Tag: Sexuality

ARC, Books

Book 651: Sorted – Jackson Bird

Geoff W

book cover of 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 648: Honestly Ben – Bill Konigsberg

Geoff W

Honestly Ben book coverThis one was pretty forgettable for me, which is sad because it’s actually a good book. I think the problem is that I read Openly Straight, basically the first half of this book/story a little over five years ago. If I would’ve read these back to back I would’ve probably had much stronger feelings about this one.

Let’s start with what didn’t work: the swimming analogy. The book opens with Ben, the protagonist, going to swimming lessons for the first time and sinking to the bottom of the pool. Konigsberg uses this as a very clunky metaphor for Ben’s life and thoughts at the start of the book. I was honestly hoping it wouldn’t resurface at the end of the book—which isn’t totally fair because I would’ve been more pissed if he didn’t complete the metaphor—but it did and it just made me sigh and shake my head.

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Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

Geoff W

Book cover for "When Brooklyn Was Queer"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 623: Danced Close (Portland Heat #6) – Annabeth Albert

Geoff W

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.

For me, this one felt like Albert had a checklist of what all haven’t I included in one of my MM Romance novels in this series yet? And when she looked at her list she realized she hadn’t written a HIV positive character or non-binary character and voila Danced Close.

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Book 622: Wrapped Together (Portland Heat #5) – Annabeth Albert

Geoff W

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.

This one falls into the same formulaic routine as the others (not a bad thing, just an observation), but because it’s Christmas themed and the two main characters have technically known each other for decades a lot of the get-to-know-you stuff happened off the page.

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