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cyphomandraLisa Henry, He is Worthy. Rome, 68AD, and the Emperor Nero is busy running the place into the ground with state-sanctioned murder and sexual decadence. Senna, a friend of Nero’s (one of the few he hasn’t turned against) has the job of telling patricians when they’ve lost Nero’s favour and need to kill themselves; he is sickened by what Nero has become, and recruits one of Nero’s new sex slaves, Aenor (a Bructeri trader) to kill Nero for him.
I thought this did a good job of backgrounding and including historical detail, but unfortunately it falls down in a) failing to make me like Senna and b) having Aenor brutally raped at every opportunity (as I’ve commented before, this does appear to be the author’s thing for the younger, slighter partner in her romances). Senna, in particular, is someone I wanted to like – I have a lot of potential sympathy for people who realise they’re in over their head, and want to get out – but his plan to get out involves putting Aenor at such massive risk that it seems totally unfair. Senna has, by this stage, managed to save his own sister with remarkably little difficulty, and will also, later, be saved by his own slaves (because he treats them nicely) and, hmm, I just really needed him to be the one to pay for some of all this. It doesn’t help that the first time he has sex with Aenor, it’s the day after Aenor’s been sodomised with a giant marble dildo (possibly not an accurate historical detail, but then again, remembering my Classics lectures, maybe) and then raped so brutally that he passes out. Senna is aroused despite himself by both these events and no, he doesn’t let Aenor top.
This is really novella length, and I think I would have liked it longer, with a bit more exploration of both characters; there’s enough work on the world here to expand it up, and give Senna a chance to fail elsewhere (and Aenor, possibly, a chance to succeed). Lisa Henry only has one book left out that I haven't read, Tribute, which appears to be about two sex slaves, and which I think I can predict well enough to give it a miss for now.
Heidi Cullinan and Marie Sexton, Second Hand. This was just the right amount of sweet and fuzzy, much to my surprise (I read about half of it at the dog park, which was also the ideal setting). I had wondered whether combining these two authors would skew more towards explicit sex or total sap (Heidi Cullinan’s extremes), but instead it’s worked rather well, without my feeling too trapped by the small town setting (more of a Marie Sexton thing).
Paul Hannon is a touchingly naïve vet school dropout who moves to Tucker Springs because his girlfriend wants him to, only to then have her leave him for another man and dump him with the mortgage and a lot of household appliances. Which he starts selling off at the pawn shop, to the owner, El Rozal, who started the shop in the hope of curing his mother’s hoarding, is gay and cynical about relationships, and taken enough with Paul to convince him that he can only buy one kitchen item a day from him, thus ensuring regular visits. There is a puppy and family meals and ice cream and skating in the park, and it is all cuddly and adorable, and just what I wanted to read at the time. Both of them have believable families, friends and co-workers; the ex-girlfriend doesn’t come off particularly well, and Paul’s lack of contemplation of his own sexuality might have bothered me in another book or at another time, but this was fine. I did go have a look at the first Tucker Springs book, by L.A. Witt, but it appears to have someone getting together with their health professional, a trope I hate with an abiding passion; the third one, Dirty Laundry, which is Heidi Cullinan alone and appears to involve explicit sex in laundromats and characters with anxiety disorders, sounds more my speed, but isn't up on AREbooks yet.
I thought this did a good job of backgrounding and including historical detail, but unfortunately it falls down in a) failing to make me like Senna and b) having Aenor brutally raped at every opportunity (as I’ve commented before, this does appear to be the author’s thing for the younger, slighter partner in her romances). Senna, in particular, is someone I wanted to like – I have a lot of potential sympathy for people who realise they’re in over their head, and want to get out – but his plan to get out involves putting Aenor at such massive risk that it seems totally unfair. Senna has, by this stage, managed to save his own sister with remarkably little difficulty, and will also, later, be saved by his own slaves (because he treats them nicely) and, hmm, I just really needed him to be the one to pay for some of all this. It doesn’t help that the first time he has sex with Aenor, it’s the day after Aenor’s been sodomised with a giant marble dildo (possibly not an accurate historical detail, but then again, remembering my Classics lectures, maybe) and then raped so brutally that he passes out. Senna is aroused despite himself by both these events and no, he doesn’t let Aenor top.
This is really novella length, and I think I would have liked it longer, with a bit more exploration of both characters; there’s enough work on the world here to expand it up, and give Senna a chance to fail elsewhere (and Aenor, possibly, a chance to succeed). Lisa Henry only has one book left out that I haven't read, Tribute, which appears to be about two sex slaves, and which I think I can predict well enough to give it a miss for now.
Heidi Cullinan and Marie Sexton, Second Hand. This was just the right amount of sweet and fuzzy, much to my surprise (I read about half of it at the dog park, which was also the ideal setting). I had wondered whether combining these two authors would skew more towards explicit sex or total sap (Heidi Cullinan’s extremes), but instead it’s worked rather well, without my feeling too trapped by the small town setting (more of a Marie Sexton thing).
Paul Hannon is a touchingly naïve vet school dropout who moves to Tucker Springs because his girlfriend wants him to, only to then have her leave him for another man and dump him with the mortgage and a lot of household appliances. Which he starts selling off at the pawn shop, to the owner, El Rozal, who started the shop in the hope of curing his mother’s hoarding, is gay and cynical about relationships, and taken enough with Paul to convince him that he can only buy one kitchen item a day from him, thus ensuring regular visits. There is a puppy and family meals and ice cream and skating in the park, and it is all cuddly and adorable, and just what I wanted to read at the time. Both of them have believable families, friends and co-workers; the ex-girlfriend doesn’t come off particularly well, and Paul’s lack of contemplation of his own sexuality might have bothered me in another book or at another time, but this was fine. I did go have a look at the first Tucker Springs book, by L.A. Witt, but it appears to have someone getting together with their health professional, a trope I hate with an abiding passion; the third one, Dirty Laundry, which is Heidi Cullinan alone and appears to involve explicit sex in laundromats and characters with anxiety disorders, sounds more my speed, but isn't up on AREbooks yet.
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Date: 2013-01-24 02:51 pm (UTC)I did think that the plan put them both - not at risk, so much, as that it was clearly going to end in both their deaths, and I wanted to see a little more of that grim emotion in Senna's thoughts.
But yeah, it needed to be longer, with more plot and less rape. Um.
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Date: 2013-01-26 02:26 am (UTC)(how are you going with the rest of shukyou's stories?)
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Date: 2013-01-26 02:49 am (UTC)I particularly adored The White Palace (right up my alley!), The Stone Fox etc, and Murder Ballad. I have also enjoyed works by other authors, especially The City of a Thousand Days by Ogiwara Saki.
Contemporary m/m really doesn't do it for me, unless there is a paranormal or fantasy element. (This is true, really, for all types of media I like - I'm a fan of historical, SF, or fantasy stories/movies/etc, but I find 'ordinary people in contemporary situations' boring!) I think
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Date: 2013-01-26 03:16 am (UTC)This used to be me, and I'm not sure what happened! And it still is, in a way - almost all the fanfic I read is for sf/f type canons, and my non m/m reading is almost always genre. But I burnt out on published secondary world fantasy a while back (I still read some, but only by authors I know or for books with very convincing recommendations), and I've failed to finish any of the published m/m in fantasy worlds I've read (off-hand, I've stalled out in books by Josh Lanyon, Marie Sexton and Heidi Cullinan, all of whom write contemporaries I like). But I loved The White Palace as well, and I think it's a reflection of shukyou's ability as an author (and possibly the fact that she's not working within typical romance novel conventions) - the whole beginning sequence with Fard's flatmates, and just the whole construction of the world, is not something I get out of the fantasy novels (m/m or otherwise) that I can buy.
(I thought when I got into manga that I'd be reading a lot of the very iddy BL stuff as well, but apparently what I like is dysfunctional relationships between white-collar workers in dead-end jobs in contemporary Japan. No idea.).
I know why s2b2 does it, but I really wish they included summaries of their stories! I don't think I've read Murder Ballad, but I have been recently reading her supernatural duo, Mike Dies at the End and This Story Has Scorpions in it, Seriously Dude, Don't Read It (titles from memory!) and loved them. I have enjoyed those sort of supernatural m/m's, where it's ghosts and mediums rather than werewolves and vampries - Jordan Castillo Price's Psycop series (published) is great.
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Date: 2013-01-26 03:47 am (UTC)I actually fell out of love with high fantasy a while back, and only have recently rediscovered it, and I would say it's not my favorite genre (either m/m fantasy or fantasy in general). But some fantasy worlds have really appealed to me lately.
Romance as a genre doesn't appeal to me; I need something more - adventure, or action, or whatever. I need more than just people falling in love. E.g. in White Palace there is a whole political/military side to it, as well as the fish out of water trope which I admit to loving.
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Date: 2013-01-26 10:04 am (UTC)I'd love to write something for s2b2, and need to actually commit to a deadline. Yuletide works well for me because of the fear of letting someone else down, but the open signup s2b2 has isn't nearly as intimidating.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-26 03:14 pm (UTC)