Well, friends, it’s late Sunday night in my time zone and I don’t have a word for you. Apologies. It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. I did make notes on a few of the small-r romances I read, so I thought I’d share those.
The Devil Comes Courting (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Courtney Milan. This is such a fascinating and unusual historical—set in late-nineteenth-century China with a Black American hero who is laying telegraph cable across the ocean and a neurodivergent Chinese heroine taken by British missionaries who is trying to encode Chinese characters for the telegraph—and it really delivers not only on setting and characterization and plot, but also on the sheer depth of emotion that these two people feel for each other. And it’s got an epistolary component—yes we’re counting telegrams—so of course I loved it. Content warnings: emotional abuse, some racist remarks, some misogynist remarks, sex.
Our Favorite Songs (bi m/gay m, both cis, contemporary, novella) by Anita Kelly. I don’t know how Anita Kelly packs so much character and feeling into a novella and probably wouldn’t understand even if someone drew me a diagram, so I just have to accept this book for the tiny, fully formed miracle that it is. I loved the setting of the weird little karaoke dive bar—oh, how I miss mine—and the kindhearted bisexual jock looking back on his high school years and realizing he was queer then, too. Content warnings: parental death from cancer, grief, sex.
For the Love of April French (cis het m/pan trans f, contemporary) by Penny Aimes. This kinky, emotional story has such great, deep characterization of both main characters, a white trans woman named April and a Black cis man named Dennis. They’re both so sweet and loving and have diametrically opposed relationship issues—she pushes him away because she doesn’t believe she could be anyone’s first and only choice for love, and he’s afraid to press for more because he pushed his last partner too hard. I loved the slightly unusual structure of this book, where the middle six months of their relationship are told first from April’s perspective and then from Dennis’s. It was great to see how certain scenes and supporting characters changed. I found this book really moving. Content warnings from the author.
I hope to be back on October 3 with an etymology to share!
