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czanel840
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Comments by czanel840
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great info, not something I would enjoy reading cover to cover

1 week • 2 Likes
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Three and a half stars, I think? This leans more towards mystery than romance -- and it's a pretty good mystery. It's not at all clear who our hero can trust and finally he needs to take a leap of faith, and there's also some mystery for us the readers as Tal ever-so-slowly doles out information about the trauma in Everett's past. The romance was satisfying, if secondary.

There is some pretty gruesome on-page violence, including

an eye being gouged out

.

I just reread this for the first time in many years. I still love it. It's one of only 3 1970s YA books I still have copies of, along with Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (LeGuin) and Max's Wonderful Delicatessen (Winifred Madison). I never thought about it before, but the reason these three have stuck with me is that there all about kids (boys, as it happens) who don't feel any sense of belonging, then find a person, or people, with whom they belong.

This book has its problems. It has Tragic Queerness, it's got some diet culture stuff in it, and it's trying hard to use 70s teenspeak in a way that rings false. And there's material in it that many people will find anathema:

sexual interaction between an adult and a young teen, as well as the death of a major character

. But, as I said, I still love it, with all its warts, and I wouldn't even choose to change it.

CW: This would have two Major Archive Warnings if it was on AO3. If that might be a dealbreaker, do your research before you read.

1 month • 1 Like
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My least favorite of the series so far, but still a good read. Some of the material on

religion, miracles, and people choosing their fates/circumstances

was uncomfortable for me. That stuff can so easily be pernicious, and I'm not sure how much of what Inmon writes into the characters he personally believes.

1 month • 1 Like
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This is a fun, weird little story about love between a woman and her door.

Yes, door.

He doesn't stay in door form the whole time.

I don't really want to tell you more because spoilers. It's not that long, and it's not expensive. If you think you'd enjoy some soft femdom with a touch of myth and a touch of weird, go for it.

90% loved it, 10% irked by it. I really like the magic system and magical world-building. The stuff about the roles and feelings of unmagical people from magic families is cool. The surfacing of the ways men discount women and the reasons they shouldn't is awesome. I mostly liked the romance, and I thought the mystery/thriller aspects were well-done and well-integrated with everything else. But

the third-act breakup felt too much part of a romance formula, and the way it was resolved by the thriller plot bringing them back together with no indication of whether they would have ever fixed it themselves without that felt annoyingly deus ex machina.

Generally a nice romcom with neurodivergent (in my reading, anyway) characters finding a way to fit together. The first sex scene really pissed me off, though --

a character who has previously had trouble orgasming with a partner can suddenly come spectacularly, simultaneously with her partner, during PiV intercourse, apparently because all she ever needed was to shtup someone who wasn't a jerk

.

This book blew my mind. It's a complex, layered examination of capitalism, compulsion, conditioning, consent, and connection. It depicts a near-future world in which debt becomes heritable and people burdened with familial debt, including student loans from previous generations, need to choose between debtor's prison and indentured servitude. If they elect servitude -- which often includes sexual service, especially if the servant, called a Docile, is young and attractive -- they have the option of taking Dociline, a drug which makes them happily compliant and causes them to forget their servitude. We follow a particular young Docile, who rejects Dociline, and the trillionaire who buys his contract. The connection changes them both in ways neither could foresee.

I found this powerful and thought-provoking (and, yeah, occasionally sexy). It's definitely going to stay with me and I'm going to be thinking about it a lot and surely rereading it. I recommend it *if* you can read it with appreciation and personal safety. Take the content warnings seriously and take care of yourself. Consider whether reading the book will be painful for you and also whether you will be able to encounter its powerful ideas without being put off by the [content warning follows, not truly a spoiler]

rape, abuse, and suicide attempt and suicidal ideation

Commented on:

A note I made while reading:

I'm at 50% and this is an absolute shitshow as far as consent goes -- in both directions.

He clearly thinks he should refrain from having sex with her, but she urges him to go ahead, knowing that her pheremones are nearly irresistible to him. He's said that if she gets pregnant he'll have to pair-bond with her for life, and he says that his reproductive physiology is complex, and she keeps sexing him without asking for more details. And he keeps sexing her, hoping she'll get pregnant so she'll have to stay although he knows that's not what she want. Also, he fucks her almost to death and then they try again at her urging.

NO ONE is considering consequences.

Having now read the wwhole book, my take is that this is a space romp with Dr. Who levels of making sense (i.e. hardly any and if you try to make it make sense you'll just spoil your fun), heavy duty alien banging, and a certain amount of happy accident in the resolution.

It kept me interested and engaged the whole time, but I felt like there were plenty of problems with it too -- I just didn't like how heedless bouth MCs were towards each other and their separate and joint future.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this story.

The good: There were so many scenes and moments that put a smile on my face. I found Lydia fetching her Christmas tree particularly delightful. As always with one of Jenkins's histroms I enjoyed the setting and historical detail and fleshing out my mental picture of African American possibilities in the 19th century. I liked the warm relationships both Gray and Lydia have with their mothers.

The less good: I was irked when Lydia thought of Gray's penis as the part of him that would "make her a woman." I felt there was a real consent problem when

Gray used sexual pleasure, and the threat of witholding it, to get her to answer a question she didn't want to.

And I really didn't like the epilogue giving us

a baby as the HEA even though Lydia had believed herself to be barren. Why can't a woman actually be infertile and still have a happy ending? For that matter, Lydia closing the school she had previously said she wouldn't leave in order to move to her home town and be a wife is dismissed in a sentence as well.

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