Books

Book 707: Arctic Wild (Frozen Hearts #2) – Annabeth Albert

I am rapidly running out of Annabeth Albert novels to read. Probably not as fast as I think, she has a few newer series and standalone novels, but I really do feel like I’m running out of the ones I would probably prefer.

Arctic Wild finds us back in the Alaskan wilderness, this time with Toby, an indigenous Alaska Native who works as a pilot with Griffin from Arctic Sun, and hotshot New York attorney Reuben. Reuben and his friends were supposed to go on a private Alaskan tour, but his friends back out and that leaves Reuben and Toby alone for the trip and the simmer starts to build immediately.

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Books

Book 704: At Attention (Out of Uniform #2) – Annabeth Albert

Damnit Annabeth Albert and Boston Public Library, quit making me read these! [Maybe, sort of? I’m actually checking now to see if there are more I can request—maybe this is a little bit on me 😀 Looks like Arctic Heat the third in her Frozen Heart’s trilogy is available, if I must . . .]

As soon as I consider reading something that isn’t a MM romance the BPL pings me to let me know they’ve either re-purchased one of Albert’s books and I’m first in line for it or one I’ve had on hold for ages has finally come off hold. Seriously though, they need to limit me or I’m never going to stop!

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Books

Book 695: Suddenly Yours – Jacob Z. Flores

Meh.

This one just didn’t do it for me as well as the others so far from the Dreamspun Desires imprint of Dreamspinner Press. I don’t think it was Flores’ writing style. It could be because he’s a man and the other were women. Or it could be because I didn’t particularly care for either of the protagonists.

I grabbed this one because of the Las Vegas setting and the cutie on the cover. I didn’t realize that he had that goofy look on his face (stupid small photos on hoopla) or I might’ve second guessed it.

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Books

Book 685: A Gay Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – Bert Shrader

This has been sitting on my shelf for almost three years ever since I read the Rolling Stones’ article “How One Publisher is Rescuing 1970s Gay Porn Paperbacks”. I finally got around to this as I was looking at the shorter books already on my shelves. And after the emotional drain that was Ethan Frome I thought I should try and get a little further away and a smutty gay porn novel from the 1960s checked all the boxes plus some.

Let’s just say, not a lot has changed in erotica novels. I mean sure the large portion of MM romance/erotica novels are now written by women, but the few that I know for a fact were written by men are pretty damn similar to this one. The big things that have changed is that in general the toxic masculinity and hetero-toxicity in general seem to have been tone down in the more recent books and there are some overt racist scenes and comments sprinkled throughout the novel that were horrible.

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ARC, Books

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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