Book 12: Under the Mistletoe with You by Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Look, sometimes you need to end March with a gay Christmas romance novel, okay?

This one has a lot to recommend for it - it's got a baker named Christopher who lives in a quaint Welsh village. He gets snowed in with the famous actor Nash Nadeau there under a fake name who was supposed to stay at Christopher's apartment while he went home for Christmas. They clash! There's only one bed! They have to figure out how to work together to help the village! Christopher hides that he knows who Nash is! 

This book is extremely cozy, and it's lovely to have a lead character who's trans and not have that be the big message of the book. But for me, the balance of small village pre-Christmas stuff to romance wasn't quite what I was looking for - the two leads didn't have the kind of chemistry I was hoping for, and while they each had personal obstacles they had to get past, it didn't feel like they found the answers in each other. Plus, and this is just a particular pet peeve for me, Nash never sounded like an American (or a Canadian who moved to LA when he was a teenager) to me. I'm sure that the reverse happens for British readers all the time, but I wish his dialogue and internal monologue had been more carefully written to be that of a non-British person. 

Grade: C   

Book 11: The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

One of my best friends got married a few months ago, and she gave a selection of books to each person in her bridal party based on their tastes. This is one of mine, and I definitely know why I got it: a female knight! an inventive narrative structure! lesbian subtext! and a whole bunch of twists and turns and prophecies and betrayals. It's a novella that feels like it could be the launching pad to a full novel or series, because there's so much more of the world left unexplored and it ends at a place that is clearly kicking off something new. 

The titular fireborne blade is in the lair of a dragon named the White Lady, who can't be killed by a (male) knight. So following in the footsteps of Eowyn, the knight Maddileh is determined to force the other male knights to allow her to also be a knight by killing the White Lady and bringing back the blade. She has a squire who's fairly incompetent and the support of a couple of mages (official and hidden), and then the whole thing takes a turn! I read this in one sitting and it was just a very nice way to send an evening. 

Grade: B  

Book 10: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

The sequel to The Mimicking of Known Successes, this book picks up where that one left off, with our intrepid duo stumbling on a new mystery to solve on the rings of Jupiter! This one is in many ways an examination of why people within a society will contrive to create an "imposition of unnecessary obstacles" simply because they need to see themselves as living off the land or being good enough or having the ability to pull up those bootstraps that others can't, etc. And for obvious reasons, I found that pretty topical! Don't break things that are working but flawed because you're bored or because they're not perfect!!! Ahem. 

I will say that the relationship at the core of these books still isn't exactly my jam - there's too much hesitation and doubt for me, without an actual issue to give their relationship any real conflict. It's not the scifi novella series I'd most recommend, but if space colonization is your thing, it's fun!

Grade: B

Book 9: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A book club book! And one that read with some trepidation, because I don't always vibe with a short novel that's more about mood and language than it is about plot, and I am more lukewarm on stories set in space than others. 

However! I really, really loved this book. The prose is certainly stylized, but I think the structure and format of the novel (24 hours on a space station that's rotating around Earth 16 times in that timeframe) made it all work for me. There are six astronauts up there, from a variety of backgrounds - two from Russia and then one each from Italy, the UK, the U.S. and Japan - and the book tells the story of what they go through on a typical day up there, and what they see of the world below. It's not a lot of plot, but it isn't just descriptions of the glory and wonder of the planet below, and even that stuff made me so happy. I just had a great time reading this book, and in the end that's worth a lot!

Grade: A 

Book 8: Saint by Sierra Simone

So I put a hold on this book in the library when I read the following quote from it:

"There's no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend's little brother. And there's no manual for falling back in love with him when he's a monk." 

Up until the final three words it's just pretty standard gay romance novel fare, and then it suddenly takes a turn!! And that turn is why I picked up the book and it's why this book has the charms it does. 

The monk is Aiden, who had been a millionaire playboy with underlying trauma that he decides to deal with by breaking up with his hot boyfriend Elijah and becoming a monk (but like a cool monk, in a cool monastery that's fine with his queerness etc.). But then Elijah comes by because he's writing a big magazine piece on monastery breweries, and also he's engaged now to another man, and Aiden loses his mind and the chastity cage he's been wearing under his robes no longer controls his desires. 

The whole vibe of this story is giving these two men in contemporary life a reason why they can't be together that's also extremely hot, and the enforced celibacy of Catholic priests/monks/nuns is a perfect fit for it. It also begins to sag a bit at a certain point, because there's only one way out of this (Aiden leaves his monastery) and also we find out what his Big Secret was for leaving Elijah and entering a monastery the next day, and frankly it doesn't hit as well as it should. But the sexual tension and denial is extremely good, and the way they roleplay with the actual restrictions they're breaking is incredible. I was sad to discover that most of this author's books are either straight Catholic versions of this, which I'm less interested in, or fake modern politics based on Camelot, which unfortunately I simply cannot deal with right now. But this was a great winter read. 

Grade: B

Book 7: Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

When I started reading this book, I worried that I might not be able to follow all of it because my knowledge of the Troubles in Northern Ireland was so limited (along with my general knowledge of Irish independence and history). It starts with a pretty narrow focus on one disappeared woman and a few key individuals who played major roles in the IRA in the late sixties and seventies, and gradually broadens the scope, until by the end of the book I wanted to go back to the beginning and reread it immediately, because now I actually had the context I needed for understanding everything. 

This isn't a criticism at all; it's actually one of my favorite things about the book and the way that it builds a world for someone who came in with practically no political understanding of how the Good Friday Agreement came to be and how contentious it was, and how impossible a conflict between neighborhoods and streets can be to navigate, no matter what your religion or position. It's also a murder mystery, and the final third of the novel has a series of reveals that I truly didn't know where they could possibly land. 

I started reading this in the fall and continued into the winter in part because there's a miniseries dramatizing the book, which I wanted to watch after I had read this, and I'm really glad I experienced the narratives in that order. The show is also very good, but I think that my experience of watching the show was deepened significantly by having read the book first. The story itself is highly compelling, but the structure the book gives the story is so effective and so impressive, and I'm already tempted to do a full reread. It's my favorite kind of narrative nonfiction.

Grade: A 

Book 6: The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels

This is almost a really sweet and satisfying Christmas romance novel before it kind of falls apart in the end, sadly. Margot and her girlfriend break up right before the holidays, so when one of her clients asks her to be his fake girlfriend at his rich parents' home for Christmas, she says yes. All goes well until she meets Ben's hot gay sister Ellie, oh no! Ellie thinks she's a gold digger but is also drawn to her, of course. 

I thought this novel was going to avoid most of the worst pitfalls of this genre when Ben and Margot confess that they're faking it at about the midway point, long before Margot and Ellie actually kiss, but then the final conflict and resolution is so both overdone and underbaked that the whole thing falls flat. Not mad I read it, but it could have been much better with a bit more work, for me. 

Grade: C