Month: June 2017

Of Cats and Men: Profiles of History’s Great Cat-loving Artists, Writers, Thinkers and Statemen by Sam Kalda (Ten Speed Press, April 18, 2017); 112 pages.

This is a smart, quirky, feminist and fun collection of brief biographies of famous men who’ve bucked gender constraints and loved them some cats. Right up this queer girl’s alley.

First, the writing is great. The biographies are smart and just telling enough to sate the uncurious and whet the appetites of more interested folks. But most importantly, the illustrations here are gorgeous–distinctly styled but not gimmicky, clever but not MERELY clever. As a cat-lover (who is, however, not a “crazy cat lady”… this is my only book about cats) and a lover of redemptive history, this is one of my new favorite books. I show it to everyone. What, perhaps, I love most about its aim is that it cares about and redeems the cat-loving man. With the possible exception of that grisly sea-captain Hemmingway with his famous 6-toed cats, cat affection has been cast as distinctly feminine and, thus, in men, a sign of queerness. It makes me happy that this book doesn’t address that with homophobic denials (“no, no, real men can like cats, too!”), but simply presses forward with profiles of men—all kinds of men—who love cats.  It’s a quietly-great answer to the requirements for gender conformity: one can legitimately be a femme man or a butch man (or any kind of man, really), and all kinds of men can do things we used to think of as too femme (as the kids used to say, “so gay”).

But that’s a quiet benefit of this book, not its outward aim. What it does, quite simply, is present interesting portraits of interesting men who were famous and to whom cats were important.

Finally, I’m not a qualified art critic, though I’ve written my share of criticism anyway, but I will say that I absolutely LOVE the illustrations here. They remind my uneducated eye a bit of a 1950s style of illustration, as does the color palette, which, coupled with the subject matter, only adds to the redemptive and smart feeling of this collection. I’d say that the illustrations are the point—that’s how wonderful they are—but I’d be shortchanging the biographies, which also feel like the point.

As I said, I show everyone this book. I love this book. Sam Kalda, your next book should be profiles of fat old ladies who read books and write reviews of them and live in New York and have two dogs and a cane and wear glasses. Go!

Huntsmen by Michelle Osgood (April 13, 2017); 218 pages. Available from Interlude Press here:

Hunstmen is the sequel to Osgood’s 2016 novel The Better to Kiss You With. Still here are Deanna and Jaime (the stars of the first novel) and all the orbital characters that came with them, but focus has shifted to tell the story of Kiara, who must find a way to come into her own power as pack leader, keep everyone safe and figure out how to be around her former love, Ryn. You might say it’s a novel about figuring out how(l) to fix a problem.

(I guess you’d only say that if you were a pun-loving doofus like me.)

So, in case you’ve not read the first book in the series, let me catch you up right quick: there are werewolves among us, and they even have their own governing organization (GNAAW, which makes me chuckle every time). Most people don’t even know, and werewolves themselves tend to lie low so word doesn’t get out; however, there are some people—they call themselves the Huntsmen—who think werewolves are a threat to non-werewolf people, especially those werewolves without a pack and thus without allegiance to GNAAW, and so feel no compunction about hunting those werewolves down and taking them out. Kiara is a werewolf, as are some—but not all—of her friends. She lives on the DL usually, but her father’s the leader of the large, successful pack to which she belongs, and she’s been tapped to be next. All she has to do is lie low, tow the line (I know some people say “toe,” but that makes no sense to me), and she’ll eventually be promoted to lead the big pack. But when she chances to see her former love Ryn starring in a local drag show (yes, drag isn’t limited to men impersonating women, despite what RuPaul’s Drag Race would have most of America believe… and here is where my long years as a professor force me to recommend the 2002 documentary Venus Boyz) and finds out Ryn’s the target of the Huntsmen because she’s a “lone wolf,” that plan goes to pot. Kiara steps up to protect her friends (and herself) and upsets the intended order.

Like the first book in the series, Huntsmen is a fun thriller with interesting characters and smart pacing. Also like the first book in the series, Huntsmen features an intelligent, powerful woman at its center. (It’s so rare, as a woman reader/viewer, to get main characters one would like to emulate, at least ones who aren’t punished at the end of the book/movie.) And this thriller delivers: so often, books and films are able to mount the tension, but aren’t able to resolve it in a believable and satisfying way. Not so here—there’s family drama, identity drama, love angst, and the general fear of being stalked, and the novel winds all this tighter and tighter, but, in the end, gives one a really good ending. You might say there’s as much bite as bark.

You know, if you were a pun-loving doofus like me.

TODAY: I’m at BookCon in NYC today all day. I’ll be signing copies of SWEET (11a-12p, officially, but seriously, I’m there all day). Plus, my upcoming (Nov 2017) second book’s cover is revealed today (spoiler alert: it is beautiful!).

Plus, if you stop by and are nice, I’ll give you a rainbow lollipop and bookmarks or something.

Come find me, plus 1 trillion great books at the Javits Center, NYC, booth 2780 with Interlude Press.

No tag backs!

Consequences (of Defensive Adultery) by M. Jane Colette (May 2, 2017); 232 pages. Available as either ebook or paperback at Amazon here. And from Kobo books here. (See the author’s website at mjanecolette.com for more buying options.)

Consequences proposes, in a roundabout way, the concept of “defensive adultery”—adultery, in other words, committed in response to one’s partner’s wrongs (be they emotional abandonment or sexual affairs), a way of salving oneself after a lover’s cruelty, or of creating enough emotional distance that the lover’s wrongdoings can’t hurt you. In the novel, the narrator Elizabeth relates the story of such adultery to her current lover as they… do lover things.

In her story, which occurs before she takes up with her current lover, she begins an affair with a professor whose marriage to another woman, Zia, has crumbled. Into the empty space steps Elizabeth, only to discover that, once she is the wife and no longer the lover, she is put in Zia’s place as her husband takes newer, younger lovers on the side. Zia angrily haunts their relationship—in no small part because she has a daughter with the professor, a daughter who is shuttled between Zia’s and her father’s homes; also in the mix is the angry, pansexual, pierced and tattooed daughter-in-rebellion Sasha, the narrator’s blood daughter Alexandra, and Sasha’s godmother, Zia’s and Elizabeth’s friend Annie.

It’s a tenuous trembling thing, this web of people pulled together into a knot of relationships, all painful, all vital, but all the push-pull kind of hate-love. Elizabeth is strung between them all, hero and aggressor and victim in one, more naturally reactive, struggling to become active on her own. She is, in other words, extremely human.

The story is told through Elizabeth’s voice, cut through with conversations between Elizabeth and her current lover, who controls and tortures her (only as much as she agrees to and enjoys) as she recounts. The frame tale (the story of Elizabeth telling the story to her lover, his statements of interest and whim, and his tormenting of her) gives tension to the story Elizabeth is telling, positions it differently for the reader than one might be inclined to understand it otherwise. The lover becomes, through the telling, a needling voice, disbelieving the point of view or recasting the events through a different eye, calling into question the sole authority–or even primacy–of the narrator.

The author herself (whom I recently met at a book conference) hands out business cards that read “I write erotica for smart people,” which translates to this novel being gentler, more emotionally complex, more subtle and less flatly pornographic than what passes for “erotica” in most fiction/film (there’s no, “Pizza? I didn’t order any pizza“-level doing-it here). It is more about who feels what because of whom than it is about who puts what where. (It is, perhaps, more in keeping with the root of that word, “eros,” which refers either to the god of love, according to the ancient Greeks (Eros, who is like the Roman god Cupid), or to, in Freud’s terms, the “life instinct.” In those terms, yes, it’s erotica for sure.)

In fact, I’d call this “feminist erotica” (and here I can’t remember if Colette refers to her work as such, but I certainly would), in that it does not rely on dehumanizing the participants for its effects. In fact, the narrator and the women with whom she deals are allowed to be relentlessly human: confused, inarticulate about their feelings at times, proud, sometimes in the wrong, sometimes behaving badly, but still stubbornly doing it, complex, sympathetic, smart-and-stupid, real women. Plus, they’re too old and their bodies too lived-in to be porn vixens. Zia, the ex-wife who comes closest to being a villain in this story, is given the same attention and intelligence in her portrayal: the reader understands her more as a complex, angry, hurt, relatively powerless woman trying the only avenues she knows to get what she needs, rather than as a villain. I think of her more as the narrator’s antagonist; she’s the fly in the ointment, sure, but a sympathetic fly.

In fact, the only characters here who even skirt—excuse the pun—the edges of being stock are the story’s two most relevant men (the narrator’s ex-husband and her current lover), a turnabout kind of condition that could feel quite Ha-Ha-Now-YOU-be-a-substanceless-trope-for-a-change-satisfying though not necessarily right (in the way that audiences are supposed to cheer when the Scooby-Doo villain gets a bucket of paint dumped on his head), but the novel avoids this trap, stays feminist, and fleshes these guys out, too. They’re not the simple villains we’re inclined to make of them, there’s no just desserts here, or grand ironies, or, for that matter, paint buckets; there’s just real, complex people getting by in the ways they know how.

These characters, in other words, are not paper dolls—one always has the feeling, when reading, of having stumbled on a secret, of being let in to spy on something real and fraught and difficult that will go on whether or not one’s watching.

But you can’t, in the end, help but watch anyway.