Alpennia Blog ([syndicated profile] alpennia_feed) wrote2025-07-11 11:09 pm

Did Someone Say Pirates?

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Friday, July 11, 2025 - 15:59

When I see pirate novels in the new book listings, I sometimes sigh over how all of them are based on a Hollywood-fantasy version of history. But then, this is part of a grand tradition, because the story we have about Anne Bonny and Mary Read is, itself, a fantasy version of their lives, written within existing fictionalized genres and carefully tailored to audience expectations.

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Full citation: 

Klein, Ula Lukszo. 2021. “Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers” in Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688-1843 edited by Misty Kreuger. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press.

This article is something of a cross-genre, cross-temporal look at the representation of Anne Bonny and Mary Read as “sapphic pirates” and what part their stories have played within the constructed image of 18th century piracy and colonialism. (The introduction makes reference to their appearance in the video game Assassin’s Creed IV as well as the tv series Black Sails, and these depictions are also referenced later in the article.) It should be emphasized that pretty much everything we know about them has come through dubious sources created as both entertainment and as cultural propaganda, so while there is no doubt of the historic existence of the two women, the specific details that we “know” about them are of questionable historicity.

The women’s stories combined a number of established tropes prevalent in 18th century literature and media: the cross-dressing warrior, criminal biographies, and sexual narratives. These motifs are trans-national and typically work to “other” the women involved in order to comment on (and police) ideas about the role and proper place of women. As pirates, they participate in a culture defined by movement, independence from law and nationality, adventure, and danger. Standing outside social norms along several axes, their transgressive gender and sexuality in the stories are available to be viewed as entertainment, rather than a challenge to those norms. At the same time, certain elements of the stories strengthen and emphasize those norms and work to integrate the two women into a racialized image of white femininity even as they perform masculinity. In this, they illustrate the assimilation of pirate culture into a fictionalized world of (predominantly) white adventure and freedom.

The article gives the background of what it refers to as the “transatlantic” world and its relationship to, and contrast with, national structures and cultures. It also gives a brief background to the publication General History of the…Pyrates in its several editions by Charles Johnson, which is almost the sole source for information about Bonny and Read. The work was first published in 1724 and then republished across the 18th century with increasing modifications to the content. The initial edition appeared very soon after B&R’s convictions for piracy in 1720 and was based on the official trial report, as well as contemporary reporting. But even this earliest version, which can be suspected to be the closest to reality, includes details not present in these sources, including “origin stories” (a motif not included for any of the other pirates discussed in the publication) that parallel stock passing woman biographies, in which they are said to have cross-dressed as girls for somewhat implausible reasons. Due to the questionable veracity of the biographical material, the present article focuses solely on the narratives present in the General History. In particular, the article examines how the narrative emphasizes and supports their status as women and thus—despite the hints at homoerotic possibilities—situations them within a solidly heterosexual framework.

This work flourishes during a transition period in fictions of female adventure, between the adventurous heroines of Defoe and Aubin and the less transgressive ones of the later 18th century. They are allowed to represent themes of “female autonomy…[and] ambiguous virtue.” They are agents in their own stories, in contrast to the status of most women, constrained whether by class or propriety. Their stories can be compared to military passing women such as Hannah Snell, with B&R status as vicious outlaws contrasted with Snell’s image as a heroic and patriotic soldier. These differences stem, in large part, from their participation in pirate culture, even when the shape of the narratives parallel stories not involving outlaw status.

Both women were said to have begun cross-dressing at a young age, at the guidance of their mothers, and for deceptive purposes. Both were stymied in their ambitions by both gender and class and leveraged gender disguise to seize opportunities: Read volunteering as a sailor, in which context she was then briefly married to a fellow soldier, and Bonny to leave a problematic marriage and join Jack Rackam’s pirate crew in male disguise (with his knowledge). Both are framed as brave, fearless, and comfortable with violence. Although the initial version of the text indicated that Rackam purchased Bonny from her husband, later versions suggest that she was the one who arranged the move, reinforcing the image of agency.

The stories about the two women created a probably-invented contrast, with Read being the “virtuous” one, not entirely enthusiastic about pirate life but constrained by necessity, and Bonny being volatile and vicious, embracing piracy eagerly, and constantly contemptuous of men who she considered less able and bold than her. Neither woman is depicted as being subjected to an ultimate punishment for her deeds, with Read dying of illness in prison before sentencing and Bonny—after a temporary reprieve due to claiming pregnancy—was not executed but simply disappears from the historic record.

Despite Bonny and Read’s stories being firmly rooted in heterosexual partnerships with men, they are presented narratively as a pair and their interactions with each other are told more vividly than those with their male partners. The anecdote of particular interest to the Project occurs when Read first joins Rackam’s crew, when both women are presenting as men, and only Rackam knows Bonny’s underlying sex (and not Read’s). Although, textually, the interaction does not proceed to an erotic encounter, the reader not only is offered that as a possibility, but is relied on to consider it as legible and possible. This legibility is bolstered by the standard tropes of cross-dressing narratives (both those purporting to be biographical and those in outright fiction, especially in theater) in which the existence of a cross-dressed woman (much like Checkov’s gun) heralds an evitable incident of mistaken desires.

Bonny, supposedly believing Read to be a man, desires her and makes an advance. The truth of her motivations is made somewhat ambiguous by the phrase “for some reasons best known to herself” rather than describing the purpose as directly sexual. Read, supposedly believing this to be a (male) homosexual advance, deflects it. Bonny then reveals her sex to Read. At which Read reveals her own sex and the momentary erotic potential is converted into humor. The text notes that Read’s motivation to this deflection of the sexual advance is due to “being very sensible of her own incapacity in that way,” that is, knowing that she couldn’t “play the man” for Bonny, but with no overt indication that the idea itself was objectionable. Thus, on both sides there is an implied possibility of sapphic desire, carefully obscured by the ambiguities of disguise. After this mutual revelation, evidently their behavior toward each other changed sufficiently to arouse Rackam’s jealousy, forcing them to let him in on Read’s secret.

[Note: I’m going to summarize a little out of order in the following.] Both women have established heterosexual bona fides before this encounter: Read with a Flemish soldier, to whom she covertly revealed her gender, and Bonny via her initial abandoned marriage and then her relationship with Rackam. Both women are described as having other covert erotic encounters with men while still maintaining their gender disguise, but always with a gender reveal as preliminary. In these other encounters, the women reveal their gender by exposing their breasts “which were very white.”

Klein follows up in detail on one aspect of how this breast-revealing described: the whiteness of the breasts involved. This, Klein argues, is a key signifier that allows the audience to identify with the two women as characters worthy of freedom and agency, within the multi-ethnic (and racially stratified) transatlantic world. Their possession of white breasts establishes them firmly as women, and as acceptable sexual agents within the otherwise all-male pirate milieu. And the emphasis is not simply on having breasts (which one might think was sufficient to establish female identity) but on having breasts which signaled a specific ethnic and even class status.

This identity then provides the titillating contrast between B&R’s courageous and violent behavior (coded masculine) even as they are able to use their feminine status strategically (including after capture when they were able to invoke the possibility of pregnancy to defer judgment). But this strategy—as well as their acceptability as romanticized protagonists—rested strongly on whiteness and in turn served as part of the process of establishing the pop culture version of the golden age of piracy as a white domain, in contradiction to historic reality.

The article concludes with a discussion of the treatment of Bonny and Read in various modern media depictions, including leaning in to the sapphic potential.

[Note: Blogging this article has inspired me to track down the original source materials for what we “know” about Bonny and Read and I’ll put together an entry about that in the near future.]

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hrj ([personal profile] hrj) wrote2025-07-11 03:44 pm
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My Worldcon Schedule

The Worldcon programming schedule is out and I'm on a number of interesting panels.

Wed Aug 13 - Horrible Histories: A Way to Make Learning about History Fun (Room 343-344)

A discussion about shows, podcasts, and other media that help make learning about history fun. After all, it isn’t just lists of numbers and names! How do you take that dry text and make it engaging enough to reach an audience that isn’t necessarily interested in history?

Thu Aug 14 - Medieval Characters—Women Authors (Room 420-422)

A look at the legacy and influence of Marjorie Kemp, Christine de Pisan, Marie de France, Hildegard of Bingen, the anchorite Julian of Norwich, and more. Their works continue to have relevance today.

Fri Aug 15 - Conlangs 101: How to Get Started Making Your Own Language (Room 322)

Building language goes beyond just putting funny sounds together or making a word that looks cool. Learn what’s needed to make a basic constructed language and how to find the resources and tools to get started in language creation.

Plus autographing on Fri Aug 15 at noon, a (limited attendance) table talk on Sun Aug 17 at 9am and...

Hugo Awards Ceremony - Sat Aug 16 (time TBA) where I will be trying not to chew too hard on my fingernails as I wait for the Best Related Work category to come up.

More details on my blog: https://alpennia.com/events/worldcon-seattle
Alpennia Blog ([syndicated profile] alpennia_feed) wrote2025-07-11 10:41 pm

My Worldcon Schedule

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Friday, July 11, 2025 - 15:41

Planning to be at Seattle Worldcon? Want to know what I'm doing there? Check out my schedule!

Logo for Seattle Worldcon
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sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-10 05:57 pm

If life is what we make it, then why's it always breaking?

It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.
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shewhomust ([personal profile] shewhomust) wrote2025-07-10 04:57 pm
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New glasses!

I collected my new glasses from the optician yesterday morning. They are as close in appearance to my old ones as I could find: I was happy with what I had, so why change it? But of course fashion means that you can never get exactly the same as last time, so these are subtly different: slightly larger, slightly darker, slightly heavier, slightly more angular in shape, almost hexgonal. I wore them to the pub quiz last night, and C. noticed at once: "New glasses?" she asked, and [personal profile] durham_rambler wondered how she knew - had someone seen us leaving the opticians? No, we explained, she knew because she could see that I was wearing them.

The real question, though, is: do they improve my vision? Too soon to say.

I left my other pair - that is, the mid-distance pair that I use at my desktop - with the optician. These are the ones whose frames I really like, so we will try fitting the new lenses into the old frames, and hope they don't shatter. I should find out in a week or so.
Whatever ([syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-07-10 03:30 pm

The Big Idea: Sara Omer

Posted by John Scalzi

When you see a possibly terrifying mythical creature, is your first thought, I’m totally gonna pet that? If so, then Sara Omer, author of The Gryphon King, might have something in common with you.

SARA OMER:

At its core, The Gryphon King is about a horse girl on a quest for vengeance versus a man with cat-related PTSD. But before I can get into the infernal horse and lion biology at play, I have to gush about the monster-riding story more generally.

Just as children wish for puppies, children reading fantasy books wish for dragons. The unbreakable bonds between fire-breathing beasts and reluctant heroes populate epic fantasy stories, but if giant flying lizards aren’t your style, there’s any number of mythic monsters that might be mountable (monster romance implications of that statement aside). I love a dragonrider story as much as the next person, probably more than most people, but there’s a whole ecosystem of underutilized fantastic monsters out there that deserve some time in the spotlight. In the empire of Dumakra in The Gryphon King, there is at least one stable full of flying horses that didn’t ask to be ridden into battle or form lifelong bonds with power-hungry morally gray disaster princesses, but we can’t always fight the fate we’re dealt.

Growing up, having my own horse was as much a fantasy as having my own dragon, but I like to think I lived a tangential horse girl experience. I wasn’t yet in kindergarten when I learned to ride horses, taught by the grandfatherly carriage driver Mr. “Grandpa” Clint, who drove his carriage around the town square. After learning how to drive a carriage at an age that was definitely not road legal (to the chagrin of many other children), Grandpa Clint taught me how to ride a horse at his stable. The horse for the job was an ancient old white gelding living a life of comfort in retirement, and who I enthusiastically urged to a flying gallop my first time on the trail. I had a wonderful time as my mom and Mr. Clint raced after, concerned I would be terrified or die, probably. Surprise, I lived. I think everyone should experience that exhilaration, and a few hundred feet off the ground while you’re at it.

I had a formidable collection (army) of Breyer horses, although unlike Nohra in The Gryphon King, I didn’t grow up with an imperial stable. But some family friends had their own horses and boarded them nearby. Sometimes I would get to go ride or hang out at the stable and in the pastures. Rambo, their stubborn paint gelding, was barely tall enough to even be considered a horse rather than a pony, and I vividly remember a time he got kicked, presumably for being an asshole, and the bloody branding of the hoof that slowly healed. For this and other reasons, I’m convinced every horse is a little like a dragon.

There are multiple breeds of mythic horses I added to the bestiary that is The Gryphon King. Because why stop at sky horse when you can have water horse? And when I really got to thinking about the biology of pegasuses, I wanted to explore their avian side. What better way to celebrate the incredible Eurasian horses and the birds of prey in the region than combine them into one omnivorous monster that has an appetite for blood? As if horses weren’t already dangerous enough, now they really, really want to eat your fingers and the barn cats. And—oh, look—the battlefield became good grazing once the fighting’s quieted down. Really, pegasuses are a little terrifying, and they’re not even the most threatening strain of horse in Dumakra.

The moral is that if you make a bird big enough, humans begin to look like the small animals scurrying through the tall grass, evading tooth and talon. And what’s more terrifying than horse-eagle? Lion eagle.

I have utmost respect for anyone who can make a big cat with a massive wingspan seem docile and friendly; I just think, considering the injuries a falconer could incur and compounding those with what might befall your average lion tamer, you should have to sign a few release waivers to approach a gryphon.

Maybe I made all my animals ferocious because nature is ferocious and dangerous, and when people play at power, they don’t come close to the might of beasts. But their actions have often irreparable impacts on nature nonetheless.

Fear and respect can coexist. Add a little human curiosity, and I would never fault anyone who decided to ride a murder horse. The Gryphon King is for the readers who would go out of their way to pet a man-eating monster, who would risk it all to bond with a creature that could kill them a few different ways on purpose or by accident—I’m a little scared for your wellbeing, but I respect the drive and share the dream.


The Gryphon King: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Bluesky|Instagram|Twitter

sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-09 03:06 pm

But I lost my heart and the future's gone with it

Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.
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sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-07-09 02:24 pm
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It's Wednesday! And I've been reading!

Actually I've been doing a ton of reading while I shake off the last of this influenza, which is mostly now lingering chest crud and zero stamina.

While nothing has blown me away, and I've abandoned some other "not for me" books, I did make a virtuous start on The Cull. Beginning with C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

My copy, the 1965 paperback edition printed in the US, has a cover that actually sort of fits the book, unlike a lot of SF covers of the time depicting generic space skies and cigar rocket ships, with or without a scantily clad lady joined by guys in glass helmets and bulky space suits.

No woman on the cover here, which would have been false advertising as the only woman on stage during the entire novel is a distraught country housewife in the first few pages. (And no, I do not think that this is a sign that Lewis despised women, so much as that he had spent all his childhood and early manhood among males, so his default characters are going to be "he" among "hims". But that's a discussion for another book.)

I've had Lewis's space trilogy since high school (1968). This one I read I think twice, once that year, and then again when the Mythopoeic Society had branches and our West LA discussion group covered the three books.

Teen-me trudged through the first reading looking for story elements that would interest me, and though a line here and there was promising, I found it overall tedious, missing the humor entirely. On that second reading during my college years I saw the humor, and found more to appreciate in Lewis's thematic argument, but that was a lukewarm enough response that I never reread it during the ensuing fifty years.

Now in old age it's time to cull a massive print library that neither of my kids wants to inherit. What to keep and what to donate? I reread this book finally, and found myself largely charmed. The structure is strongly reminiscent of the fin de siecle SF of Wells, Verne, etc--inheritors of the immensely popular "travelogue" of the 1600-1700s--which means it moves rather slowly, full of the description of discovery (and anticipatory terror) as its protagonist, a scholar named Ransom, stumbles into a situation that gets him kidnapped by a figure from his boarding school days, Weston, and Weston's companion, a man named Devine.

As was common in the all-male world of British men of Lewis's social strata, the men all go by last names--I don't think Weston or Devine are ever given a first name, and there are at most two mentions of Ransom's first name, Elwin, which I suspect was only added as a nod to JRRT. Apparently this book owes its origin to a bet made between Lewis and Tolkien, which I think worth mentioning because of the (I think totally wrong) assumptions that Lewis was anti-science. The bet, and the dedication to Lewis's brother, make it plain that they read and enjoyed science fiction--had as boys.

I suppose it's possible to eagerly read SF and still be anti-science, but I don't think that's the case here; accusations that Lewis hates scientific progress seem to go hand-in-hand with scorn for Lewis's Christianity. But I see the scientific knowledge of mid-thirties all over this book. In fact, I don't recollect reading in other contemporary SF (admittedly I haven't read a lot of it) the idea that once you're out of Earth's gravity well, notions of up and down become entirely arbitrary. Though Lewis seems not to understand freefall, he does represent the changes in gravity and in light and heat--it seems to me that the science, though full of errors that are now common knowledge, was as up-to-date as he could make it. That also shows in the meticulous worldbuilding--and to some extent in the fun he had building his Martian language.

What he argues against when the three men are at last brought before the god-like Oyarsa, is a certain attitude toward Progress as understood then, and also up through my entire childhood: that it didn't matter what you did to other beings or to the environment, as long as it was in the name of Progress or Humanity. We get little throwaways right from the start that Lewis's stance clear, such as when Devine and Weston squabble about having a guard dog to protect their secret space ship, but Devine points out that Weston had had one but experimented on it.

Lewis hated vivisection. He knew it was torture for the poor helpless beasts in the hands of the vivisectionists, who believed animals had no feelings, etc etc. He also hated the byproducts of mass industrialization, as he makes plain in vivid images. Lewis also makes reference to splitting the atom and its possible results; I think it worthwhile to note that during the thirties no one knew what the result would be--but there was a lot of rhetoric hammering that we need bigger and better bombs, and splitting the atom would give us that. All in the name of Humanity. Individual lives have no meaning, and can be sacrificed with impunity as long as it's in the name of "saving Humanity."

As his theme develops, it's made very clear that moral dilemmas trouble Ransom--he's aware that humans contain the capability for brilliant innovation and for vast cruelty. He also holds up for scruntiny the idea that the (white) man is the pinnacle of intelligence in the cosmos. The scene when Weston talks excruciating pidgin in his determination to subordinate the Martians and their culture to the level of "tribal witch doctors" is equally hilarious and cringey.

In short, it took over fifty years for me to appreciate this book within the context of its time. I don't feel any impulse to eagerly reread it, but I might some day. At any rate, it stays on the shelf.
Whatever ([syndicated profile] scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-07-09 09:11 pm

Into the Woods

Posted by John Scalzi

Krissy is off visiting friends for a couple of days, and so it falls to me to take the dog for her daily walk through the local nature preserve. I mean, I could not do it, but then I would disappoint Charlie, and, look, you just do not want to disappoint a dog. She will look at you all mopey and sad for the whole rest of the day. No thank you. A walk is vastly preferable. Plus, you know. I need the exercise too.

How has your Wednesday been?

— JS

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C.E. Murphy ([personal profile] mizkit) wrote2025-07-09 11:53 am
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crossposter?

Does anybody have a functional crossposter from Wordpress (a private site, not the .com) to Dreamwidth? It turns out the one I was using doesn't work with scheduled posts, which I've been doing, and furthermore is abandonware so I'm deeply, deeply reluctant to pay money to use it to crosspost. And at this point, Dreamwidth is so legacy internet that nobody newer is crossposting to here.
shewhomust: (bibendum)
shewhomust ([personal profile] shewhomust) wrote2025-07-09 11:07 am

I just don't get cocktails

According to last night's news, on his visit to the Palace, President Macron was served a cocktail of English gin and French pastis. This was reported to demonstrate the entente cordiale, but it sounds medicinal to me.

Also, gin? Isn't that traditionally from Holland?
Alpennia Blog ([syndicated profile] alpennia_feed) wrote2025-07-09 02:08 am

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 318 - On the Shelf for July 2025

Posted by Heather Rose Jones

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 19:08

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 318 - On the Shelf for July 2025

 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2025/07/08 - listen here)

Welcome to On the Shelf for July 2025.

You might think that retirement means I’d never have a late podcast ever again, but here I am uploading it several days past the first Saturday. A certain amount of it is finding myself in the middle of “Time? What even is time?” But there’s another factor at play. They say that in retirement, every day is a weekend. Well, my weekends used to be jam-packed full of projects, and now every day is a weekend. On the plus side, I’m making a lot of progress on a lot of projects.

Publications on the Blog

I fulfilled my pledge to blog a publication every day in June for Pride Month, focusing mostly on materials relating to US history, which I’ve tended not to prioritize in the past. This included surveys of Colonial-era legal issues and cases, such as:

  • Richard Godbeer’s “’The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England”
  • Robert F. Oaks’ “"Things Fearful to Name": Sodomy and Buggery in Seventeenth-Century New England”
  • Alden Vaughan’s “The Sad Case of Thomas(ine) Hall”

and

  • Greta LaFleur’s “Sex and ‘Unsex’: Histories of Gender Trouble in Eighteenth-Century North America”

or similar issues in the post-Colonial period, such as:

  • Estelle B. Freeedman’s “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics”

Several articles looked at literary themes, such as:

  • Lillian Faderman’s  “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James”
  • Mary E. Wood’s “’With Ready Eye’: Margaret Fuller and Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”

and

  • Kristin M. Comment’s “Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic”

Several articles examined transmasculine topics, such as:

  • Jen Manion’s “The Queer History of Passing as a Man in Early Pennsylvania”

and

  • Rachel Hope Cleves’ “Six Ways of Looking at a Trans Man? The Life of Frank Shimer (1826-1901)”

And of course I spend over a week blogging Cleves’ book Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.

Several articles tackled the process of researching queer lives or the historic resistance to doing so, such as:

  • Sylvia Martin’s “'These Walls of Flesh': The Problem of the Body in the Romantic Friendship/Lesbianism Debate”
  • Pamela VanHaitsma’s “Stories of Straightening Up: Reading Femmes in the Archives of Romantic Friendship”
  • Lillian Faderman’s “Who Hid Lesbian History?”

and

  • Linda Garber’s “Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction”

And due to the vagaries of my process, some non-US topics slipped in, such as Theresa Braunschneider’s “Acting the Lover: Gender and Desire in Narratives of Passing Women.” It’s been a while since I covered that much material in a single month, so I guess I can be excused for getting distracted from writing podcast scripts!

News of the Field

Before I move on to the new book listings, I wanted to give a shout-out to that rare instance of sapphic characters in a historic tv series. Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers follows the careers of a group of American heiresses looking to marry into aristocratic English society. There was a previous miniseries based on the same material in 1995 that stayed somewhat closer to the original material. The current show plays a bit more fast-and-loose with historic accuracy, introducing some race-blind casting and modern party-girl sensibility, but most pertinent to our interests, we get a sapphic romance that develops with the same scope and detail as several of the other relationships. This particular plot point does not exist in the original text, so we must be grateful to the producers for acknowledging that a female same-sex romance was solidly accurate for the period and working it in. We can’t yet know whether they’ll be allowed a happy ever after ending, but as the heterosexual pairings in the story don’t all get one, it’s probably a toss-up.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

While pulling together this month’s new book listings, it felt like I was finding a lot of titles on the theme of unsent or lost letters, though some of them were part of the current flood of publications that smell like AI, so they won’t be mentioned here.

I’ve been doing some initial stats for this year’s books and one interesting—or possibly concerning—trend is the dearth of historicals from the small queer presses, though in exchange we’re getting a startling number from major publishers. I hope to get back to doing a deeper analysis at some point, though it means I have to go back and do a lot of data-coding.

There are a couple of May books that only just came to my attention.

The Housekeeper's Ledger by Allison Ingram has a solidly gothic feel to it, but it’s difficult to guess exactly when the story is set.

When Anna Hale takes a humble position as housekeeper at the sprawling Ashmore estate, she expects long days, silent halls, and the cold indifference of Lady Catherine Ashmore. What she doesn’t expect is a trail of secrets hidden behind locked doors, a crumbling legacy haunted by old debts, and the sharp undeniable pull between herself and the woman she serves.

As whispers of betrayal and scandal echo through the estate, Anna and Catherine must navigate a web of lies, dangerous rivals, and the looming threat of ruin — all while confronting the fragile, fierce love blossoming between them. In a world eager to break them, Anna and Catherine will risk everything to stand side by side, but surviving the storm will take more than trust. It will take a choice.

I’m not sure that I can give a recommendation to A Truthful Companion By My Side by Claudia Haase, although the historic setting looks solid, but the writing feels like a very awkward translation from some other language.

Princess Agatha is alone at court with her cultural interests and intellect. She does not find any suitable conversation partners in her companions and ladies-in-waiting. Her curiosity is aroused all the more by the smart Ernestine and her unconventional lifestyle - and finally she finds the person with whom she can share all her passions.

The young Countess Ernestine doesn't think much of the aristocratic goings-on at court. She represses the thought that she was once promised to a crown prince as his wife. However, she could imagine a life together with Princess Agatha. But no sooner have they become close than the royal family insists on an early wedding ceremony with Agatha's brother.

Immerse yourself in the love story of two aristocratic women who lived at Bergfels Palace and Sturmstein Castle in the transition from the 17th to the 18th century!

June books cover a fairly wide spread of eras, including some unusual ones.

Secrets at the Ambrose Café by Carryl Church from Choc Lit Historical Romance is set in England just after World War I.

Two women. Two different worlds. One secret that could ruin them both.

Exeter, 1925. Della Wilde has set aside her dream of moving to Paris to study at the renowned Le Cordon Bleu, choosing instead to support her family torn apart by war. By night, she works at the prestigious Ambrose Café, serving the city’s elite — she feels utterly invisible.

Until a chance encounter with rebellious Alice Winters, the daughter of a powerful MP, upends Della’s world.

Alice is a woman caught between duty and desire. She secretly yearns to be an artist but is expected to marry a respectable suitor and raise a family. Della, with her sharp wit and quiet strength, is unlike anyone she has ever known. She makes Alice feel alive.

So she draws Della into her orbit — first as a muse for her secret art, then as something infinitely more intimate. But in a world where reputations are easily shattered, their growing bond is a danger that threatens not only their futures, but those around them.

As Alice risks scandal and Della faces the consequences of following her heart, they must decide: will they allow others to choose their path, or dare to forge their own?

Salt in the Silk by Delly M. Elrose sounds like it’s telling a Titanic story in an alternate form, set a decade earlier on a fictional ship.

1898. Aboard the RMS Victoria’s Grace, bound from Liverpool to New York, two women from opposite worlds collide: one born into ivory and etiquette, the other into soot and survival.

Catherine Ashbury, a refined upper-class heiress, is being shipped off across the Atlantic for an arranged marriage to save her family’s dwindling fortune. Cloaked in silk, obedience, and unspoken longing, she’s resigned to her fate—until she meets a girl who lives with no rules at all.

Nell Nolan, a tough and clever third-class passenger from East London, is an orphaned pickpocket disguised as a seamstress. With calloused hands and a pocket full of stolen coins, Nell isn’t afraid of breaking laws—or hearts. She boards the Victoria’s Grace with a stolen ticket and nothing left to lose, desperate to start a new life in America.

Their first meeting is accidental. Their second, unforgettable. What begins as curiosity becomes defiance—then desire. But love is dangerous in the shadows of a ship ruled by class, reputation, and silent codes. And when disaster strikes in the icy Atlantic, Catherine and Nell must face a choice no woman should have to make: Love, or survival.

A couple years ago I listed the first book in the Lavender and Foxglove series by Hilary Rose Berwick, set in a medieval convent in a world with a bit of magic. Somehow I missed books 2 and 3 when they came out—A Bounty of Bitterwort and A Rondel of Rosemary—but now book 4 turned up on my radar once more: A League of Lavender. Now I only wish the series was available somewhere other than Amazon because it sounds intriguing but not quite intriguing enough to drop my ethical objections.

Within the convent walls, the pestilence has largely passed, and Prioress Emmelot des Étoiles has a new conundrum: how, exactly, do bones become relics, and what will it mean for her convent when the pilgrims come to see them? Of more concern is the king's increased interest in those with magic sheltered by holy orders, including Emmelot's beloved, the novice Ysabeau.

But before she can solve those problems, Emmelot discovers the infirmary holds an unknown body with no signs of pestilence: a young woman clutching a posy of lavender — a sign of the conflict between followers of the old gods and the new. Now Emmelot must solve this murder before a longstanding feud erupts into open warfare.

In Her Own Shoes (The Ferrier Chronicles #1) by Mark Prime is another book with a medieval setting. I was a bit thrown by the title, because I’ve never encountered any adage similar to “in her own shoes” and can’t quite figure out what spin it’s trying to give.

In a castle built on legacy, one woman dares to claim her own name.

England, 1425. Tamworth Castle stands as a fortress of stone, secrets, and centuries-old power. When Elizabeth de Ferrel arrives to marry into the Farrier family, she isn’t stepping into a life of privilege—she’s walking straight into a battleground.

To secure her inheritance, Elizabeth must wed Sir Thomas Farrier, the ambitious heir of a noble bloodline now clinging to its influence. But she brings with her more than a title—she brings a dagger, a sharp wit, and a past she refuses to bury.

Inside Tamworth’s walls, every gaze has weight. Elizabeth forms an unexpected bond with Mae, a dark-haired scullery maid whose loyalty cuts deeper than her silence. Meanwhile, Griselda, the stone-faced housekeeper with more secrets than the cellar, watches Elizabeth’s every move—not as a threat, but perhaps as a guardian. And in the shadows, young Jonah, a servant boy marked by trauma, carries a truth that could set the castle ablaze.

When a bishop dies under mysterious circumstances, and Elizabeth receives a lock of hair as warning, alliances fracture, hearts are tested, and no one escapes untouched. Whispers rise of a Black Nun haunting the chapel—a spectral reminder that Tamworth remembers every sin carved into its walls.

At the heart of it all: a woman who refuses to shrink. Elizabeth isn’t interested in being the lady of the house. She wants to rule it. And she’ll do it in her own shoes.

The Letters Beneath Her Floorboards by Mira Ashwyn is one of those “unsent letters” stories I mentioned above, this time with a supernatural twist and stories in parallel timelines.

One letter. One mystery. One chance to heal.

When Rae Ashcroft returns to her late grandmother’s coastal estate, she isn’t looking for closure—she’s looking for silence. Haunted by a past she’s tried to bury, Rae just wants to escape. But the creaking old house has other plans.

Beneath a warped floorboard, she discovers a letter.

Written decades ago by a woman named Elise, the message unravels a forgotten love story between two women—one that was silenced, hidden, and never resolved. Drawn deeper into the mystery, Rae begins uncovering secrets Elise took to her grave… and uncovers echoes of her own.

At the heart of it all is Camille: the fiercely gentle, storm-eyed artist living next door. Rae doesn’t want to fall for her—but Camille is patient, kind, and maddeningly persistent. As the two grow closer, past trauma rises like a tide, threatening to drown the fragile trust Rae is learning to rebuild.

But someone is watching. The more Rae uncovers, the more dangerous things become. And the more she realizes—Elise never left. And maybe… she never meant to.

We get another medieval romance with lots of danger and angst in House of Ash and Honor by W.S. Banks.

When duty demands sacrifice, love demands everything.

Lady Avilene Northcliff has always been the perfect noble daughter—until her family arranges her marriage to the cold and calculating Lord Westmark. Desperate to escape a loveless union, she flees to the one place no one would think to look: the estate of her family's sworn enemies.

Lady Elara Blackwood should turn away the Northcliff daughter seeking sanctuary. Their houses have been locked in bitter feud for twenty-five years, built on lies, betrayal, and bloodshed. Instead, she offers shelter to the woman who ignites feelings she never knew existed.

As forbidden attraction blooms between them, both women discover that the enmity dividing their families rests on a devastating deception. When explosive family secrets surface, Avilene and Elara must choose between the safety of silence and a love that could cost them everything.

In a world where women's hearts belong to others, two enemies will risk everything to claim their own destiny.

The July books are mostly 20th century settings, or close enough. And as usual, the rhythms of pre-publication publicity mean that they’re almost all from major publishers.

Lavender & Gin by Abigail Aaronson leans in to the current fashion for Prohibition stories.

Taking on her brother’s identity has given Kasia almost everything she wants: money, power, a gang to call her own in Prohibition-era Detroit. Until a new police chief threatens to destroy everything she’s worked for, and a beautiful woman tempts her to expose her secret.

After a decade disguised as her missing twin brother, Kasia leads a gang running liquor for the most powerful mob in the city. The ruse gave her a foot in the door, but in order to keep her position—and more importantly, to keep money flowing in for her and her sick mother—she has to be willing to do whatever it takes. And what it takes is cold calculation and a ruthless hand. She needs both in spades when a new police chief is determined to eliminate Detroit’s mafia, a threat to destroy everything she’s built.

When Kasia learns Sophia—a glamorous flapper who owns an underground queer club—has an unusual hold on the supposedly-incorruptible chief, Kasia wants in on Sophia’s secret. Blackmailing Chief Harding could protect her gang and give her a leg up in the mob’s ranks. But her plan unravels when she falls for Sophia’s fiery spirit and sophisticated charm. After years of avoiding relationships to protect her identity, her feelings for Sophia lead Kasia to take bigger risks than ever. Risks that endanger her gang, her secret, and her life.

Emma-Claire Sunday follows up on last year’s Regency romance The Duke’s Sister and I with another Regency, The Fortune Hunter's Guide to Love once more from Harlequin Historical.

How can Lady Sylvia save herself from financial ruin?

Step 1: Move to the seaside for the summer, where there will be no shortage of wealthy bachelors holidaying.

Step 2: Strike a deal with local farmer Hannah. If Hannah can help Sylvia bag a rich husband, Sylvia will fund Hannah’s dream of opening a cheese shop.

Step 3: Charm their way into luncheons, parties and exclusive balls, but do not start to confuse friendship with romantic feelings for Hannah.

Step 4: Focus on her fortune-hunting scheme and do not let her heart get carried away by her unexpected and magical kiss with Hannah!

With a title like The Rebel Girls of Rome by Jordyn Taylor from Harper Collins, one might guess we were looking at a classical setting, but this one is a dual-timeline story set during World War II and the contemporary era.

Now:

Grieving the loss of her mother, college student Lilah is hoping to reconnect with a grandfather who refuses to talk about his past. Then she receives a mysterious letter from a fellow student, Tommaso, claiming he’s found a lost family heirloom, and her world is upended.

Soon Lilah finds herself in Rome, trying to unlock her grandfather’s history as a Holocaust survivor once and for all. But as she and Tommaso get closer to the truth—and their relationship begins to deepen into something sweeter—Lilah realizes that some secrets may be too painful to unbury…

Then:

It’s 1943, and nineteen-year-old Bruna and her family are doing their best to survive in Rome’s Jewish quarter under Nazi occupation. Until the dreaded knock comes early one morning, and Bruna is irrevocably separated from the rest of her family.

Overcome with guilt at escaping her family’s fate in the camps, she joins the underground rebellion. When her missions bring her back to her childhood crush, Elsa, Bruna must decide how much she’s willing to risk—when fully embracing herself is her greatest act of resistance.

Another story using that popular motif of dual timelines via historic research is The Secrets of Harbour House by Liz Fenwick from Harper Collins.

When Kerensa is sent by her father’s auction house to catalogue a neglected house overlooking the sea in Newlyn, Cornwall, it’s a welcome escape. Once the home of two female artists, Harbour House is a treasure trove, but one painting in particular catches Kerensa’s eye – a hypnotically sensual portrait of a beautiful young woman which dominates the hallway.

Captivated and intrigued, Kerensa finds herself piecing together the enigma of Bathsheba Kernow, a fiercely talented young artist who left St Ives almost a hundred years before, eager to escape a society that wouldn’t understand her, and her sweeping journey from the underbelly of Paris to the heady luxury of Venice, where a chance encounter would change her life for ever, drawing her into the most dangerous and forbidden of love affairs.

For Kerensa, still reeling with a grief of her own and facing an uncertain future in love, Harbour House will have secrets that will change her life too, and in ways she could never have imagined…

It’s fairly rare to find sapphic stories set in non-Western cultures written from within those cultures but there have been several in the past year. This month’s candidate is Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath by Moon Heeyang, set in Korea, although I’m not quite sure of the date as the reference is to a dynasty that lasted for five centuries.

In a world where lineage rules and silence is survival, two women in a noble Joseon household discover a forbidden love that defies rank, custom, and time.

Soona, a humble maid, and Lady Hyeon, the daughter of the house, share stolen glances in the steam of the bathhouse. What begins as duty unfolds into desire, and soon into a secret bond.

But when their love is seen—by the Lord himself—everything changes. A proposition is made. A second wife is named.

And both women find themselves pregnant.

Whispers Beneath the Banyan Bath is a lyrical, emotional, and unflinching tale of queer motherhood, silent rebellion, and love that grows like magnolia in the cracks of stone.

The Original by Nell Stevens from W.W. Norton & Company has a twisty plot that looks like it has a lot of layers.

In a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.

An unwanted guest of her uncle’s family since childhood, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household. She has unusual predilections: for painting, particularly forgery; for deception; for other girls. Her life is altered when a letter arrives from the South Atlantic. The writer claims to be her cousin Charles, long presumed dead at sea. When he returns, a rift emerges between family members who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. Grace, whose intimate knowledge of fakes is her own closely guarded secret, is forced to decide who to believe and who to pretend to believe. In deciphering the truth about her cousin, she comes to understand other truths: how money is found and lost, and who deserves to be rich; what family means to queer people; and the value of authenticity, in art and in love.

Skating the edge of my definition of historical fiction, we have Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs from William Morrow Paperbacks, where the lesbian is one of a large cast of characters.

In 1968 we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd—a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns—locked away merely for being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly.

Mairin— free-spirited daughter of Irish immigrants, committed to keep her safe from her stepfather.

Angela—denounced for her attraction to girls, sent to the nuns for reform, but instead found herself the victim of a predator.

Helen—the daughter of intellectuals detained in Communist China, she saw her “temporary” stay at the Good Shepherd stretch into years.

Odessa—caught up in a police dragnet over a racial incident, she found the physical and mental toughness to endure her sentence.

Denise—sentenced for brawling in a foster home, she dared to dream of a better life.

Janice—deeply insecure, she couldn’t decide where her loyalty lay—except when it came to her friend Kay, who would never outgrow her childlike dependency.

Sister Bernadette—rescued from a dreadful childhood, she owed her loyalty to the Sisters of Charity even as her conscience weighed on her.

Wayward Girls is a haunting but thrilling tale of hope, solidarity, and the enduring strength of young women who find the courage to break free and find redemption...and justice.

Finishing up this month’s books we have a mid-century rural English romance: Miss Veal and Miss Ham by Vikki Heywood from Muswell Press. This is another book where my impulse is to buy it, but the publisher makes that difficult, not because of my Amazon blockade this time, but because they only distribute ebooks through one particular obscure phone app. Ah well.

Public companions, private lovers.

It is 1951 and behind the counter of a modest post office in a leafy Buckinghamshire village Miss Dora Ham and Miss Beatrix Veal maintain their careful facade as respected local spinsters. But their true story is one of passion: suffragist activists who fell in love at a rally in the 1900s, danced in London's secret gay clubs between the wars, and comforted one another during the first night of the Blitz. Together they have built a life of quiet dignity and service in rural England. Now over the course of one pivotal day their carefully constructed world begins to fracture. Through Beatrix's wry perspective we witness the severe impact of post-war changes on their peaceful existence. Changes that will lead to heart-breaking decisions for Miss Veal and Miss Ham. At the heart of this intimate, moving and witty novel is a story of resilience, the dignity of love that cannot be spoken, and the challenges that come when the future no longer feels safe.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading this month, once I get past the complex logic of how I want to acquire and read books? I often have three novels going at a time: one in hard copy, one in ebook, and one in audiobook. The different formats help me keep the stories separate in my head, but that was a bit trickier than usual this time because Joanna Lowell’s A Rare Find (my audiobook) and Lindz McLeod’s The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet (my print book) are both Regency romances and overlapped so solidly in feel and reading period that I kept having to remind myself which story I was in. Not that the stories are that similar in plot or characters, but if I had it to do over I’ve have avoided overlapping them. A Rare Find has a lot of resonances with the author’s Victorian-era story A Shore Thing which you may have spotted if you listened to my interview with the author. In addition to interesting gender choices, they share a tendency to pack the story full of subplots. So if you like a lot going on, this could be your thing. The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet is a fairly standard “let’s pick a couple of characters from the Austen Cannon and make them sapphic.” McLeod’s Mary Bennet is quite different from the book’s character and gets a complex queer community supplied by the author’s imagination.

A sale on the Chirp audiobook platform let me to pick up a series starting with The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman about which I’ve heard good things from friends. Like magical school stories, there’s an entire subgenre of magical library stories, which should be solidly my jam. In retrospect, I did definitely enjoy the book, but somehow in the middle of it I kept forgetting that it was waiting for me. Not sure why, but it meant it took me over a month to finish.

Wanting something a bit more bite-sized, I browsed through my to-be-read bookcase (yes, I have an entire bookcase with lonely hard-copy books waiting for me to pet them) and picked up Servant Mage by Kate Elliott. This fantasy novella managed to pack in enough plot and action for an entire novel—maybe even for a trilogy. A masterpiece of telling you just enough about the world and setting that you can fill in large spaces on your own.

Author Guest

One of the things I’ve wanted to work harder on in my theoretically greater free time is doing more interviews. I’ve made a good start this year, but from the other dropped balls you might guess that I don’t have one in this show. I do have several interesting people lined up for later this year—not all of them authors—and I’m always interested in doing companion interviews for new releases. In the last couple years, that means most of them have been for books from major publishers, because those are the books I know about enough in advance to set up the interview. I’d love to work with more small press and indie authors, but you have to let me know that you’re going to have books coming out!


Show Notes

In this episode we talk about:

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

Major category: 
loup_noir: (Default)
loup_noir ([personal profile] loup_noir) wrote2025-07-08 03:37 pm

(no subject)

After spending so much time on the floor for my back, I made a decision: it was time to get a gardener. Simple, right? However, finding someone to do any sort of work here is an exercise in frustration. It took time and a couple of false starts, but someone else is weed-whacking the road this year. I'm still doing a lot of the weeding and pruning, which is much easier work on cranky back.

Tomorrow is my last day of weeding for a week. We're running the bar at the local volunteer fire department's barbeque this weekend, which translates to moving both commercial and homebrew kegs around. While the WBH is puzzling together his various lines to the kegs and CO2 bottles, I get to move umpteen boxes of beer glasses and wine cups from the container to where we serve. After set-up, it'll be beer, beer, cider, and more beer for five hours. I'd much rather pour beer than deal with people. Our locals are nice, but I can only handle so much dithering and enforced chitchat.

Media consumption: the newest Longmire (gets a strong B grade) and Squid Games (gets a C-, mostly for the final episode).
sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-07-08 02:23 pm

'Cause they will run you down, down to the dark

Probably because it has been weeks since I slept more than a couple of hours a night and months since I had what would be medically termed a good night's sleep, I spent at least ten hours last night unconscious enough to dream and it was amazing. Under ideal circumstances I would devote my afternoon to reading on the front steps until the thunderstorms arrive. Under the resentful circumstances of realism I have already devoted considerable of my afternoon to phone calls with doctors and will need to enact capitalism while I have the concentration for it. I may still try to take a walk. I have a sort of pressure headache of movies I managed to watch before I ran completely out of time and would like to talk about even in shallow and unsatisfactory ways. I heard Kaleo's "Way Down We Go" (2015) on WERS and am delighted that the video was shot in the dormant volcano Þríhnúkagígur. I will associate it with earthquake-bound Loki. My brain thought it should dream about nonexistent Alan Garner and what I very much doubt will be the second season of Murderbot (2025–).

[edit] Taking a walk informed me that the sidewalk of the street at the bottom of our street has been spray-painted with a swastika, visible efforts to scrub it out notwithstanding. The sentiment is far from shocking, but the placement is rather literally close to home.
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rachelmanija ([personal profile] rachelmanija) wrote2025-07-08 10:05 am

Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger



Ellie is a Lipan Apache teenager in a world where magic, vampires, ghosts, and so forth are known to be real. She’s inherited the family gift for raising ghosts, though she only raises animals; human ghosts always come back wrong, and she’s happy with the companionship of her beloved ghost dog Kirby, not to mention her pet ghost trilobite. But when her cousin, who supposedly died in a car crash, returns in a dream to tell her he was murdered, she finds that knowing who killed him isn’t as helpful as one might imagine…

Ellie’s cousin Trevor told her the name of his killer, Abe Allerton from Willowbee, but he didn’t know why or how he was killed. Ellie enlists her best friend, Jay, a cheerleader with just enough fairy blood to give him pointy ears and the ability to make small lights. More importantly, he’s good at research. They learn that Willowbee is in Texas, near the town where Trevor lived with his wife, Lenore, and their baby. Jay brings in help: his older sister’s fiancé, Al, who’s a vampire.
All of them, plus Ellie’s parents and a ghost mammoth belonging to her grandmother, play a part in the effort to solve the mystery of Trevor’s death and bring his murderer to justice. And so, in a sense, will a major character who’s long dead (and not a ghost) but who’s a big presence in Ellie’s life: Six-Grand, her great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, the last person to have a gift as powerful as Ellie’s… and who vanished forever into the underworld.

I enjoyed this quite a bit. I mean, come on. GHOST TRILOBITE. GHOST MAMMOTH. It’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s heartfelt, it has lovely chapter heading illustrations, and it’s got some gorgeous imagery - I particularly loved a scene where the world transforms into an oceanic underworld, and Ellie sees a pod of whales swimming in the sky of a suburban neighborhood.

It's marketed as young adult and Ellie is seventeen, but the book feels younger (and so does Ellie.) I'd have no qualms handing it to an advanced nine-year-old reader, but it also appeals to adult me who misses the time when "urban fantasy" meant "our world, but with ghosts, elves, and so forth."
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mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-07-08 11:27 am
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What We Are Seeking, by Cameron Reed

 

Review copy provided by the publisher. Also the author is a friend.

 

I love planetary settlement novels, and I love alien communication novels, and Cam has given us both. When John Maraintha arrives on the planet Scythia, he has no particular intentions toward its inhabitants. It was never his intention to be there, and now that he is, he expects to serve as a doctor for the colonists. But he's simultaneously shut out of some parts of Scythian society and drawn into the puzzle of its sentient species and their communications. Their life cycles are so different from humans', but surely this gap can be bridged with goodwill and hard work, even in the scrubby high desert that serves as home for human and alien alike?

 

Science fiction famously touts itself as the literature of alienation; Cameron actually delivers on that here in ways that a lot of the genre is not even trying to do. The layers of alienation--and the layers of connection that can be found between them--are varied and complicated. This book is gentle and subtle, even though there are scenes were John's medical training is put to its bloodiest use. If you're tired of mid-air punching battles as the climax of far too many things, the very personal and very cultural staged climax of What We Are Seeking will be a canteen of water for you in this arid time. Gender, relationship, reproduction, and love mix and mingle in their various forms, some familiar and some new. I expect to be talking about this one for a long time after, and I can't wait for you to be able to join me in that.

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mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-07-08 09:21 am
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A Mouthful of Dust, by Nghi Vo

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is another of the novellas featuring Cleric Chih and their astonishing memory bird Almost Brilliant, although Almost Brilliant does not get a lot of page time this go-round. This is mainly the story of hunger, desperation, shame, and unquiet ghosts. It's about what depths people might sink to when famine comes--in this story, a famine demon, personified, but the shape of the story won't be unfamiliar if you've read about more mundane famines.

The lines between horror and dark fantasy are as always unclear, but wherever you place A Mouthful of Dust, I recommend only reading it when you're fully prepared for something unrelentingly bleak.

mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-07-08 07:55 am
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Queen Demon, by Martha Wells

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is not a stand-alone book. It's a close sequel to Witch King, and the characters and their situation are more thoroughly introduced in that volume. Unless you're a forgetful reader or specifically like to reread whole series when new installments come out, I think Wells gives you enough grounding to just pick this one up, but not enough for this to stand alone--it's not intended to.

If I had had to pick the title of this book, the word "alliances" would have figured heavily in it. I get that the two titles pair well this way, but this is a book substantially about dealing with one's allies--the ones who are definitely, definitely not friends as well as the ones Kai loves dearly who are not actually as reliable as he might have hoped. The other enemies of Hierarchy are not all immediately eager to team up with an actual demon; some of them require convincing that the enemy of their enemy really is their friend (VALID, because that is not a universally true thing). And of course Kai's own nearest and dearest are growing as people and have the growing pains associated with that. If you enjoyed Witch King, you're in for a treat as this is very much a continuation of all the things it was doing.