nat learns Catherine has no money due to her father disappearing (and being quite the drunk) and so offers to fly Catherine to a nice planet where she can get some clothes with Nat’s money. They end up in a hotel room (cue important ‘where will we sleep’ tension) and go clothes shopping (cue ‘do you want to see the cute panties you bought me?’). Catherine thinks she’s straight and so flirts like only an eighteen year old can with a safe target. Nat’s big on consent and so things get really damn hot. Catherine eventually realizes she wants to bang and things proceed.

The second half of the book has more of the sci fi plot. Deciding to go on a pleasure cruise in a fancy rented spaceship, Catherine and Nat become prisoners of space pirates when their ship gets jacked. Then there’s lesbian space pirate drama (the best kind) and some decent action scenes.

Nitpicks

Erasing homophobia in future settings is a growing trend in queer fiction, especially spec fic. Parts of RESCUE read more like a 1980s bar encounter in terms of homophobia and sexual advances but it’s definitely important for authors to be able to see their worlds in the books they write. Many lesfic writers in particular came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when homophobia and sexual harassment were still very commonplace. Being in this age group I can deeply relate to the events in the book, although they may ring abstract and unnecessary for younger readers.

The biggest stumbling block in the story is the tech. The book is one hundred years in the future but one law enforcement person still uses a paper printer (it’s noted as an antique). Heaters still have dials. The ‘old’ spaceship has a windshield (that gets cracked from a meteor but no one gets sucked into space) and a steering wheel that Catherine actually has to fight to keep the ship on course through the asteroid field.

(It should be noted that my partner defended the steering wheel and suggested that the old ship was made for human comfort and the inertial dampeners had been routed through the steering wheel to give it a more ‘historic’ feel.)

You don’t really read books like this for the science, however, and the problems are easy to overlook in the very well done sexual tension. The scenes and placements are sometimes silly and over the top but keep you well in the narrative and rooting for the main characters to just boink already. Example:

…Nat realized the woman was braless. Nat forced her eyes away, and with shaking hands, pulled off the girl’s boots and socks before focusing on removing her pants. It was difficult to cut through the thick fabric and knowing precious time was slipping away, Nat tossed the scissors aside and gripping the cloth, yanked with all her strength to tear the pants apart and off the girl’s body.

I mean, we laugh but really, we’ve all had this fantasy.

You can join the space pirates in ebook here, or the space rangers in paperback here. Either way, you get to bang in the shower.

 

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