booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

Lots of visual descriptions, doesn’t mesh well with aphantasia.

I enjoyed this, I like the characters and the relatively slow burn of the plot. It was, however, weird that in the resolution of secondary aspects of the plot there's a message of "while some cops are corrupt the institution can be saved through self-correction". That was especially jarring in a book about queer men in the 1950s. It’s always dicey for me when a protagonist has a relative who is a cop, especially when that relative is portrayed as being "one of the good ones". On its own the story could be fine, but it ends up contributing to this overall social trend of copaganda in fiction, whether accidentally or intentionally.

THORNHEDGE is a Sleeping Beauty retelling which recasts the sleeper as someone best never woken: a faerie changeling whose confusion at the human world and disregard for other lives turns her into someone who can only be contained in sleep or stopped forever in death. The sleeper is constrained and contained by Toadling, the once-human girl who was stolen from her cradle and replaced by that very same changeling.

I like this as a take on Sleeping Beauty, but it plays the idea of changelings straight, not engaging with the historical links between “changeling” children and autism (or other ways of being ostracized for being strange). In that light, featuring a child so unable to learn social rules that she must be kept or killed becomes a more fraught narrative, one that makes the story harder to enjoy. I like Toadling and Halim, but because of how the backstory is told first as memories then as stories to Halim, I remain unsure just how much Toadling told him of what had happened. I appreciate Halim as an idea of a character, but as a novella there wasn’t really room to flesh out that many significant characters and Toadling received most of the detail (to Halim’s detriment). The time dilation between the human world and Faerie allows for a couple of cool narrative moments. Ultimately this is a book I would neither recommend nor dissuade someone from reading. 

I don’t like the narrative style.

Too contemporary in setting for my taste.

This is like if the crew from Leverage were trying to stop magical murders instead of corporate greed.

THE SECRET LIVES OF COUNTRY GENTLEMEN is another excellent gay romance from K.J. Charles, this time between a noble and a smuggler... with the complication that the noble, Sir Gareth, didn’t get his inheritance until his twenties when his estranged father died unexpectedly. Gareth pushes away a man with whom he'd spent a very pleasant week, only to have it turn out that this man lives near his late father's home and their lives keep intertwining in unexpected ways. 

I don’t generally like the miscommunication trope, but this one is handled well without making anyone behave nonsensically (as much as I'd prefer they'd made different decisions earlier) Much of the tension is over people who think the Gareth has information which he does not, and this was overall delightful to read the missed the violence in murder and other dangers of smuggling as a profession. I like Joss, I generally enjoy roguish characters, and as a smuggler he fits that both in occupation and in personality. 

I love the Doomsdays as a family and as individuals. The ways they behave collectively and individually just make so much sense and written so well. There's a real sense of identity to the people in the Marsh without turning them into a single mass. There's also a focus on Luke, a boy whose father uses his position within the Doomsdays to mistreat him and wield power as a petty tyrant over a child with limited recourse.

I wanted a romance with danger and maybe a little death, and this delivered on all fronts with a fascinating narrative to boot. The ending leaves room for some kind of follow-up on Luke, and I plan to read the sequel which features him as an adult.