J.S. Fields

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May 2, 2021

Review: A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian

Genre: romance: historical

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

Alice had her eye on that lady’s maid.

Yes. Yes she did. For like the whole book, which I read in about and hour and thoroughly enjoyed. I was not expecting this to be as good as it was. Wow.

The cover is a little…well it reminds me of the kind of romance novels my grandmother used to read. I almost didn’t buy the book because of it. But then I remembered how much I loved THE LADY’S GUIDE TO CELESTIAL MECHANICS, also an Avon Impulse book, and thought I would give this a try.

Not. Disappointed. This tiny novella packs a punch.

Alice Stapleton is a confirmed spinster, thanks to A) Mr. Tenpenny, the gentleman who accosted her virtue and then said she came on to him (oh the nerve!), B) her asshole father who kicked her out of the house for smearing the family name, and C) Mrs. Wraxhall, and older spinster who has brought Alice to live with her, provides everything she needs, and really would like Alice to have a better time (but isn’t going to push it).

Alice likes embroidery, so she spends her free time…embroidering.

Molly Wilkins is a lady’s maid who used to be a pretty decent thief and maybe still is, for the right mark. She works for Mrs. Wraxhall and is trying to stay straight (HAHAHAHAHAH ahem) but you know, Stapleton just looks so nice and pretty and is so damn proper and irritating and maybe if Molly just set her right on a few things…

Anyway.

Molly likes the ladies and embraces it. Alice likes the ladies and can’t admit it. Mrs. Wraxhall pretends to be oblivious to everything (hilarity). But Molly dragging Alice from her shell digs up more backstory than either were planning, and the two have to help each other to forgive, forget, and even embrace parts of their pasts.

This book is adorable. And short. It has no wasted words or pages, gets right to the flirting and sass, and has decent sex scenes. Molly is every part the seductress scamp with a heart of gold and Alice, though initially irritating, proves to be a really engaging lead by the end. Her father gets a sound smacking, as does Mr. Tenpenny (I’d love to smack the guy myself), true love blooms, and Mrs. Wraxhall is hilarious in her silent aiding and abetting.

Another solid lesbian romance installment from Avon Impulse. You can get your own sassy lady’s maid by buying the book here.

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: lesbian, romance

April 26, 2021

Review: The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows by Olivia Waite

Genre: romance: historical

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

Owner of a printing business and mother of a political activist son, Agatha Griffin is going about her day, minding her own business, when she finds a colony of bees in her warehouse. This cannot stand, so she calls in a beekeeper.

Penelope Flood is a beekeeper. She is also married to a gay man with his own lover. Penelope is entirely dedicated to her bee hives, which reside on land formerly owned by a rich lady who has recently died. The land has been given to others but Penelope inherits the bees, and she is determined to keep them alive. Various other parts of the estate have been given to warring factions and there’s some drama around valuables and inheritance and lewd statues.

Things progress, as they do in romance. Penelope helps Agatha with her bee problem. Both are consumed with interest in the other but don’t feel comfortable talking about it. There is endless internal monologue interspersed with plot (the Queen is coming! Rich people are doing shenanigans! There’s some nude statues that keep popping up in weird places and Penelope’s husband randomly enters the scene and is delightfully hilarious. There’s one reasonable sex scene that takes forever to get to, and several hundred pages of pining. There’s a walnut dildo, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

If you’re into standard lesbian fare movies, where both women feel the urge for the love that dare not speak its name (even though literally everyone around them is totally cool), long, measured eye glances, and basically this plot, then this book is your jam. The bees and estate management and nude statues are entertaining, but the romance aspect just meanders and takes far too long to get anywhere. The characters aren’t nearly as engaging as the ones in THE LADY’S GUIDE TO CELESTIAL MECHANICS, and seem to be bashed around by the plot instead of interacting with it. Both are reasonably strong women, but I never really connected with either of them. What I did connect with was the cover, which has two women clearly just checking out each other’s cleavage. Hilarious. Fantastic. On-brand.

It’s the same time period and world as CELESTIAL MECHANICS (early 1800s), so readers looking for a tie-in will be pleased (this is the printer that prints the guide from book one):

“Not as full as I like to keep it, to be honest. We’ve got ten or so more pages in the new edition of Celestial Mechanics and then we’re clear,” Downes replied. “I’d planned on getting started on some of the next issue’s embroidery plates, but there’s room if you want to add something.”

Waite plays around with language in the book, which is entertaining and something to look forward to it you’re skimming to get away from the deluge of internal monologue:

Agatha shivered, as if the sun had ducked behind a cloud. You’re wearing her husband’s clothes, Agatha reminded herself, and felt extremely queer about it.

As well as some stellar one liners:

It was an entirely frustrating thing to attempt to supervise two young people resentful of your intrusive presence, while trying not to make obvious calf’s-eyes at the woman who’d fucked you senseless the night before.

Aside from the pacing, my main gripe in the book is the walnut dildo the two women use towards the end of the book:

“Anything?” Agatha breathed. But she was still surprised when Penelope pulled a small box from her bedside table and opened it up to reveal…well, a respectably sized dildo made from sleek walnut.

To which I say ABSOLUTELY NOT! Well oiled or not, we do not need to be sticking problematic and semi-toxic woods up our vaginas. Heat, pressure, and moisture pull extractives out of wood like you would not believe and THOSE THINGS DON’T GO IN VAGINAS! Yes yes, it’s a period piece but I beg you to ask why not maple!? Beech? Poplar? WHY WALNUT!?!?

Ahem.

If you’re a lover of a traditional romance and don’t mind a lot of ‘is she thinking this, what will people think, what do I think’ back and forth, and/or really like bees, this is your book. It’s not a strong follow up to CELESTIAL MECHANICS but it’s still worth your time. You can invest in your own beehive and try to snag a cross-dressing beekeeper by buying the book here.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: lesbian, romance

April 25, 2021

Review: The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite

Genre: romance: historical

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual

Warnings: none

Review

Lucy is the daughter of a renowned astronomer who has recently passed. He’d been secretly senile for a while, with Lucy doing most if not all of his calculations. The two had been in communication with numerous astronomers and others in high society and hence, when Catherine St. Day finds herself in need of a translator for an astronomic text (her late husband’s final work that he never completed, and maddeningly, in French), she writes to Lucy’s father.

Alas, Lucy’s father has recently passed, and her brother isn’t quite sure what to do with his potential spinster of a sister, who cares more for her telescope than men. Lucy decides to take fate by the stars and travels to meet Catherine, and proposes that she, Lucy, do the translation.

It’s a romance, so that’s basically the plot. Catherine eventually agrees, and Lucy begins an arduous French translation that brings her afoul of the local gentleman’s astronomy society, but also closer to Catherine. There are scientific shenanigans, men being jerks and men being awesome and men getting their just desserts, and some hot sex scenes (helloooo light role play!).

The characters are three dimensional and have believable and well-fleshed backstories. Lucky’s ex-lover is more comical than irritating, and Catherine’s memories of her dead husband are delightfully bittersweet. There’s a fun twist at the end, and enough of a plot that even non-romance readers (ahem) will be swept up in the narrative. It also has a great cover. 12/10 will keep on my shelf instead of giving away. Hell, I loved this book enough I bought my girlfriend her own copy because I didn’t want to share mine. It’s got fancy dresses and smart scientists and wealthy older women and more than one sex scene. Damned near perfection.

Skip town on your jerk of a brother and find yourself a hot, wealthy widow by buying the book here. 

 

Also, this is a fun little passage I thought I’d share, as Catherine thinks back on her dead husband, marriage, and almost getting remarried to another man:

She’d believed she could bear a widow’s loneliness more peacefully than the misery of a bad marriage. But that was like choosing whether hemlock or belladonna was the better poison. In the end, they both sapped the life from you.

With thoughts like that, Catherine, you definitely needed to try the ladies.

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: lesbian, romance

December 4, 2020

Review: The Dragon’s Lover by Samantha Sabian

Genre: romance (fantasy)

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis pansexual

Warnings: implied child sex trafficking

 

Review

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

 

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

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

Cover

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

Plot

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a touch of surprising nonbinary rep:

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

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

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

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

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

March 20, 2020

Review: Sword of the Guardian by Merry Shannon

Genre: fantasy: sword and sorcery

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian

Warnings: white default, near-rape scene (in detail), ‘girl masquerading as a boy and isn’t trans’ trope

 

Review

Orphaned from a young age by a band of village marauders, Talon and her sisters are sold to a traveling theater troupe. The two younger sisters are trained as singers and Talon, masquerading as a boy, becomes a skilled acrobat.

Some years later, during a performance, Talon has the opportunity to perform for the royal family. She impresses the Princess Shasta, but shortly thereafter an assassin kills the crown prince. Talon takes a dagger to protect the princess, lives, and she and her sisters are purchased by the king. Talon is to be the perfect protector for the princess, and the two younger girls are to be her ladies-in-waiting.

The plot progresses in a traditional romance fantasy trope fashion from there. Talon is brave and learns to be fundamentally invincible with a sword, the princess turns out to be more caring than at first appearance, they grow close, eventually Talon’s gender is revealed, they’re driven apart, they realize their feelings for each other, there’s a battle, and they finally get together.

It’s formulaic, but that doesn’t make it any less hot.

Published in 2006, SWORD OF THE GUARDIAN, at the time, filled an important role in the sparse lesfic world, allowing lesbians to see themselves in popular generic fantasy settings. SWORD took many of the tropes of male generic fantasy: berserker fighting, Gary Stu-like leads, fridged parents, and a hero’s journey, and blended them with the newly-established lesfic tropes that were emerging at the time, such as the butch character hiding their gender to survive in society, rape as a plot device to establish the morality of men, and the quintessential self-actualization of both main character and love interest (in terms of being lesbians).

Looking at SWORD as a product of its time, it was a groundbreaking piece of fiction. It didn’t have a hope of being picked up by Big Five Publishing (oh, how times have changed!) and it found its home in small press, where it could be the steamy, romantic, adventure tale we all want to be a part of.

Unfortunately, while small press gives a platform to underrepresented voices, it also lacks a lot of quality control, which is readily evident in SWORD. Under a strong editor, the book could have gone from simply ‘good’ to ‘amazing.’ The amount of repetition in the book, especially in the front half, made it virtually impossible not to skim.  Motivations, backstory, even entire phrases were repeated over and over, sometimes paraphrased, sometimes not. Much of the beginning backstory was told, not shown, in some incredible info dumps. The back third lagged and the last one hundred pages were superfluous, and only served to drag down a story that had a decent pace and strong tension, under the guise of a ‘lesbian’ happy ending which, of course, always involves marriage and a baby. It is a romance, after all.

Formulaic, of course, doesn’t mean a book is bad, by any means. In the romance genre in particular, readers have expectations as to how the story will progress, and SWORD does not disappoint. The romance between Talon and Shasta develops at a decent clip, with each interaction pushing their physicality that much closer to actual sex. The tension is palpable, the chemistry strong, and the characters dimensional enough that the lack of distinct voice can be overlooked. For a romance book, it’s really good. For an action book, or sword and sorcery fantasy, it’s mediocre at best. SWORD tries to juggle between the two and this is where it stumbles–when it tries to world build too deeply, offering stuttering political intrigue and extended battle scenes without sufficient tension or character buy-in. It shines best in the romance, the love triangle of chambermaid-guard-princess, and the relationship between Talon and her sisters.

Indicative of its time, SWORD also suffers from white default, and not subtly enough to be ignored, even with the steamy sex (not that it should ever BE ignored, but one slip or two you one usually eyeroll their way through). The consistent othering of Talon is exhausting, and Shannon seldom misses an opportunity to bring up Talon’s skin tone and how dark it is compared to everyone else (no one else HAS skin, as far as the narrative is concerned. No one else’s skin tone is every mentioned, therefore I deem it now canon that they are walking skeletons with muscle).

Talon grinned, well aware that her dark Outlander coloring and androgynous, elfin features…

…and looked down at the handsome olive-skinned face resting peacefully…

What a strange person stared back at her, she thought: this androgynous dark face with its delicate elfin features…

…picture his smooth olive skin in the lantern light.

…but for the first time she noticed how the soft white linen shirt seemed to glow against his farm olive skin…

She planted kisses on every inch of the olive skin that she could reach…

The fabric fell back to reveal a mass of ugly bruises that spread across the olive skin in a terrible rainbow…

…and Shasta’s blue feather necklace resting against the dark throat.

…the glorious warmth of her dark skin…

…and the dark skin of an Outlander…

We get it. She’s got olive skin that is apparently very dark despite olive skin not actually being all that dark. Meaning everyone else either has no skin, or is so lily white they are nearly translucent. Also dark skinned people don’t belong in the Only Kingdom That Matters. *sigh*

Another persistent problem in lesfic writing is dealing with butch characters who wear binders. The issues with this tend to stem around two focal points: 1) there is a line, though somewhat blurry, between butch women who wear binders as a presentation effect, and non binary people and trans men who do so out of gender dysphoria. Throwaway lines like so-and-so sometimes almost forgot they were a girl–erase that line and therefore scoot towards erasing our trans siblings. One does not forget their gender–it is an intrinsic part of who we are. A butch women is a woman, no matter what she wears unless she states otherwise. She isn’t going to forget she is a woman, unless she is in fact not one at all (perhaps nonbinary or a man, and working towards that realization). And SWORD establishes very early on that Talon is not a man:

…and contrary to popular belief–and evidently her own rebellious body–she was most definitely not a man.

and yet, we get this line a handful of pages later:

‘Have I been impersonating a man so long, she wondered, that somehow I’ve become one, on the inside?’

And while the above are Talon’s own thoughts on trying to figure out her sexual attraction to women, they still edge on problematic without a narrative rebuttal. Especially as Talon’s gender reveal comes without her consent, which is a consistent and really big problem in fantasy narratives. Forcible gender reveals, whether on gender nonconforming people or not, are an act of violence. And while no one rips or tears Talon’s binder (thank goodness!) she is still forced to reveal her gender after being wounded (trope! take a drink!):

“I’m tired of this, Talon, I’m sick of all your silly games and secrets. If you can’t give me one good reason–“

“I’m not a man!”

The second, more pressing issue for SWORD is the effect of a binder. Anyone who has worn a binder can tell you two things: 1) they aren’t comfortable for long term wearing (think of how much you love taking off a bra at the end of the day, now compound that times 1000) and 2) they’re dangerous. The long-term repercussions of binder wearing, especially 24 hours a day, is well documented in medical literature. They also restrict your breathing, as well as permanently deforming your ribs and moving your internal organs, much like a poorly-fitted corset.

Leaping into the center of the room, she launched right into her routine, executing two cartwheels and a front flip, bending backward, and then kicking into a handstand. With exquisite precision, she lifted one hand off the ground and held the position while one of the smaller troupe members placed delicate cups of steaming tea on the tups of her toes and in her open hand.

Hence, the idea that Talon has been wearing a binder since puberty, while working as an acrobat and then training as a swordsman, and has absolutely no issues becoming absolutely fucking fantastic at everything she does, stretches the suspension of disbelief. That she makes it into her twenties and has no long term health effects from said binder, is also highly unrealistic. SWORD is a fantasy, yes, but with a focus on lesbians and lesbian lives. As such, these particular areas deserve a bit more scrutiny than the rest.

Despite all of that, SWORD OF THE GUARDIAN was a fun read, with some very tight romantic tension and nice sex scene near the end (“Well then, Corporal, I hope I remember to whisper when I’m calling out your name.”). For those tight on time, feel free to skip the last 50-100 pages, but definitely don’t skip the beginning, as the sexual tension is set up well and is a delight to follow.

You can get yourself a binder that somehow doesn’t crush your ribs, grab a sword, and seduce a princess in paperback here and ebook here.

P.S. And yes, I did note the anatomically incorrect fungi. Spores can’t and don’t burrow, just for clarification, even in fantasyland.

 

Filed Under: book review Tagged With: fantasy, lesbian, problematic tropes, romance

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