Book Review: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

I read this book at four in the morning while suffering a bout of insomnia. And, honestly, that felt like an appropriate time to read it, because this book is...weird. Not bad-weird. Just...weird. It had an almost dreamlike, surreal quality to it.

I liked it, though.

Be advised that this book does carry trigger warnings for violence, gore, mentions of sexual activity, and transphobia. The transphobia is called out and shown as a bad thing, but it is present.

The story follows the residents of Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, which is partially a boarding school but mostly a sanctuary for teenagers who have traveled to other worlds and long to go back. The principal character is Nancy, who visited a land of the dead.

It’s not long after Nancy arrives at the Home that things start going wrong. Along with her fellow students, Nancy tries to unravel what’s going on, before more people are hurt or the school is forced to close.

It was an entertaining take on what happens to characters after they come back from their fantasy adventures. A lot of portal fantasy that I've read has an air of “happily ever after” once the protagonist comes home, and it’s always hard not to wonder how they cope with our world after that. In Every Heart a Doorway, the answer is...well, not that great. They struggle. They long to return to their individual fantasy worlds, and have to learn how to deal with the knowledge that it might never happen.

That was definitely compelling. I liked that a lot.

Every Heart a Doorway came highly recommended to me as an aspec trans person. The main character is asexual, and one of the major supporting characters is a trans man. That was great to see and I very much liked it. I thought it was done pretty well. The only real quibbles I had were that immediately after coming out to her roommate, the asexual main character is asked about masturbation, and the trans man character is referred to by another character as being “born a girl.” That said, both of the characters saying these things are portrayed as rude and their responses as inappropriate, so wasn’t too huge of an issue for me personally. Your mileage may vary.

Now for what I didn’t like.

[Note: the rest of this review contains spoilers.]

This story hinges on violence against young girls, including a young girl of color. Multiple characters die in graphic ways, and though the deaths are not shown on-page, the fatal wounds are described in relative detail. We don’t get to spend a lot of time with the characters before they’re killed, and we don’t get a great grasp on their stories until after the fact. I’m not inherently opposed to character death, but I have developed great distaste for violence against women and girls, especially women and girls of color, being used for entertainment. There’s a lot of it, and it gets hard to stomach. Especially in a work that doesn’t have a lot of time to add deep characterization, it’s jarring and upsetting to see girls get offed so violently and suddenly.

Overall, I really adored the premise and the worldbuilding, but I feel like there are other, much more engrossing stories that could have been set in this world than “violent murder spree targeting young girls.” That said, I’m definitely interested in reading the next installments in the series, because the premise and worldbuilding were enthralling.

In short, this is one I would recommend to my fellow portal fantasy fans, but it is one I would recommend with caution.

Until next time,
Jenn.

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Book Review: Chameleon Moon, by RoAnna Sylver

I bought Chameleon Moon by RoAnna Sylver within five minutes of it being recommended to me, because the premise was something I knew I needed in my life: queer superheroes. We all need queer superheroes in our lives, really, even if they only exist in the 

pages of books. We deserve to know that there’s hope, and that we’re not alone.

And that’s exactly what Chameleon Moon told me: there’s hope, and I’m not alone. From the first pages, I got to see people like myself: nonbinary people, asexual people, transgender people, polyamorous people, neurodivergent people, disabled people. People like me, who the mainstream too often pretends don’t even exist, got to be the stars of an action-packed, high-intensity narrative. And, gods, was that good. That was so good.

Chameleon Moon is set in Parole: a gutted, run-down city that sits above a fire that’s been burning for years. It’s perpetually on the verge of crumbling into the flames, and water is so precious it’s used as currency. Those left in Parole have strange abilities, given by a drug that didn’t work as planned when introduced to the populace. They’re under forced quarantine by a military police force, and everyone is in a perpetual state of waiting for the city to completely collapse.

The narrative follows Regan, the asexual lizard king of my heart, as he tries to recover his memory. He falls in with Evelyn Calliope, a trans woman whose voice dominates the stage at the Emerald Bar, and whose grace under pressure is, honestly, utter goals. Because she’s one of the Helpers that Mr. Rogers told us to look for in times of trouble, Evelyn takes Regan under her wing. She takes him home, where the rest of her family is introduced: her wives Rose and Danae, their son Jack, and the family robot-dog, Toto-Dandy.

From there, the story is a rollercoaster, but in the absolute best way.

Chameleon Moon was fast-paced and brutal. People get hurt, and struggle, and suffer. They get put through the wringer, and they earn every last second of downtime they get. There is no “dead queer” trope to be found, blessedly, but be advised that there is violence and serious injury. The ending is what I’d call a bittersweet victory--mysteries get solved, goals get met, and conflicts get resolved, but there are definitely still plotlines to be resolved. My copy came with a bonus short story set not too long after the book, which was a wonderful treat, but I’ll still be buying book two as soon as I can.

Overall, I adored Chameleon Moon. The story was a thrilling ride, but what really sold it for me was the characters. They were so real, and refreshingly relatable. They have panic attacks, they deal with PTSD, they dissociate, they validate each other's’ struggles and needs. As a neurodivergent person living in a world where triggers are all-too-often mocked, I needed Chameleon Moon. I needed queer, neurodivergent, disabled characters whose struggles aren’t just relatable, but validated and worked through and shown as normal.

The story was good, yes, but the characters made me feel good about myself. They made me feel loved. They made me feel like I, too, can get through the day even when I want to shut down and give up.

Read this book. If you ever need a reminder that you matter, please, read this book.

Until next time,
Jenn.

(Reminder: If you enjoy my content, consider backing me on Patreon or buying me a coffee via Ko-Fi. Thanks!)

Representation is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Last week, I participated in the very first #QueerSpec Twitter chat, hosted by @AlexHarrowSFF. I had a great time chatting with some great people, and I'm looking forward to the next one (which, for those interested, will be June 15th at 6 PM EST).

One of the discussion questions centered around what kind of stories, topics, and themes the participants would like to see become more common in queer SFF. I posted multiple things, but, in particular, it was this one that came back to bite me:

"I would LOVE to see more queerplatonic relationships in fiction. People crap all over them, but they're important. #queerspec" [permalink]

I woke up this morning (er, afternoon) and checked Twitter to discover someone, who I have since blocked and whose tweets I can no longer access, was taking my tweet to mean that I believe gay romance doesn't matter and I think queerplatonic relationships are more highly stigmatized than sexual queer relationships. I was then accused of internalized homophobia and told that I am not allowed to use the word "queer."

A tip: that is not what I meant, and I can damn well use the word queer if I please.

I was accused of saying that gay sex isn't stigmatized and therefore shouldn't be represented, when what I simply said was that I'd like to see more representation of queerplatonic relationships. Queerplatonic relationships, or QPRs, are often stigmatized both outside and inside the queer community. They are a relationship style common among asexuals and aromantics, who constantly face harassment and exclusionary gatekeeping. Aspec people deserve to see our relationships represented as much as anyone else.

This spiked a conversation with a few other, wholly delightful, folks on Twitter that boiled down to, "representation is not a zero-sum game." People writing about QPRs does not take away from people writing about sexual and romantic queer relationships in the slightest. 

Writing autistic characters doesn't mean that nobody can write characters with ADHD. Writing bisexual characters doesn't take away from stories about lesbians. Writing stories with Latinx characters doesn't take away the importance of writing stories with Black characters. Etc. All of these groups deserve positive representation. 

Positive representation of one group doesn't take away from positive representation of another (assuming, of course, that the positive representation of one does not come coupled with hurtful representation or erasure of another--but that's an issue that deserves its own post).

If I am not portraying romantic and sexual queer relationships in a negative light, or pretending that they don't exist, there is no harm, and in fact is a lot of good, in me positively portraying queerplatonic relationships. Aspec people seeing ourselves in fiction is not taking away from allosexual and alloromantic queer representation.

So please, write queer romantic and sexual relationships. We need them desperately. Write them, share them, tell me about them so that I can share them, too.

But don't tell me that I don't deserve to see myself represented.

Don't tell me that seeing myself somehow means I'm keeping you from seeing yourself.

There is room for us all to be represented, and I will gladly stand beside you and help you boost your representation right alongside mine.

Because it's not a zero-sum game.

Until next time,

Jenn.

(Reminder: If you enjoy my content, consider backing me on Patreon or buying me a coffee via Ko-Fi. Thanks!)

You Can't Quantify Hard Work

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I've enjoyed having a blog again, and I've really been scratching my head for topics. The one I keep coming back to feels like a variation on my post "Don't Write Every Day," and I'm always wary of beating a dead horse.

Thing is, it seems like that message needs repeating. Often.

So many people fall into the trap of believing that people who don't write every day just aren't working hard enough. The thing is, you don't know how hard I work. You don't know just how hard it is to put my butt in the chair, as the common advice goes, and put words on the page.

"Hard work" is subjective, as well. There are days I can put down several thousand words without breaking a sweat. More commonly, I struggle to string together even a few paragraphs. Hitting 500 feels like a miracle. That doesn't somehow mean I worked "harder" or "better" on the day I wrote a few thousand.

I have to celebrate the baby steps. Every word is a victory. I've spent a long time feeling like I'm not successful because I don't have any published books to my name. I've spent a long time feeling miserable because it feels like I can never do enough, and my words will only mean anything once people can buy them in a bookstore.

I have never been a fan of the way the writing community puts published writers up on a pedestal, as if they are harder-working, better-writing, better-than-the-rest-of-us paragons of authordom. I have never liked the way that we as writers only seem to "count" once we sign that contract and have an official book deal--or, sometimes, when we only count once our book is on the shelf at Books a Million.

Writers are writers are writers, and we as a community have got to give more respect to those who struggle, who work for a week and produce only a handful of words, or who go weeks or months or years without being able to write much at all. We have got to have more respect for those who break themselves trying to meet far-off goals, only to realize that cramming themselves into the mold of what the community says success looks like is making them miserable.

There are countless paths to success as a writer. There are countless views on what "success" even means. There are countless ways to work hard, there are countless ways to produce content, and there are countless ways to be an author.

Your success is not the only way of being successful. Your accomplishments are not the only ones that took hard work. Your hard work is not the measuring stick by which others should be judged.

It's hard being too exhausted to write. It's hard being constantly told what my goals should be, what my workload should be, and what my daily output should be. It makes me hate writing, sometimes, to know that I'm "not working hard enough" by a lot of folks' standards.

Screw your standards, I work by my own. I am a writer regardless of what my output looks like, and I refuse to listen to those who put arbitrary quotas on people they don't even know.

It feels terrible to know that there are folks out there who think you're not doing enough. It feels terrible to find yourself buying into it, and to catch yourself beating yourself up for going a day without putting down words.

Don't let the gatekeepers and the naysayers get you down, because they're full of crap.

Every word is a victory. Celebrate it as such.

You are a real writer, and you belong in the writing community.

I promise.

Until next time,

Jenn.

If you enjoy my content, consider backing me on Patreon or buying me a coffee via Ko-Fi. Thanks!