I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*
There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.
Continue reading “Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan”
June was an incredibly busy month! We traveled to the West Coast for almost two weeks for a wedding and to see friends/family, I read 14 books, and we did some local exploration too. June was also pride month, and shockingly—we usually avoid it because I don’t like crowds and it’s usually too damn hot in June—we actually attended pride in Portland, Oregon. See what I did with the rainbow hop and the intro…yeah 😀
So instead of taking a break after realizing I probably shouldn’t read six romance novels in a row by the same author I pick one up that they co-wrote. I really am a masochist right?
Of the six books in this series, this one is toward the bottom of my rankings. I’m not sure if there is anything specific about this book (full disclosure it could be my biases), but I think it has more to do with this being the sixth MM Romance I read by the same author in a very short time.
I think this is my favorite in the series. I’m not sure if it’s because of life-long friends becoming lovers, the twins marrying twins aspect, or the sheer adorkableness of snarky Hollis or the unsure cockiness of Sawyer.