Alana McCool

Some people might say that The Stars Too Fondly is a queer sci-fi space opera, but really it is queer fic with a sci-fi space opera twist. Starts as a heist, turns into a space opera sci-fi superhero mystery kind...thing. But really it is queer fic and sapphic romance. Girl grows up loving stories about the failed mission to Proxima Centauri, girl goes with her queer friends (1 trans girl, 1 enby, and 1 token straight guy for some reason) to heist a spaceship and figure out why it all went wrong, girl and queer friends are blasted off to Proxima Centauri on that experimental spaceship, girl falls for hologram memory of space ship's lost captain, girl and queer friends get superpowers and save the universe. Really a simple queer story like that. Not the best written characters but I always like the "computer falls in love" story because the romance is always wrapped around becoming-->person, which is a theme I love very very much.

And I guess it is fun to have really casual queer representation in a book. One of the little devices centers around the trans girl making sure there is enough spironolactone on the ship, with no explanation for cishet readers. Or arguing about stupid bullshit and teasing about crushes and cute relationships. Or friends figuring out your crushes long long before you, a stupid sapphic, do. Very relatable.

The only thing that feels a little unbelievable is that while girl and hologram are falling for each other, the real captain is watching through interdimensional timey-wimey stuff, and somehow that romance gets transferred over...it makes a nice conclusion (especially when they decide they need to make a hologram girl to exist with the hologram captain), but just kinda weird and I don't know if I buy it. How does that work really.

DNF'ed it, should start with that.

For some reason I like genre fiction, and for some reason when I go to the library to find new books to read, either on the new shelves or searching the stacks for authors I recognize, 90% of what I read, 9 out of 10 books, are queer-related. Maybe that is just how sci-fi/fantasy is being written these days, and always how horror has been. But it is not a problem for me because I like to read queer stories. I am a queer woman and I can relate to the experiences of people in these stories. Even if the stories are about messy people (because I am also a messy person).

I could not read more than half of I Keep My Exoskelletons to Myself. It hurt to read, and not in a way that feels cathartic. The world in this book is a tragedy that feels impossible to escape, and the protagonist just can't move herself out of her personal tragedy and the barriers in the world on marginalized people, who are criminalized, the shadows that she has to have on her. Like, yeah, life feels like that in our reality, sometimes. But I don't want to brood in it.

I think the author is writing her own story into this, and that is good. People should write their own stories. But the protagonist, she is just caught in that forever cycle of despair that the realized metaphor of the shadows lock her in, in that tragedy of her wife's death and her child already having an extra shadow from birth. She speaks all her snicking sarcasm to try to cope, making things worse for herself, not really being a good parent. I hated her a little. But maybe that is just some sh*tty respectability politics I am feeling. And if that is so, and I know it, it is shining a mirror on my own internalized marginal-phobia. Cringe is cringe at yourself.

I read halfway and then I skipped to the end to see if something shines through. There is maybe something at the end about young people breaking through intergenerational trauma by owning it. But I could not tie it all together and finish it, and I do not think it would have been good. So that is why it is two stars, because it did not reach me personally, because I read genre fiction for fun and this was not fun, not at all.

My first T. Kingfisher book was Thornhedge and I loved it so much I thought I should read some more. This one, Nettle & Bone, plays with godmothers, magic gained from doing impossible tasks, and graveyard keepers who talk with the dead (and also keep chickens that sometimes have demons). Also the Goblin Market is mixed in there, and a really cute straight romance that didn't bother me at all! I don't know if Kingfisher has a type but both Toadling and Marra have a similar feel to them, young, inexperienced, stubborn but also not really sure about themselves except what they should be doing (and that they are doing something wrong). And it is a fun character to follow.

I like N&B starts in media res with Marra making a skeleton dog, singing from the folk song Twa Sisters; which reminds me of the impossible tasks from Scarborough Faire. Maybe there are more folk songs woven in the rest but I did not recognize them.

Time's Agent is like a worst of all possible worlds capitalist multiverse. Literally. All the pocket worlds taken over by corporations, human life treated as completely disposable. Strings upon strings of tragedies, catastrophies, extinctions, until there are so many you become numb. The protagonist's (who was a pocket world archeologist investigating Taino ruins) daughter is both dead and alive, her wife (pocket world naturalist) won't talk to her and stays in a pocket dimension she wears around her neck, and the accident which caused all this is what loosed the nightmare dystopia on the world. This is not one of those time travel stories where you can just go back and make things right. There is no reset for Earth Standard. Earth Standard is screwed. But there might be hope in another way.

Set in the Dominican Republic, ties deep into Taino religion and myth, and is a lesbian tragedy where the lesbians don't die. Still a tragedy. Really, the Earth in Time's Agent makes me feel like, okay, at least our world could never become that bad, what we get will be only marginal terrible compared with that.

Some of the ending confused me because I don't have the cultural context, and i didn't really care for the way the authors used abbreviations for certain things. But it left me feeling a husk, some hopeful, and that is feeling something other than numb. Maybe feeling numb was the point. But I don't want to feel numb at everything terrible in the world.

A queer dark fantasy novella. i read because I recently read Tesh's Some Desperate Glory and liked it. This is a very different and much shorter story, something I can read in an hour sit, but the same detailed prose and deep world. In Silver in the Woods I can feel the dirt and wet and smell the moss and good rot (and also bad rot). A cute May-December romance hides in the fairy tale. Recommend if you like T Kingfisher's fairy tale novellas, it is in that similar way with darker vibes.

Cinderwich is Appalachian Gothic and hits that perfect feel, sleepy town in the mountains, victorian mansions with witchy sisters, local folk magics, a big creepy old gum tree hung with ribbons. It is also a bittersweet story about two women looking for closure: one, for her aunt who gave her her name; one, for the lover who disappeared 30 years ago. It is also a creepy ghost story but I don't want to spoil anymore of the mystery for anyone reading.

Except one thing: this is not a romance. Not any. Even though the POV protagonist is bi and 40 and the other protagonist is in her 70s and a lesbian, and even though most books I read have queer romance in them these days, and even though may-december romances can be very cute, the fact that Kate was Judith's student 20 years ago made that seem like a more creepy idea than the ghost story. And I was even more worried when I learned that the dead Ellen was also Judith's student before they became lovers. But that was discussed and handled very well, and I was relieved that nowhere in the book did it feel like Judith and Kate were any different than friends, and no implications that it would become any different from that every.

I really love a first person POV story, and journal entries works really well as a framing device in Piranesi. Because the narrator only knows what is at hand, and only shares what they think is right to put down in their journal. And what is at hand is memory, flashes written on my own heart, building the House of the Blessed Child.

I remember years ago I was on the north shore of O'ahu during the winter, when the waves can grow to 50 feet high, and they thunder down on the beach. And when I think about that I can feel the thunder again. The House is a soundscape, a feelscape, I can hear and smell and touch in my body the great ocean, that thunder, the spray and mists, see the quality of light on statues, feel the warmth and also the ice cold of winter shore, hear the calling of all sorts of birds, the quiet of the Drowned Halls. It is very Proustian the way it grows as the Blessed Child writes his journal, just a little taste and the whole space fills out.

It reminds me of the game Myst some, that kind of solitary atmosphere. But in Myst, you are alone and feel strange. The Blessed Child does not feel strange, he is home. And it is only when others come into the House and dredge memories that he feels anything is wrong. Why would he want to leave?

Why would I want to leave?

Thank you to @hardybooks for recommending this.

Chuck Tingle is king of queer horror. He can be queen if he wants, I know he is non-dysphoric trans, but whatever kind non-authoritarian benevolent monarch title works, he is it. This novel Bury Your Gays and his other traditional published novel Camp Damascus are set in the same layer of the Tingleverse, and I should explain that if you don't know Chuck Tingle lore.

So, Tingleverse is a multi-layer reality, all infinite number of universes stacked on top of each other. The higher up a story is, the closer everything in the story is to our base reality. The lower, the stranger and more about butts and dicks and all that you see in his internet published short stories. But in all layers Love is Real. Outside the Tingleverse is the Void, which comes seeping in and brings monsters and horrors, and that is partially where the horrors in his horror novels come from. So, Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays take place in the same layer, but it is a little down from our top layer so more weirdness can happen. The novels reference each other in really tiny ways but you don't need one before the other.

I don't want to give too much information on the plot because there are some nice surprises and it is best to just experience them. But it has a lot to do with "capitalism is terrible" and "generative AI is terrible" and "hollywood is often terrible" and writing horror as a way of overcoming childhood trauma. Like, the monsters in the book come straight from the protagonist's childhood experiences with homophobia by friends and family, that he wrote into film and television. And there is the big theme that queer joy is not a forced thing and we should be able to write whatever queer stories we want to write rather than whatever is profitable for big media or The Algorithm.

The ending climax made me laugh and cheer and cover up my smile with my hand. It was that good.

I want to say, this is a fun short flipped fairy tale. I loved the world that the author built, both in the human realm and in the fairy realm. I love the greenteeth. i love the characters, especially Toadling. Really I relate to Toadling, she is kind and gentle but the world is not kind and gentle (except for her greenteeth family and at least one human), and she is young and not perfect. I love her, I want to visit her in my mind after the story is over and see what she is doing, see what other stories happen with her.

It is nice to sit down and read a story like this in a few hours, not dragging any, and feel wishing for more but still satisfied.

When I read the review that this book makes you cry ugly tears I did not believe. You know, reviewers exaggerate. And then I got to that scene in the middle of the novel. And I threw down the book and said, "I hate this book", and went to my bed and cried. So it is not false advertising. This book hurts you. And although I have a lot of empathy for Kyr at the beginning because of the situation she is in from birth, she really is the worst person ever. And then at the end you are cheering for her, because she has that kind of long character arc. Books don't make me feel this up and down every day. So, I didn't always like it, but at the end I liked it.