And we've hit the brain candy portion of the summer reading, when the heat turns my brain to mush and I stop being able to follow things like plot and just read romance until said brain reconstitutes.
This is not a dig at romance; I could also be rereading favorites where I already know the plot. But it's the reliability of the story that makes romance so appealing.
And after I really enjoyed Hall's bonkers Holmes/Lovecraft homage, but with 1000% more queer people, I figured I would see what else he wrote.
Reader, he redid 50 Shades of Grey, but gay, and here I am.
(I've definitely talked about gay romance novels specifically as a place where gender, sex, sex as a verb, and power get tangled and disentangled. Also true here, although Hall engages somewhat more with the...toxicity of masculinity rather than the non-equivalence of masculinity and power. Which also makes sense in the context. Hall also doesn't engage with it insofar as the book isn't about such things. But they exist in the background and as part of the world building for any book that is set in our world. Romance novels are simultaneously the most radical and reactionary speculative fictions about relationships, but the deliberate focus on creating good feelings tends to both obscure that element and also play it down.)
Anyway, A+ brain candy, excellent lovable but ridiculous college student, beautiful rendition of the "I just want a Duke to sweep me off my feet, but it's the 21st century so let's just go with the disgustingly rich instead and also it's more complicated than that" story. I know that the next book is going to make me sad and so I might just hold off on it until the third one is out in September and just meander through the rest of Hall's oeuvre.