Tag Archives: LGBTQI+

The Dangerous Art of Blending In

by Anna

By Angelo Surmelis

Blending_InI missed posting this in Pride Month, but this can just as easily be read for Gay Wrath Month instead! This is a semi-autobiographic coming-of-age story about a seventeen-year-old boy in the months after the summer he realized without a doubt he is gay. Coming from a very strict and orthodox Greek family, his domineering and abusive mother is very much not okay with it. Like, performing-an-exorcism not-okay.

Surmelis does a particularly good job of capturing how overwhelming large groups of people, particularly teenagers, can be, all talking over each other and shifting topics constantly, which is both an impressive literary feat and difficult to read. I was having minor anxiety while at the same time appreciating his skill.

Also, authentically, the protagonist describes himself as a geek and a loner, who doesn’t fit in, though he has several close friends, and an even wider circle of pleasant acquaintance from school. As someone who truly isolated herself in high school, this used to make me sort of resentful, but I think it actually just goes to show that most of us feel isolated and out of place in high school, regardless of our relative popularity.

The scenes of abuse are difficult to read, and thing that got to me in particular was how many adults saw and looked the other way. I remember that from My Friend Dahmer, too; that author wrote that there were so many adults that saw Dahmer’s decline and did nothing. Luckily, this book ends much more happily. I kept flipping to the author’s photo in the back to reassure myself that he looked so handsome, happy, and cared for.

Meet Cute

by Anna

By various authors

Meet_CuteI’ve been having a bit of a reading crisis lately. I’ve started three different books and can’t seem to get past around the midway point. It’s not the books’ fault – I mean they aren’t stellar or anything, but there wasn’t any clear reason for my lack of interest. My best explanation is just that the news has been so inundating and depressing lately, and I can’t seem to stay off twitter, and I’m just all worn out.

So, I figured I’d recharge with a fluffy collection of short stories! Just a bunch of cute first romantic meetings sounds comforting, right? Well, I didn’t exactly get what I was looking for. They for-sure cover the meet part, but most of the authors seem to have forgotten the cute part. About half (okay, only a quarter of them, but it felt like half) the stories feature someone in mourning for a dead loved one, like only through grief are they vulnerable enough to accept love, and it is a real bummer.

On the plus side, they mixed it up with good diversity, in ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, so that’s something at least. Here’s some cold, hard data:

  • Short stories included in anthology: 14
  • Stories involving grief over the death of a loved one: 4
  • Stories featuring high-school bullying: 3
  • Stories with a main character older than 25: 0
  • Stories that my cranky old self actually thought were cute: 3.5*
    (none of the death or bullying ones)

*3 stories were straight-up super cute, and one had a very interesting premise, but the characters themselves weren’t super engaging.

The Arnifour Affair

by Anna

By Gregory Harris

Arnifour_AffairSometimes I worry that I’m getting too cranky in my old age – that books I would have enjoyed when I was younger, I now pick apart as trite since I’ve read so many other, better books by this point. I really wanted to like The Arnifour Affair: it is a Victorian-era murder mystery featuring a renowned detective, and his partner, both in work and life. Unfortunately, it reads like someone’s Sherlock/Watson fanfic with the names changed. Which, honestly, I would be all over, if only it was well written!

I swear every other line of dialogue included some synonym for “laughed”: chortled, smirked, snickered, chuckled, etc., until they all sounded like a pack of lunatics, laughing inappropriately at every single scene. This also clinched the idea of fanfic origins for me; smirking is a favorite of amateur writers, to the extent that I now hate the very word, and think it should be given a moratorium of use for at least a decade. See what I mean about me getting cranky?

The bare-bones of the character and the plot were there, so it could have been something really interesting. The Sherlock character sticks pretty close: son of a high-level government official, he is considered too eccentric for polite society, but still admired for his top-notch detective skills. Instead of recovering war veteran, though, the Watson character is an ex-street hustler and drug addict, who Sherlock…I mean, Colin Pendragon, has rescued. This could have been an interesting dynamic if they weren’t constantly chortling at each other.

All of the characters made little sense, switching personalities fairly dramatically whenever it suited the author’s purpose (though always maintaining a hair-trigger laugh impulse). This really threw off the plot since it was really hard to predict how any character would act in any given scenario and what their motivations would be. Everyone ended up being fairly unlikeable, and yet I was somehow still offended by which unlikeable character ended up the culprit. I’m still not sure what the final motivations were for the crime, though there were enough of them floating around that it seemed like Harris maybe just threw everything at the wall to see what stuck.

Murder on the Champs-Élysées

by Anna

By Alex Mandon

Champs-ElyseesInspector Guillaume Devré is a closeted gay man in Paris in 1900. He is also extremely cranky and a bit authoritative, so I had less sympathy for him than I’d expected. He’s still an interesting character: torn between his drive for truth and justice, and his own necessary deception.

His investigation of a murdered man almost immediate takes him to “the infamous, most celebrated woman in all of Paris…known as La Balise.” La Balise, aka Lucie-Geneviéve Madeleine, is a famous courtesan, and treated by the media, at least, as a cross between a super model and a rock star. She has a Past, that is alluded to, but not explained, and is also an utter delight!

The mystery itself takes many twists and turns, left me guessing the entire time, and is satisfyingly scandalous in the end. There were also enough teasers of the various characters that I have high hopes of future mysteries featuring the detective and the courtesan, not to mention the terse American forensic pathologist they both admire.

Since no sequel has yet appeared, here’s a recommendation for another historical novel featuring gay protagonists, though much different in pretty much every way:

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue

By Mackenzi Lee

Gentlemens_GuideI think this might be the type of YA romance that we will see more of, written by and for the millennial generation, and I have to say, I’m here for it! Though it is set in Regency England (and Europe, as the main characters embark on their Grand Tour), it to an extent anachronistically inclusive of diverse races and sexualities. I had a moment of GenX crankiness over it until I realized that no one (including me) is reading this book to get a detailed historical look into the time. It is sweet, flirty, swash-buckling, and just a whole lot of fun!