J.S. Fields

Author & Scientist

Review: Nottingham. The True Story of Robyn Hood by Anna Burke

Genre: fantasy: fairy tale

Pairings: f/f, trans/f

Queer Representation: cis lesbian, cis bisexual, trans man

Warnings: none

Review

After her brother is killed for poaching in the king’s forest, Robyn takes up the role as family provider. She too is caught, and in her haste to escape must kill a man. Not wanting to bring down her whole family, she runs away to Sherwood Forest, where she meets Little John and slowly (sometimes painfully slowly) builds up a band of ‘merry men’ outlaws who, eventually, decided to take out the Sheriff of Nottingham, steal from the rich, give to the poor, etc. You know how this goes.

It’s Robin Hood, but literally every named character is queer. Most are lesbians, except for Little John, who is a trans man. The rep is great, and the ratio of men to women in this retelling is much better than most I’ve read. A+ for that, especially for how Little John was handled. I rarely see such well executed trans men in lesbian fiction.

“God’s nails,” she said, taking a step back. “You’re a woman, too.”

“No,” John said. “I’m not. Call me John. That’s who I am. Forget it, as others have before you, and I’ll leave you to fend for yourself.”

“But you…” she trailed off.

“Look like an ox?”

Robyn hadn’t been thinking of those words exactly, but the description fit. “As strong as one anyway,” she ventured.

“That’s what my late husband called me. Joan the Ox.”

“I…I’m sorry?”

“Don’t be. I got the last word.”

Robyn wondered exactly what had happened to Joan’s husband. John, she corrected herself. He’d said that was who he was, and it was no business of hers to decide otherwise.

Perfection.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much else of note in the book. NOTTINGHAM leans too heavily on Robin Hood lore, so much so that it cannot stand on its own. It takes the stock characters and gives them backstory, yes, and gender swaps, and fun adventures, but everything still feels two-dimensional. There are too many characters and side quests, which leaves the narrative long-winded and wandering. The romance between Robyn and Marian is all but lost in the story, and Robyn herself is a frustrating lead who does not drive the plot past the first few chapters. Instead, her merry (wo)men push and pull her along, or the narrative itself does, giving every chapter a slow as molasses feel.

The side characters, in many ways, are more three-dimensional than either Marian or Robyn, even though they have far fewer lines and scenes. John is amazing, and by far the breakout character of the book. Will(a) is perfect and saucy and brazen and a damn delight. Even Gwyneth is engaging, once the narrative gets going enough to let her character breathe.

Robin Hood buffs may find this book just what the sheriff ordered, but those looking for a tight, moving plot and a romance line that carries throughout will be disappointed. From reading the front and backmatter, NOTTINGHAM appears to be Burke’s first every book written (not published) and thus, the wandering and thickness make sense. Still, noting the skill the author now possesses (dear god, I will never recover from THORN), it would have been worth killing a few darlings to bring this book up to a similar quality.

Sneak into Sherwood Forest and see if Little John will let you join Robyn 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.

Review: Raven Nothing by Som Paris

Genre: fantasy: portal

Pairings: f/m

Queer Representation: trans woman

Warnings: dysphoria, bullying related to being trans, forced biology reveal

Review

Blurb from the back of the book:

Raven, a trans girl from south England, wakes on a piece of ice floating on a frozen ocean. Adap, who has lived his whole life in a dying village just off the coast, finds her and brings her home. When she is told she must travel to the Golie Mountains, at the center of the world, Adap volunteers to take her. Together they navigate around a resurgent soviet-esque state that is at war with an ancient culture of gender-wild shamans. As they travel, she realizes that there is no one in this magical world who is not black, like her, and that every place they go seems uncannily familiar.

~~

At its heart, RAVEN NOTHING is a story about finding acceptance from family during a young girl’s trans journey. It’s steeped in secondary world fantasy, with a heavy dose of ‘ancient culture mysticism’.

There is nothing really unique about the story. Raven is unaccepted and taunted at home, and longs for her father’s love. She suddenly finds herself in a foreign, frozen sea (assumed portal, though none is mentioned), and her journey through the frozen land takes you through her memories as well, and various allegories for common trans experiences. There is a great deal of ‘trans pain,’ which was no doubt cathartic for the author to discuss but may be grating/tiresome for some trans readers seeking relief from the everyday trials of the cis world.

Raven is likable enough, though it is Adap’s character that really shines through as a unique voice. The end is appropriately happy, with a reconciliation with the father and Raven coming to terms with the function of her portal/dreamscape.

There was nothing functionally wrong with the book, but I have to admit that I found it tiresome. The prose was heavy, the allegory thick, and at this current place in 2020 I just really am not in the mood for childhood taunting and forced undressing.

When Raven didn’t budge, the woman raised her crow’s beak hand and began tugging at Raven’s sodden jacket. Raven recoiled. The woman’s gnarled fingers caught hold of Raven’s school skirt and, as she backed away, it slid half-way down, and Raven was left exposed in the middle of the frosty room. The woman’s hands rose to her own mouth, and she fled.

I hate it when gender/sex/anatomy (depending on story and character) is forcibly exposed in cis male written works–so much so that I usually toss the book across the room and stop reading. I was surprised to find it in what I (assume) to be a trans author’s work. But we are allowed to discuss our pain however so choose, and perhaps this event mirrors an event in the author’s own life. I don’t know. I suspect the book was written more with a cis audience in mind (via education), or for a much older trans audience that could relate to the acts of violence done to Raven and see them as either a rite of passage, or a ‘this is an element needed in trans fiction’. For me, I found them grating. I wanted fantasy, and I wanted Raven to triumph, and I wanted her to do it as herself, not despite being a trans girl.

To the book’s credit, the romance is sweet and age appropriate, and definitely was the reason I kept reading.

He looked her straight in the eye and solemnly said, “I’d want to go anywhere you wanted me to.” And then they both suddenly felt unbearably awkward and looked away, to the snow thickening over the hills, to the roofs bleating amongst the tall green grass, and neither of them spoke for a while after that, but Raven felt as radiant inside as the setting sun that bathed the snow and grass in blankets of gold.

There are some nice neopronouns use (fe/fer) and the world being entirely Black was a nice change, though very little is discussed in regards to either.

He was not a tyrant wanting to lock her away from herself, not an all-powerful lord of the house whose word endangered her ability to become a beautiful person of her own. NO, he was just a frightened little man who had followed her up this tower because she was his daughter and he would have followed her anywhere at that point. Because he loved her.

The ending is sweet and very much the ending each and every trans person deserves. I just didn’t like the journey, not because I couldn’t empathize with it, but because it hits too close to home. Escapism, for me, this book was not.

RAVEN NOTHING is published by Aqueduct Press and will be out in late 2020. This post will be updated with buy links when they are available.

 

Review: City of a Thousand Feelings by Anya Johanna DeNiro

Genre: fantasy: dystopian

Pairings: f/f

Queer Representation: trans woman

Warnings: none

Review

In a short story spanning thirty years, two trans women are outcast from The City, a place where emotions can become physical manifestations. They return in an army to take the city, face numerous hurdles, and eventually battle necromancers for control of the place they yearn to belong, but can never again be a part of.

I… don’t really know how to review this book. It’s short, only 81 pages long, and in those 81 pages the author attempts to set up thirty years of epic fantasy. It’s so bare bones in places as to be comical, but the emotions are dead-on.

“They even convinced me, when I was young, that I would be able to find a home with them. I threw myself in my training, but I started to realize that–I was not a boy. And they made me feel like that was the most horrible thing in the world.”

This isn’t a book to be read for the setting or fantasy elements. It’s a book to be read for the connection to the trans women who are both literally and allegorically searching for a place of their own in a society that wants nothing to do with them.

The strongest aspect of the book is the critique on lesbian culture. Trans women are too-often excluded from lesbian and wlw spaces, and the book hits this issue on the head in this scene, where the women are returning to the city that exiled them for being trans:

Most of these are monuments to women in love with each other, which might have been found “safe” and unremarkable in a more serene time. Love that is pure and unassuming and forced to die by exposure.

Bits of queer community elements can be found in the book as well, such as here:

When women like us start out, it’s easy to fall for someone who’s further ahead on the (more or less) same journey. It’s often mistake for romantic love, but that is rarely the case.

My favorite section of the book is the end, where a strange little bit of poetry adds to the worldbuilding. Of particular interest:

In Mystery’s old village, before she was stolen by the corpse-mongers, children are born with two souls, with one sacrificed to the forest goslings. Mystery’s pretty sure they screwed up.

A complicated (sometimes too much so–it took me three weeks to finish this 80+ page book) read, the trans narrative and struggle for acceptance in CITY OF A THOUSAND FEELINGS will resonate with  trans readers, as well as anyone who has lost acceptance over an innate aspect of their being.

You can buy CITY OF A THOUSAND FEELINGS here.

 

Review: Lucky 7 by Rae D Magdon

Genre: science fiction: dystopian

Pairings: f/f (could also be classed as f/nonbinary, the character in question hasn’t quite decided)

Queer Representation: cis bisexual, asexuality, trans, nonbinary

Warnings: none

Review

There’s nothing in the world as good as making a beautiful girl come.

Jacker Elena is on the run from AxysGen after the death of her crew during some ‘illegal’ activity.

Handler Sasha, an operative team leader, just lost her jacker and the rest of her crew in a botched operation. She can’t find a crew without a new jacker, and Elena needs a place to hide, STAT. AxysGen has a hit out on Sasha, too. If any of them are going to survive, they need to be deleted from AxysGen’s databases. And they can’t do that without a jacker. Or Sasha’s crew.

Elena and Sasha must work together to find Sasha’s crew and prevent AxysGen from finding Elena. The deeper they get into the the virtual world, however, the more layers of AxysGen peel away and the more Sasha’s past, including her ex-girlfriend, come back to haunt them.

LUCKY 7 is a fast paced dystopian sci-fi novel that starts with action on page one and does not let up. Unfortunately the action comes at the steep cost of stakes and character buy-in, and the first third of the book is entirely skimmable. The gems of attraction between Sasha and Elena are well done, but do little to progress the narrative forward. Elena’s character is poorly developed, as is her motivation, and Sasha’s ice queen attitude leaves her functionally emotionless.

The book takes a hard right turn at the one third point, with a steamy shower sex scene that breaks through our ice queen’s exterior and gives the reader some much needed emotional interplay. There’s consensual power play here, too, and it is hot as fuck. The book is worth buying for the sex scenes alone (there are three!).

But something in me wants to fight. To push back against her dominance, to show her I’m not just some warm body she can bruise because she hates me. I need her to fuck me, but she doesn’t get to unless I fuck her back.

~~

Somehow, I know I’ll never tire of bringing her over the edge. “Come for me,” I growl into the dip of her collarbone, close enough for her to feel my lips on her skin. “I want you to come for me.”

Halfway through the book changes POVs from Elena to Sasha, and it is at this point that the narrative takes off. Sasha’s POV is rich and complex, and the reader cannot help but be fascinated as she learns about her forgotten past, her relationship with her ex, Megan, and the secrets behind the ship’s AI. With an emotional hook, the storyline and plot pack a punch. The stakes raise, the crew becomes more three-dimensional. You care about Sasha. You root for Sasha. Sasha is the ideal unreliable narrator.

The A plot, of Elena running from the evil corporation, takes a quick backseat to the B plot of Sasha’s origins and the motivations of Megan. The B plot is by far the stronger of the two. Megan is the perfect villain–delightfully self absorbed with just enough humanity to make her relatable. The clone situation is excellent, the AI a delight, and Sasha, again, steals the show.

Another bonus: the representation in the book is phenomenal. Elena is Mexican (with brown skin), Sasha is black, and the richness of Elena’s background comes through in so many fantastic phrases and snippets of history. There is no white default in this book-white people are described via skin tone upon first introduction as much as the numerous people of color.

“If anyone tries to speak to you, let me do the talking,” Rami mutters from the corner of their mouth. “Just give them a white people smile.”

“The close-lipped ‘I acknowledged you, now please go away’ gringo smile?”

“Exactly.”

The trans rep, in particular, really struck a chord with me. One of the crew is trans, but it is the exploration of Sasha’s gender identity that was the most compelling. It is rare to see a true exploration of the nonbinary experience in queer fiction. So much is either a nonbinary person just being a person and having adventures, or being a side character. Sasha’s explanation of her gender, and Elena’s intuitive understanding, cemented their relationship as one of the best I’ve read in lesbian fiction. In a culture where the butch identity was long used as a dumping ground for both gender and gender identity, having one branch explored at length, and with deep sensitivity, was absolutely amazing.

I know from her smile that she’s joking, but my confidence falters. I know what Elena wants, but I’m not sure I’ll be ante to give it to her. I’ve got baggage around sex, around trust, around my body, and although I feel good in my skin tonight, I can’t guarantee she’ll get the results she wants, no matter how hard she tries.

~~

My face heats up. I’ve tried thinking about it that way sometimes, more often before I bought my first prosthetic. Once in a while, it works. Usually it doesn’t. There are aspects of womanhood I still connect and identify with, but my parents aren’t one of them. And even thought I know all too well that body parts don’t make a woman, being touched that way feels…vulnerable. In a good way, on some occasions, but more often in a not-good way.

~~

Once my hands are dry, I consider what to do about my swimsuit. The decision to pull down my trunks is an easy one, but my top is more difficult. It bares my midriff, but keeps my chest fairly flat. The look of hunger that takes over Elena’s face is enough to tempt me out of it. Her dark eyes have zeroed in as I pull it off, and her tongue leaves a glistening line on her lips as she wets them. I’m naked, but thanks to her admiration, I don’t feel overexposed.

~~

It’s a feeling of freedom, of knowing I can fly without the fear of falling. It has everything to do with the face that it’s Elena between my legs.

She’s memorized more of me in a few weeks than other people have bothered to learn in years, and I actually feel comfortable enough to teach her. It’s different. Powerful. A little scary. Bit it’s also all kinds of good, and I know I’d be a fool to give it up. I’m not even sure I can.

You can find your own curvy hacker in paperback here and ebook here. Consider supporting an independent bookstore by buying it here.

 

Double bonus: this scene

“You blew up the front door,” Rami yells back, taking the steps two at a time.

“Because I love you,” Cherry hollers. “Even though you left me in Brazil!”

“How do you run so fast in heels?” I gasp as I stagger down the front steps. I don’t know how Sasha finds all these magical bitches who can run ops in perfect makeup and designer shoes, but if I wasn’t terrified of dying, I’d be jealous.

 

And the best description of this particular flavor of bisexuality to date:

“Not my type, kid. I like pretty boys with long eyelashes and girls who look like they could step on my windpipe with their jackboot and make me thank them for it.”

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