Assorted m/m
Jan. 8th, 2013 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraA recent binge which is still ongoing. I'd recommend the second of these with caveats, and the third with the disclaimer that I loved it but may well be hopelessly biased. And you can find me being snarky - with spoilers - about the first one, behind this cut:
Fyn Alexander, Rentboy. This has the least likely “science” A plot I’ve read in an m/m romance since that appalling one with the invisibility formula that I have deleted off all my ereaders. This is annoying, because a) it was easily tweakable to slightly more probable and b) as opposed to the invisibility formula one, I actually like one of the leads.
Anyway. Edward Atherton is one of those ill-defined “scientists” , working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he has been creating a pesticide. Unfortunately the one he’s created kills people as well (it’s not clear to me how they found this out, and I did wonder about the ethics committee’s opinion). Fortunately he is able to fix this with a few changes on his laptop and no actual clinical trials (given that his lab has rats, mice and plants, but no pests, this is probably a good thing). Unfortunately his boss is secretly evil and wants to sell the deadly pesticide formula to a would-be Uganda dictator (who everybody thinks looks startlingly like Idi Amin even if they were born well after he went into exile, and who does cocaine and has nameless minions who mutter to each other in accented English), and even more unfortunately the evil boss decides that the best way to get the formula from Edward is to hire an embittered ex-Special Forces guy whose hobbies include domestic violence and intimidation to send his 19 year old son to steal Edward’s laptop. It is never made clear to me why the evil boss has no other access to Edward’s work, especially as Edward keeps duplicates of all his notes in the lab (in a safe, but come on).
Edward – Eddie – is also totally naïve, gay, and an extremely effective black belt in karate, despite being so clumsy that at one stage he gets his hands stuck in his pockets and requires two people to free him. He is not the character I like. I like Fox, who is the son of the Special Forces guy, and who is trying to do his best in a series of hopeless situations, including guarding his autistic twin siblings (in a particularly irritating fashion they are constantly described as identical despite being boy/girl) from their father, helping his alcoholic mother, getting through art school, and introducing Eddie to the joys of gay sex despite Eddie insisting on referring to his “willy” the entire time. I liked Fox’s pov a lot, especially his interactions with his own and Eddie’s family, and the final action scene, in which both Eddie and Fox are being tortured – Fox via Skype, as his father is in Uganda but is still able to provide tips on the best way to waterboard him – was really good. However. I am sick of reading m/m with at least a ten year age gap between the leads where the younger one is still in his teens, and this did not help.
Lisa Henry, Dark Space. Unfortunately Lisa Henry is also fond of the age/power gap romance, with the addition of having the younger less secure partner prone to being raped and abused by assorted thugs (here) or malevolent villains (The Island). Fortunately, there is a lot of good stuff here despite that, not least the setting – mostly Defender Three, a space station – which actually manages to feel like space, and the set-up, which is that aliens (the Faceless) have been attacking Earth, and doing rather well. They also kidnapped Cameron Rushton (space pilot and military poster boy) rather than killing him, as they’ve done with all other humans, and at the beginning of the story they send him back in a pod, able to communicate with the aliens and convinced that they now want peace.
Brady Garrett is a conscript who grew up in a backwater town that appears to be in Australia (cockatoos, red earth, fibrolite) and is there when Cam’s pod is opened, both because he’s from a similar area and because he has some paramedic training. But the pod is keeping Cam alive, and when it’s cut open Cam’s heart stops, and in the confusion Brady’s containment suit is also cut open. He ends up sharing his heart beat – and thoughts – with Cam. The two of them are left together while the military decide whether to trust Cam or exterminate him.
It’s all very readable, but it is a bit static when they’re both in containment and the main source of tension is Brady’s panic about possibly being gay. Brady was raped in the showers shortly after arrival on the station by Wade (thug) and his gang, and they (the gang) really are tissue thin characters who are only there in order to beat Brady up again at an appropriate point down the track, and in addition the alien that picked Cam up communicates with humans by having anal sex with them (this situation appeared to be begging for jokes about anal probes, and yet it was played totally straight. Ahem). I like Cam, I like Brady (it’s in his voice), I like the worldbuilding a lot, but I needed more tension over Cam’s story, and more interaction with characters who weren’t wholly good or wholly bad (one of Cam’s exes shows up, but it’s a bit too late). However, all that aside, I like her books and will keep trying them.
L.A. Witt, From Out in the Cold. This hit me very hard on a completely unexpected personal sore spot (basically, attending family gatherings and despite wanting to, not being able to talk about something crucially important, because either they won’t understand or when you’ve tried before it’s been more painful than helpful). So I absolutely loved the book and thought it was excellent, but I have no way of knowing if it would work for anyone else.
What it also has is two adult characters who have been friends on and off for a long time, have had sex twice (once as a teenage experiment, once as a less successful drunken hook-up which damaged their friendship for sometime) who are both struggling with terrible events, as well as their old desires and feelings coming back. It’s a winter book and a Christmas book, and at some point I will re-read it and see if I can get any distance on it, but at the moment I’d just strongly recommend it.
Fyn Alexander, Rentboy. This has the least likely “science” A plot I’ve read in an m/m romance since that appalling one with the invisibility formula that I have deleted off all my ereaders. This is annoying, because a) it was easily tweakable to slightly more probable and b) as opposed to the invisibility formula one, I actually like one of the leads.
Anyway. Edward Atherton is one of those ill-defined “scientists” , working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where he has been creating a pesticide. Unfortunately the one he’s created kills people as well (it’s not clear to me how they found this out, and I did wonder about the ethics committee’s opinion). Fortunately he is able to fix this with a few changes on his laptop and no actual clinical trials (given that his lab has rats, mice and plants, but no pests, this is probably a good thing). Unfortunately his boss is secretly evil and wants to sell the deadly pesticide formula to a would-be Uganda dictator (who everybody thinks looks startlingly like Idi Amin even if they were born well after he went into exile, and who does cocaine and has nameless minions who mutter to each other in accented English), and even more unfortunately the evil boss decides that the best way to get the formula from Edward is to hire an embittered ex-Special Forces guy whose hobbies include domestic violence and intimidation to send his 19 year old son to steal Edward’s laptop. It is never made clear to me why the evil boss has no other access to Edward’s work, especially as Edward keeps duplicates of all his notes in the lab (in a safe, but come on).
Edward – Eddie – is also totally naïve, gay, and an extremely effective black belt in karate, despite being so clumsy that at one stage he gets his hands stuck in his pockets and requires two people to free him. He is not the character I like. I like Fox, who is the son of the Special Forces guy, and who is trying to do his best in a series of hopeless situations, including guarding his autistic twin siblings (in a particularly irritating fashion they are constantly described as identical despite being boy/girl) from their father, helping his alcoholic mother, getting through art school, and introducing Eddie to the joys of gay sex despite Eddie insisting on referring to his “willy” the entire time. I liked Fox’s pov a lot, especially his interactions with his own and Eddie’s family, and the final action scene, in which both Eddie and Fox are being tortured – Fox via Skype, as his father is in Uganda but is still able to provide tips on the best way to waterboard him – was really good. However. I am sick of reading m/m with at least a ten year age gap between the leads where the younger one is still in his teens, and this did not help.
Lisa Henry, Dark Space. Unfortunately Lisa Henry is also fond of the age/power gap romance, with the addition of having the younger less secure partner prone to being raped and abused by assorted thugs (here) or malevolent villains (The Island). Fortunately, there is a lot of good stuff here despite that, not least the setting – mostly Defender Three, a space station – which actually manages to feel like space, and the set-up, which is that aliens (the Faceless) have been attacking Earth, and doing rather well. They also kidnapped Cameron Rushton (space pilot and military poster boy) rather than killing him, as they’ve done with all other humans, and at the beginning of the story they send him back in a pod, able to communicate with the aliens and convinced that they now want peace.
Brady Garrett is a conscript who grew up in a backwater town that appears to be in Australia (cockatoos, red earth, fibrolite) and is there when Cam’s pod is opened, both because he’s from a similar area and because he has some paramedic training. But the pod is keeping Cam alive, and when it’s cut open Cam’s heart stops, and in the confusion Brady’s containment suit is also cut open. He ends up sharing his heart beat – and thoughts – with Cam. The two of them are left together while the military decide whether to trust Cam or exterminate him.
It’s all very readable, but it is a bit static when they’re both in containment and the main source of tension is Brady’s panic about possibly being gay. Brady was raped in the showers shortly after arrival on the station by Wade (thug) and his gang, and they (the gang) really are tissue thin characters who are only there in order to beat Brady up again at an appropriate point down the track, and in addition the alien that picked Cam up communicates with humans by having anal sex with them (this situation appeared to be begging for jokes about anal probes, and yet it was played totally straight. Ahem). I like Cam, I like Brady (it’s in his voice), I like the worldbuilding a lot, but I needed more tension over Cam’s story, and more interaction with characters who weren’t wholly good or wholly bad (one of Cam’s exes shows up, but it’s a bit too late). However, all that aside, I like her books and will keep trying them.
L.A. Witt, From Out in the Cold. This hit me very hard on a completely unexpected personal sore spot (basically, attending family gatherings and despite wanting to, not being able to talk about something crucially important, because either they won’t understand or when you’ve tried before it’s been more painful than helpful). So I absolutely loved the book and thought it was excellent, but I have no way of knowing if it would work for anyone else.
What it also has is two adult characters who have been friends on and off for a long time, have had sex twice (once as a teenage experiment, once as a less successful drunken hook-up which damaged their friendship for sometime) who are both struggling with terrible events, as well as their old desires and feelings coming back. It’s a winter book and a Christmas book, and at some point I will re-read it and see if I can get any distance on it, but at the moment I’d just strongly recommend it.
