Book 25: Off Campus by Amy Jo Cousins

The setup of this romance novel is basically everything I love best: two college students with secrets in their past are roomed together, despite each of them having been told they would be living in a single. On top of that, one of them is openly gay, and the other has been so busy dealing with his disaster of a life to really consider things like his latent attraction to men as well as women.

The conflict starts immediately, with Tom simply wanting to have a bed he can fall asleep in and Reese determined to scare him off by having extremely frequent and obvious sex with men in their room whenever Tom wants to be there. This leads to Tom being there and "asleep" during some of those hookups, and eventually it leads to a late night hookup of their own.

I really enjoyed the beginning of their relationship, and how the two of them dealt together with Reese's need for control and PTSD from a past assault. It managed to be compelling and considerate while also being satisfying romantically. But as the novel progressed, their future conflicts and inability to ever actually listen to each other or have a real conversation made the story fall apart. They were both a bit too dumb and too demanding of each other at times, and it made the resolution at the end not quite land the way I wished it had. It needed more therapy and less romantic conflict, sadly. I still liked the characters, but while I think there was a good book somewhere within this one, the end result wasn't quite right.

Grade: C

Book 24: For Real by Alexis Hall

This is a BDSM romance that examines how to find a new relationship that both satisfies one's sexual desires and their emotional needs. It's relatively easy in a city like London to find a partner whose tastes in kink complement yours, but navigating a relationship that starts with kink and hopefully ends with love can be a difficult path.

37-year-old Laurie had his heart broken six years ago and has decided that it's easier and less risky to satisfy his need to submit sexually without attempting to find the depth of connection he once had with his partner Robert. Toby is new to the scene (and, at the age of nineteen, fairly new to adult life in general) and struggling to find a way to fulfill his dominant needs while he's still learning exactly how to dom. Somehow they find each other.

My favorite part of this novel was the dynamic between Laurie and Toby. An age difference of eighteen years (as well as a class difference that's just as large) is fairly common in BDSM romance, but it's much more unusual for the younger person in the relationship to be the dom, and it works beautifully. Their interactions convey Toby's natural inclination for domination and sadism while also showing his learning curve and the level of trust that must exist between the two of them for their relationship to work. And Laurie's instinctive responsiveness to him reads so well, leaving the reader with no doubt why he was drawn to Toby in the first place. Beyond that, the book does an incredible job of showing that any kind of sex or role can be submissive or dominant, depending on who's doing what. I can't remember the last book I read that so successfully separated the motivation from the act in a BDSM relationship, and it was wonderful.

The plot had one too many conflicts and crises for my taste, and there were details that existed outside of their relationship that didn't ring particularly true for me. But the dynamic of the pairing is so satisfying, and that's what I took away from this book in the end.

Grade: B  

Book 23: Under Contract by Helen Saito

Many romance novels (or erotica) approach kink and BDSM by depicting safe and responsible relationships between partners that could theoretically exist in a healthy real life setting. And then there are BDSM stories that deliberately exist in a universe that both isn't real and isn't desirable, all in the service of erotic satisfaction in what is clearly fantasy and not real life. Under Contract belongs in that second category.

In some presumably future dystopian society, sex slavery is legal, and functions as a sort of extended contract BDSM prostitution. The titular contract is a legally binding one between owner and slave, and there are brokers and trainers who prepare slaves for their jobs and also dissuade the interest of any "thrill-seekers," potential slaves who have other sources of income who think they want to be owned and used and give over their consent to be in a BDSM-style relationship without any kind of safe word to protect them.

The story focuses on Gavin, a former slave who is now a trainer, and his new trainee Alex, who he assumes is a thrill-seeker due to Alex's age (45) and the fact that he's been able to work and survive without selling himself into sex slavery before now. Gavin's opinion of the situation slowly changes as he puts Alex through the ropes, and their connection deepens and grows a bit complicated once emotions enter the picture.

The sex and the kink is very well written, and the fact that Alex is 45 and Gavin is in his early thirties also adds an unusual and welcome dynamic to the pairing and overall story. This isn't a good story for readers looking for one monogamous relationship at the heart of it; Gavin has a partner of four years independent of his training work, and Alex has very enthusiastic sex with numerous people throughout the story. The ending and final resolution felt a bit rushed to me, and occasionally I wanted to thwap a couple of the characters over the head with a newspaper until they stopped being quite so clueless about their own feelings, but overall I really enjoyed this book.

Grade: B

Book 22: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Reading Fun Home was a fascinating experience. I have seen the musical adapted from this graphic novel (actually memoir) three times, and I also read collections of Bechdel's comics Dykes to Watch Out For back when I was a teenager and figuring out why her work resonated so deeply with me. So reading this book was deeply familiar from the very first page.

But it was also new, and unexpected, and it left me with an even greater appreciation for what an incredible adaptation the musical really is, because it is both unerringly faithful to the book and its own unique narrative. It's not just that there are parts of the book that aren't a part of the musical, although of course that's true, it's that the story changes with the form, and the relationship that theater (and musical theater in particular) has to its audience is different than the one an author has with their reader.

Bechdel uses so many different lenses to examine her father's life, and her relationship with him, and her future beyond him: the shared (yet tragically separate) sense of being an outsider, of queerness, their relationship and connection through literature and using the words of fiction and other people's experiences as a bridge between themselves, the use of design and art and maps, so many maps, to attempt to explain the unfathomable. She also shows how her own diaries attempted desperately to tell the story of her family in a way that made sense, either by omission or by telling the factual truth and avoiding all the emotion underneath. It's a brilliant, beautiful book.

Grade: A

Book 21: Children of Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is a book that I've been waiting anxiously to read since Kay announced it last spring. Over the past thirty years Kay has published 13 novels, and I've read them all; he's a permanent entry on the list of my top five favorite authors, without question. I started reading him when I was a teenager, and I've felt like his work has grown and changed along with me.

I offer up all of this personal history of my relationship to his work because it's impossible for me to imagine how I would have responded to Children of Earth and Sky had it been the first Kay book I'd read. While he started his career writing fantasy novels set in various worlds that were evocative of Europe, he gradually moved in a direction of writing what I think of as historical fiction RPF with the serial numbers filed off. Five of his novels (of which Children is one) are set within a cohesive universe that is one quarter turn off from the history and geography and cultures of Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. Children's setting is the Mediterranean Renaissance, and while there are fantastical elements in this novel (and his other historical fiction), the magic that exists does not serve to make the setting feel otherwordly; if anything, it more firmly grounds it in reality.

Clearly, Kay's writing has been in conversation with the narratives of history for many years now. But in Children, he is more explicitly in conversation with his own past works than he ever has been before. It is not strictly a sequel to the other four books; I believe it could still succeed as a story for someone with no familiarity of Kay's past works at all. But there are so many moments of exceptional power and resonance that could not possibly land in the same way if the reader hadn't read his past works, in particular Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors. Those moments go beyond being Easter eggs of sorts and end up being the foundation of my appreciation of the novel. It's possible I'm overstating the benefit of having read the other four novels (especially since I can never read Children while lacking that knowledge), and perhaps the general impact of those moments will still land, even if the reader doesn't know the specific reason why. But Kay's obvious interest in (and possibly even his need for) engaging in that sort of conversation with his own work means that if the reader doesn't have that knowledge, they are missing out on something fundamental, in my opinion.

None of the above is meant as a criticism, for the record; the moment I realized how explicit and deliberate the parallels were between a Children storyline and the main narrative arc of Sailing to Sarantium was one of my favorite moments in the novel, and it deepened my understanding of and appreciation for what he was doing as a storyteller. And of course, writers will often include references and motifs and parallels that not every reader will understand; a writer cannot demand (or expect) that readers will be familiar with all of their influences. But for me, Children is a story within an already established world, and the journey does not begin there. I would have a hard time recommending this book without also first recommending the four other books in the same geographic setting; I wouldn't call those five novels a series in the traditional sense, but they enrich each other, and I think reading any one of them in the absence of the others does a disservice to the story as a whole.

Other thoughts: this book has some of my favorite characters in all of Kay's works. It is more of an ensemble piece than some of his novels are, and there isn't a clear cut main character whose journey we follow most closely. But the characters hit the right balance of depth for me, with even minor characters landing after very little time on the page. The women in particular are fantastic; while he has always written complex and compelling female characters, the variety of women and their divergent motivations and actions in this book really struck me, from the two main female characters all the way down to characters who appear for a scene or two.

On a different note, I don't think I've ever made it though one of Kay's novels without crying, and Children is no exception to that. What is different is that one of the main emotions behind my tears this time around was that of relief. I wouldn't call Children a book that pulls its punches, but I do think it's a novel about finding grace and new beginnings and sometimes forgiveness out of an intended path of revenge and grief and intrigue. It left me feeling emotionally drained in a way I wasn't expecting to be from a Kay novel; it's lovely to know that after all these years, he can still surprise me.

Grade: A