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Book 681: Lab Partners – Mora Montgomery

What this books needs more than anything, is a good editor: there were continuity errors, there were issues with over description and there were issues with dialogue. And the saddest part is the story and characters were solid enough, but the editing really let it down. [Some of it may have been fixed in the final version of the book, but if it were me I would not have released this to reviewers with these types of errors.]

I requested a copy of this book from NetGalley based on the blurb and the cover.* I mean cute cover, adorable blurb about high school first romance, who wouldn’t want to read it right?

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Book 655: Upside Down – N.R. Walker

Sometimes you just have to eat your own words. I really don’t like reading self-published works. In general, they are not edited (structurally, thematically, copy) appropriately, but then I stumble across a self-published book, like this one, and I am pleasantly surprised.

Don’t get me wrong there were a few copy editing errors—I’m looking at you “Hans Solo”, ouch—but no more than what I’ve found in some big publisher books before (cough ** Mr. Dancy ** cough ** Signett Classics ** cough). And in general, I found this to be well paced and complete. Maybe this is because I found it versus the author reaching out to me? I honestly don’t know.

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Book 651: Sorted – Jackson Bird

I am always on board for reading anything from LGBTQ+ authors, but particularly nonfiction (memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, etc.). So when the publisher reached out about this one I downloaded it (and somehow actually got to it the week it was published).*

Overall, I really enjoyed this. I mean page one is a J.K. Rowling/Albus Dumbledore quote, of course I was going to enjoy this. I had no idea about Bird’s connection to Harry Potter (or that the Harry Potter Alliance, now known as Fandom Forward even existed)! This being said, I wasn’t totally enamored with the book and didn’t figure out why that was until roughly 80% of the way through the book.

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Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

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.
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Book 632: My Brother’s Husband, Volume 2 – Gengoroh Tagame

My Brother’s Husband, Volume 2, if possible, is even more perfect than Volume 1. We pick up with the story where Yatchi is continuing to digest what it must be like for LGBTQ+ individuals to come out and not be accepted. He’s internalizing everything and applying it to his own relationship with his daughter.

As Yatchi is doing he comes to the realization that he may not have fully accepted his twin’s sexuality. He finally acknowledges that they grew apart and that it wasn’t Ryoji’s growing distant and physically moving to Canada, but that he became distant with his twin as soon as he came out.

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