Book 2: Take Your Eye Off the Puck by Greg Wyshynski

In the past year or so, I started watching hockey again. It had been a sport I watched with friends in high school (and I played street hockey very badly with the same friends), but last season I started watching it again much more frequently and intensely. At a certain point, I realized that while I knew the basic rules of the game and had a pretty good idea of what was bad vs. what was good, I was missing a lot of the nuance. So I started listening to podcasts and reading articles on tactics and hockey stats, and that was how I heard about this book.

Greg Wyshynski is a hockey sportswriter, and his style is very much of the old school sportswriter genre--there's not a simile in the world he hasn't met and loved. But I found his book to be very well organized and provided a structure for understanding aspects of hockey that I had observed but hadn't necessarily understood just from watching games. I've found myself relying upon how he laid out various points when trying to explain rules or what have you to friends who are new to the sport, and I really like having that sort of vocabulary at hand instead of flailing around for how to describe a thing I understand instinctively but don't have the words for. He's also someone who grew up about thirty miles from where I did and is only a couple of years older than I am, so I get all of his cultural references and in general there's something about him that makes me feel home again in a way that few things have since My Chemical Romance or seeing Clerks for the first time. Most people probably won't have that sort of fondness for him baked in the way I do, but even without that, if you're a newish hockey fan (or even an old hand at hockey who wants a refresher course on certain topics), I really recommend his book.

Grade: A

Book 1: Abroad by Liz Jacobs (Book 1)

Note: I know the author of this book socially and read and provided feedback on an early draft of this novel.

As is probably implied by the above, I am too close to this book to claim objectivity about it. But man, I love this book. It's the story of a college student during his year of studying abroad in London. Nick's family emigrated to the U.S. from Russia when he was young, and he's been an outsider for all of his life. But when he goes to London, he finally finds his people in the form of a queer social circle, which is not the most emotionally comfortable way for him to find belonging, since the idea of being gay terrifies him. That terror isn't enough to kill off his attraction to Dex, though, or to prevent him from opening up for the first time to Izzy, who's having a bit of her own sexual identity crisis.

The story alternates between the POVs of those three characters, so you really get a sense of the entire world of their social circle, and all of the various personalities and emotional entanglements that exist within it. Part of what I love so much about this book is that there's a gay romantic relationship that isn't the only gay thing in the story--Nick and Dex aren't the token queers of their friends group, and it's not comprised solely of gay guys, either. There's an authenticity to both the complications of friendships and sexual relationships in college and the specific realities of queer social circles, and it's so nice to read a story and recognize the people and the conversations and what matters to them.

The same is true of the examination of Dex's experience as a black British gay man, which feels fully integrated into both the character and his emotional arc, and Nick's as a Jewish Russian immigrant who feels out of step no matter where on the globe he is. Following him as he gradually finds a way to inhabit himself fully is very emotionally satisfying. And Izzy's shock at discovering something new and unexpected about herself also rings true, as does the subsequent fallout she has with an unexpected person. 

I'm about halfway through the second part of this story, and I cannot wait to discover what happens to all three of them and the rest of their friends. With a lot of romance writing, gay or straight, you have a pretty good idea of how everything will end up, even if you don't know how they'll get there. I honestly don't have any idea how the story ends in this case, but I have complete confidence I'll be satisfied by it.

Grade: A 

2018 Master List

What's that, you say? It's March? Well, we may be two months into the year but I haven't read any books at all for the first two months, so we're starting this now. Here's my list of books to read this year. It's most of the books that were on this list from last year, plus a bunch of new ones that I've gotten. Last year I managed to read twelve books; this year I would like to read more than that. Let's go.

Book 12: The Half-Drowned King by Linnea Hartsuyker

Note: I know the author of this book socially, and I received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair and honest review. 

As someone who loves historical fiction, I was extremely excited when a friend of mine started working on a Viking saga many years ago. In a novel which spans many lands and characters, the broader narratives of power and conquest are told primarily through the experiences of a brother and sister, Ragnvald and Svanhild, and how their lives intersect with Solvi, the son of a king. Ragnvald is betrayed within the first chapter by Solvi and then learns that this was the result of a far larger betrayal carried out by his stepfather Olaf and by Solvi's father, one of the many kings of small holdings of land throughout Norway. Ragnvald is determined to take back the land and status he considers to be rightfully his, but he must weigh his desire for revenge against the shifting tides of allegiance among the various rulers of the land. This personal struggle plays out against the larger reality that Harald, one of the kings in question, has far greater ambition than to simply rule a small part of Norway: he wants to rule it all. 

Ragnvald's experience is contrasted with Svanhild's constrained life as a woman, and in particular as a woman with no living father and no brother present to help protect her. She makes brave and often reckless choices in order to avoid an untenable fate for herself, and her decisions result in her being at odds with her own brother at times. I really loved her journey, especially given that at various points Ragnvald bears more than a passing resemblance to Hamlet: he almost always knows what he wants to do, but often his sense of obligation and honor and self-preservation prevents him from taking that action. He is very conscious of what the long-term consequences of his actions might be, and what his place in a world ruled by Harald would be (and what it would be if Harald fails), and he sometimes hesitates when he would be better served to act (and vice versa). Svanhild, on the other hand, doesn't have the luxury of such contemplation, which makes her arc incredibly vibrant and unpredictable as well. 

The POV of this novel also manages to walk a very tricky line of presenting the religious and, at times, supernatural beliefs of the culture as being real to the characters, while not making a judgment for the reader as to the truth of them. I really liked that approach, and I felt it worked extremely well for this particular story and world. It allowed me to simply accept their reality without questioning my own interpretations of events, which never disrupted the flow of the story.   

One of the things I love most about reading historical fiction is the opportunity to learn about various historical periods and cultures that I know very little about. The Half-Drowned King drops you right into the middle of its tale, and the reader is left to swim their way to shore, much like the titular character. That isn't a complaint, by the way; I found the experience of genuinely not having a sense of where the narrative was going to be fascinating. I didn't have a level of familiarity with Viking culture in the 9th century to know what was likely to happen, and I definitely didn't want to google the real life inspirations for many of these characters and events and inadvertently spoil myself. Preventing myself from doing so will be even more difficult as I wait for the second and third novels of the trilogy, but I am positive that my patience will be rewarded in the end.

Grade: A

Book 11: An Unnatural Vice by KJ Charles

This book is everything for me that the first book in this series wasn't, oh my goodness. Justin Lazarus is a supernatural medium, a man who makes his living by tricking rich people and telling them what they want to hear, and Nathaniel Roy is a journalist out to expose Justin's entire trade. They both find themselves in the middle of a far more complicated and dangerous story than that, and somehow they go from enemies to lovers in the process. Justin is a character type that KJ Charles writes better than just about anyone, and the balance between him and Nathaniel is perfect and satisfying. I understood better what the first book in the series was setting up after reading this one, and it made me like some of those characters better as well. My one critique of this book is simply that I thought it could have been longer; there's a section in which Justin and Nathaniel have to flee London together for a while, and I would have loved for that to have gone even further in depth than it did. The third book in the series comes out this fall, and I cannot wait to read it.

Grade: A 

Book 10: On Point by Annabeth Albert

Oh god, this book had so much potential, and it did not live up to any of it, woof. The setup is something out of my contemporary romance novel dreams: Ben and Maddox have been best friends since SEAL training, and a decade later they're SEAL teammates and also roommates whose friendship is complicated by a threesome they have with a twink from a gay club. But before they can talk about their feelings, they go on a rescue mission that goes bad and both of them are severely injured.

Now, so far this setup is fantastic! At this point we could have amnesia, or one of them confessing his love and then thinking the other one didn't hear him/didn't remember because of the live-threatening injuries, or one of them could almost die because he sacrificed himself to save the other one, or all kinds of things! And instead, they get back to the States after going through this horribly traumatic event, and then they decide to fake date each other? Only they're really dating, they're just...not calling it that? But also going to Ben's dad's wedding together. None of it makes sense, and it has nothing to do with the first half of the book, and all of their emotional issues and how they respond to them don't feel like how real people act at all. But beyond that, they don't feel like decade-long friends to me. Ben is shocked to discover that Maddox wants to leave the Navy and open a bakery. Maddox also has a totally fucked up family situation that is a major plot point while he's in the hospital after almost dying and is then completely dropped after that. This book feels like two novellas stapled together, with no emotional consistency or logic to it. I've liked a bunch of other books by this author, but this one did not work for me at all.

Grade: C

Book 9: Save the Date by Annabeth Albert and Wendy Qualls

So many tropes that I love in one book! Quiet bookish scientist Randall's in town for his sister's wedding, and they go out to a gay bar as part of her bachelorette party. While there, he meets a hot stranger and decides it's time to actually hook up with a guy and stop being so shy! What are the odds that this stranger is also in town for the same wedding and is Randall's future brother-in-law's childhood best friend?

I love the setup of an inexperienced guy discovering sex and love unexpectedly, I love the conflict of them being thrown together during the insanity of a family wedding, and I just really loved the chemistry that they had together. Randall and Hunter work together so well, and they had just the right level of backstory angst and miscommunication mishaps. The whole thing worked for me, start to finish.

Grade: A