Books of August ’24
A pretty even mix of great and not-great this month. The highs were high (Gathered Heat! Adib Khorram’s romcom! Kingfisher and Borges!) but the lows were low with a streak of disappointing historical romances. I’m almost ready for a solid three-star mediocre read to decompress. A lucky number 13 once again, but that’s with stranding four (excellent) books that I’m within a couple chapters of finishing—stay tuned for September.
Evil Eye — Etaf Rum (2023) ⚭
This is why I wanted to read more Etaf Rum. This is the book I knew she had in her. It’s just as brilliant and damning a portrait of a toxic marriage as Liars was, with the added generational trauma and displacement of a Palestinian family. Those are the parts that brought tears to my eyes, the glimpses of the nakba and the camps, the unspeakable loss, the traditions and meals Yara preserves even in the mountains of North Carolina. It does one another beautiful thing that Liars doesn’t do, too—it’s not so insular, it’s ultimately friendship and connection that break the spell of isolation and grief and help Yara find her way out. It’s a love story in the end, between a mother and her daughters, between two best friends, between a woman and herself.
Lessons from Cruising — Martin Goodman (2024) ⚭
Joke’s on me, because I picked up this ARC for the last story, a retelling of Billy Budd from Captain Vere’s point of view. I figured I’d sample the rest; instead I went down the buffet line and inhaled them all. Rarely do I like every story in a short story collection, but that’s what Goodman’s done to me. The cover and title are not helping the book find its audience, as indicated by the low ratings and confused reviews on Goodreads. I expected stoic litfic a la Garth Greenwell; instead there’s surrealism, hilarity, dream states, spec fic and fantasy, myth retellings, and my favorite: the disillusioned Anglican vicar Alan, writing letters from Tarsus and Antioch, heretically following the footsteps of St. Thekla and St. Paul. The writing buzzes with life, surreal, queer in every sense of the word, delightful.
A Sorceress Comes to Call — T. Kingfisher (2024) ⚭
I’m here all day long for T. Kingfisher’s aging, aching protagonists, with bad knees and big hearts and a well-honed sense of doom. The plot is a very loose retelling of The Goose Girl, minus princesses and kings and plus a conniving, murderous, sorceress mother. Evangeline, aka Doom, is determined to marry herself and her trapped, obedient daughter to the highest bidders in proper Regency-esque fashion, plans thwarted when she encounters a squire’s spinster sister who sees her for exactly who she is. There’s a coterie of women to the rescue: the no-nonsense Hester, the ruthless Imogene, the enchanting Penelope, and eventually Doom’s daughter Cordelia herself.
It’s not rah-rah feminism so much as it is changing the terms for who we deem worthy of consideration, agency, and power in these stories. In T. Kingfisher fashion, that includes the animal world as well. I’d happily read a whole series of Hester, her geese, and her friends (including Richard) living their best life and thwarting monsters in whatever form they take.
Hot Earl Summer — Erica Ridley (2024) ⚭
A goofy, over-the-top farce with the volume dialed up to 11. Which seems absurd to complain about, given how I just read and loved Something Extraordinary—surely if anything is dialed up to 11 it’s the Tarletons. But Alexis Hall grounds his farce with deep emotion and intimacy, using it to scratch away at the actual farce of a society that dictates such rigid, preposterous roles. I feel Erica Ridley wanting to do something similar, but it stays at the superficial level, with ripped abs and lust at first sight and a relationship that’s just as conventional as you please, apart from a heroine with a sword. I applaud the found family and the chronic disability rep, but without deeper character work, this veers into cartoonish and (she winces) boring territory for me.
The Palace of Eros — Caro De Robertis (2024) ⚭
My adjectives for the prose: purple, dense, florid, bloated. It sounds like I’m describing a corpse. DNF @ 15% because none of it is connecting with me, not the first-person Psyche nor the third-person Eros, nor the prose that’s turgid to the point of hyperbole. (Did I just want the chance to deploy the word turgid? Maaaaaybe. It’s such a good word.)
The Emperor and the Endless Palace — Justinian Huang (2024) ⚭
I kept my expectations low, and the writing shows promise on the sentence level—but on the plot/structure/worldbuilding/thematic level, it falls apart. There are plot twists that change the entire point of the story, but Huang doesn’t write like he knows that. (If there’s a second book, perhaps he plans to explore that further, but it doesn’t come together in this book.) Bummer, because a queer AF update of two queer AF ancient Chinese stories—one of which gives us the origin of the term cut-sleeve—is such a great concept, and one I really want to read.
Ficciones — Jorge Luis Borges (1994) ⚭
Borges is up to some delightful fuckery, playing with form, inventing books and authors and universes that are just as, to paraphrase, contaminated with fiction as our own history of the world. The stories are brief and vertiginous, mind-boggling and often cheeky. An undisputed masterpiece, even if I’m still partial to Calvino, even if Calvino himself would disagree with me (per his essay on Borges in Six Memos for the Next Millennium).
How to Fall for a Scoundrel — Kate Bateman (2024) ⚭
A thief and a private investigator team up to solve a theft, and the vibes are basically a case-of-the-week tv episode (think Charlie’s Angels, Remington Steele, White Collar, etc) playing historical dress-up. The plot is as straightforward as it gets—they search for a macguffin, they get a clue, they get another clue, they solve the case. No twisty characters or KJ Charles-level plotting here. I was all set to breeze through it and enjoy myself regardless, and then a bad case of instalove reared its head, along with ye olde hardcore gender essentialism, the kind that bums me out and turns me off. For example, a memorable scene where Harry has to dress like a dandy for an undercover recon (an Italian dandy, at that), and the author takes great pains to assure us that, “On any other man, the ensemble would have looked ridiculous, almost feminine, but on him the flamboyant clothes only served to accentuate his intense masculinity.”
Sigh. That’s on me for reading outside my lane, but my hope for a quick, fun read with heists and spies didn’t pan out.
I’ll Have What He’s Having — Adib Khorram (2024) ⚭
I’m glad the term tonic masculinity has been making the rounds, because this feels like tonic masculinity of the highest order. David Curtis, sommelier, mistakes Farzan Alavi for a food critic, and what blooms in the wake of this mixup is a tender, sexy, heartfelt romance between two grown adults who have to deal with the obstacles that a grown-ass relationship entails. Highlights include both of their friend groups, and coworkers, and families, jokes and mishaps during sex (!), the love letter to Kansas City (flaws included), and the rich Iranian culture, community, and cuisine of the Alavi family restaurant (my stomach growls).
Beautifully done, every bit of it—especially the miscommunication, which is the opposite of contrived and sparks growth and better communication. Favorite romance I’ve read this month, and on track to be one of the best-of for the year.
Come Out, Come Out — Natalie C. Parker (2024) ⚭
In the same niche as Camp Damascus, the conversion-therapy-as-horror genre. Similarities abound, even down to the senior class quarry jumps, which doesn’t indicate any co-opting of plot points but simply how ubiquitous this experience is, the same script across rural America, where any deviation from the script means there will be Consequences. A key plot point involves a gender-swapped/gender-neutral production of Grease, which is both fun and thematically relevant. Chuck Tingle nails the horror bits more effectively, but Parker nails the family/friends emotional dynamics very well. I’m glad that both exist.
A Governess’s Guide to Passion and Peril — Manda Collins (2024) ⚭
The fourth in a series, and I read at least one of the first three during the fugue state years when my dad’s health was failing, so I have only the haziest memory of it. That might mean I’m missing something, as it never felt explained in the text why the other women hadn’t come to Jane’s aid before now, nor why Jane’s feelings for Adrian would evolve beyond a schoolgirl crush. The plot is sketched out, not fleshed out—the side characters are props, the culprit is telegraphed from his first appearance on page, both the mystery and the romance are a series of scenes that happen without much tension or suspense, and the climax is sloppy to a fault. One thing that bothers me in romance is when it’s taken for granted that the couple belongs together: i.e. they’re young, attractive, and available, so poof, they’re in love. As opposed to being drawn toward someone against expectation or reason, and all the complexity and growth that entails. It manifests a lot more often in straight romance than queer romance, for obvious reasons, which is why these m/f historicals keep failing me, even when I’m just in the mood for fluffy distraction.
We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word — edited by Franny Choi, Bao Phi, Noʻu Revilla, and Terisa Siagatonu (2024) ⚭
Superb. This is how to do an anthology, where the disparate voices are the point—how do we even define AAPI except as “the other,” non-white? Who is the “we” in question? To whom is that category useful? The poems are sorted into themes of “mourn,” “pronounce,” “fight,” “love,” each as powerful as the last. A cacophony, a mosaic, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. As the subtitle indicates, it leans heavily on the oral tradition, and I would love to hear these pieces performed out loud.
One Day I’ll Grow Up and Be a Beautiful Woman — Abi Maxwell (2024) ⚭
Nonfiction memoir about a mother raising her autistic, transgender daughter and the New Hampshire town that puts their family through hell. A harrowing and heartbreaking survival guide (barely? hopefully?) about weathering the eye of the current political storm. I’m always looking for books I can recommend to well-meaning people who want to see past the transphobic headlines, and this one goes on the list. (Well-meaning people, as opposed to those who want to remain comfortably safe in their bigotry. Indeed, one of the most frustrating, infuriating parts of Maxwell’s story are those who just want to seem nice at all costs, so they can feel like good people, regardless of the consequences of either their hateful actions or their silence.)
Trans rights are human rights, and to learn more or take action, I can personally vouch that The Campaign for Southern Equality is doing good work here in the south. On a national or global level, try Advocates for Trans Equality or TGEU.
Previously: Books of July ’24