FF Friday book review poll

[rachelmanija]

I am launching FF Fridays! See previous post for details.

I seem to have accumulated a whole lot of FF novels and samples of FF novels over the years. From that somewhat random assortment...

Poll #19942 FF Fridays Upcoming Book Reviews

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 72

View Respondents

What FF novel would be interested in seeing me review?

View Answers

Criminal Gold by Ann Aptaker. 1949 noir about Cantor Gold, dapper dyke and art smuggler.
35 (48.6%)

Broken Wings by L. J. Baker. A blue collar fairy meets a celebrity dryad.
21 (29.2%)

High Impact by Kim Baldwin. A woman has a near death experience and goes to Alaska, where she meets an adventure outfitter and looks like they get stranded together.
13 (18.1%)

I am a Woman by Ann Bannon. Classic lesbian pulp, written in 1950s, about "immortal butch bar-dyke Beebo Brinker." (Literary immortality, not vampiric. I think.)
27 (37.5%)

Grave Silence by Rose Beecham. The super-cute cover made me think this was a cozy mystery, but reviews suggest it's quite dark and involves abuse and cults.
6 (8.3%)

Pegasi and Prefects by Eleanor Beresford. Magical girls' boarding school!
32 (44.4%)

Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas # 1) by Zoraida Cordova. Bisexual teenage bruja must rescue her family from the Underworld.
31 (43.1%)

Uptown Thief by Aya de Leon. "One smart, sizzling mami robs the rich and protects the exploited--until one heist too many puts everything at stake. . . "
15 (20.8%)

A Knight to Remember by Bridget Essex. "A librarian, a warrior woman, and a love story that's out of this world..."
30 (41.7%)

The Covert Captain: Or, A Marriage of Equals by Jeannelle M. Ferreira. Napoleonic cross-dressing.
35 (48.6%)

Desolation Point by Cari Hunter. Two women are stranded hiking in the Cascades with a killer on the loose.
9 (12.5%)

Snowbound by Cari Hunter. During a robbery in a snowstorm, one cop is wounded and taken hostage while another tries to rescue her.
14 (19.4%)

Heart Trouble by Jae. A waitress and an ER doctor get soul bonded.
13 (18.1%)

Second Nature by Jae. A romance novelist meets a werewolf!
9 (12.5%)

Deep Deception by Cathy Pegau. SF cop/criminal on a mining planet.
20 (27.8%)

Rulebreaker by Cathy Pegau. SF criminal/mob boss, on the same mining planet.
12 (16.7%)

Firestorm by Radclyffe. Smokejumpers in love.
14 (19.4%)

Trauma Alert by Radclyffe. ER doctors in love.
9 (12.5%)

The Devil Inside by Ali Vali. New Orleans mob boss/Wisconsin farm girl.
10 (13.9%)

Something else which you will suggest in comments.
2 (2.8%)

If you're familiar with any of these, please tell me what you think!

Comments

[musesfool]

I enjoyed Uptown Thief, though the writing is fair-to-middling at best.

[rachelmanija]

Is it as Leverage-like as it sounds?

[muccamukk]

On one hand I'm REALLY curious to see what you thought of Covert Captain, on the other hand I want recs for new stuff!

[rachelmanija]

I'm sure Covert Captain is very good but I'm not really in the mood for that particular set of tropes at the moment.

[staranise]

I'm curious too, because Margrethe at Love in Panels did not like it. (That's actually the review that made me follow her, because of this Twitter thread about holding F/F to a higher standard.

[havocthecat]

I think I ticky-boxed everything remotely SFF? SOULBONDING.

[rachelmanija]

The soul bonding book looks delightful but is also quite long. Maybe next week.

[coffeeandink]

I liked The Covert Captain and will try to get something up about it tomorrow.

Eta: oh, also, I've read some Ann Bannon, although not that particular one. I like the intensity of her character portraits, but they do tend to tragic lesbianism, if that's a problem.

[rachelmanija]

I give books a pass on tragic lesbianism if they were actually written in the 1950s.

[osprey_archer]

I am super curious to read your review of this classic 1950s lesbian pulp. Am I hoping that Beebo Brinker turns out to be a vampire or not? I can't decide.

[rachelmanija]

I can't decide either!

I am probably missing something due to not being a lesbian in 1950 but had you given me the name Beebo Brinker and made me guess the character and genre, "butch woman in lesbian pulp" is about the last thing I would have guessed. I think my first guess would have been "Male carny in coming of age or possibly horror novel set in rundown carnival," my second would have been "Schoolboy in boarding school story written before 1950," and my third would have been "P. G. Wodehouse character."

[havocthecat]

The problem with Beebo is that I just finished watching Legends of Tomorrow's latest season.

[vass]

I was going to nominate Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, but I checked your tags and you've already reviewed it.

So... Heather Rose Jones' Daughter of Mysteries?

[rachelmanija]

Is it good?

[monanotlisa]

I've read other Cari Hunter; I recommend you review her because they writing ain't so bad, and HOMG THE LESBIANS DON'T ALWAYS DIE! (I know, I know, but. Genre. Even with queer writers you just don't know.)

[rachelmanija]

I have to say that both the promise of h/c and the hilarious specificity of TWO books in which the heroines are simultaneously trapped by a storm and threatened by criminals appeals to me.

[slashmarks]

I read Heart Trouble and was not too impressed with it, the soulbonding got used more for embarrassment humor and random infodumps than anything fun about soulbonding, which was the entire reason I picked it up. There were somoe very cute cooking together scenes, though, and I did enjoy the doctor MC trying to apply the scientific process to the soulbond.

(...it was also a little too obvious Jae had researched Iranian culture on, like, Wikipedia. I know this because I recognized most of the information she was using from my top five google results and wikipedia, but I also read other things, eg. books, when this was relevant to a writing project? And that was fanfic, you know?)

I am very interested in why several of these involve romance with mob bosses. Is this a popular secret lesbian fantasy?

Also, you're looking for other FF suggestions, correct?

The Raven and the Reindeer is a T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) retelling of the Snow Queen with a) a happy ending and b) a romance between Gerta and the robber girl. Adorable and hilariouos.

Battle Scars by Meghan O'Brien is a hilariously earnest lesbian romance between a military vet with PTSD and a service dog and her dog's veterinarian. (I think that one might have accidentally swallowed a PTSD self help book on the way to publication.)

I feel like you've probably heard of these already? but Sara Farizan wrote two lesbian YA books, If You Could Be Mine and Tell Me Again How A Crush Should Feel. I liked the second one, which is about an abusive lesbian relationship in high school but has a happy ending and the beginning of another romance in it, better than the first, which is set in Iran and about the MC's girlfriend breaking up with her to get married to a man; the MC decides to pretend to be transgender so she can become a man and marry her girlfriend, but it underused the premise despite trying really, really hard with a number of actual trans characters.

Desert of the Heart is a lesbian classic, by Jane Rule, if you haven't heard about it the MC goes to Nevada to get divorced back when it was really hard to get divorced in the US, falls in love there - this has one of the more plausible feeling romances I've seen in fiction imo.

[rachelmanija]

Thank you! I have not read any of those.

I don't know if "romance with mob boss" is a popular fantasy but I definitely had a "sounds hot to me!" reaction. There's a really good original short story with that premise: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9630167

[kore]

Desert of the Heart was made into one of the very first FF movies I ever saw, Desert Hearts, which has a beautiful love scene. It's great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Hearts

[sholio]

I am sad the stranded-in-Alaska one is getting so few votes! Obviously I have no choice but to buy it and read it and report on it myself. :D

... by the way, magistrate and I found a book of vintage pulp lesbian fiction in a used bookstore in San Francisco and ALMOST bought it for you before realizing that it was all excerpts from period novels instead of complete stories. Boo.

[rachelmanija]

Dammit.

[kore]

You might like some of the early ff mysteries if you haven't read them already -- the Cassandra Reilly series by Barbara Wilson (co-founder of Seal Press) might be to your taste, lots of twists and travel. Ditto Lynn Ames’ Kate and Jay series, with two female reporters exposing politics, spies, secret organizations, with lots of outside settings. Val McDermid apparently has a series with a lesbian profiler but her treatment of gender issues was so bad in her male profiler series I am very wary of it. I think I have some other books from the 80s/90s, I'll have to look for them (right now am Indisposed). I don't think I've read any Katherine V. Forrest or JM Redmann. I did read Laurie King's Kate Martinelli series but was ehhh about it.

And then there's Megan Abbott of course although she seems to be moving away from noir, SIGH.

[rachelmanija]

Thanks! I will definitely check out Barbara Wilson and Lynn Ames. And Megan Abbott! She's been on my to-read list for forever.

[kore]

I also gotta admit the Rose Beecham books look like catnip to me right now.

[magistrate]

Would it be possible for you to highlight books where neither woman has sex with a man, and where it doesn't end tragically? I have friends who frequently bemoan their inability to find FF that meets those criteria, and I'd love to have some things to point them toward...

[rachelmanija]

Just based on the summaries of these, I'd be surprised if either happened in any of them. [ETA: No, wait. The 50s pulp could end tragically.] It definitely doesn't in Pegasi and Prefects.

[alias_sqbr]

I ticked basically everything because I am SO here for this :D

I've read Deep Deception and thought it was ok but not amazing. So I'd be curious to hear your opinion just to compare.

Also here's my ff shelf on goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/15953306-sean?shelf=f-f-romance

[landofnowhere]

Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee: a contemporary middle-school lesbian AU of Romeo and Juliet, where the characters are also putting on R&J as their school play. The plot starts off pretty similar to Romeo and Juliet -- in the equivalent of the masked ball scene, female Romeo crashes a Halloween party in a Darth Vader costume -- but then goes in a much lighter direction, which is why I think it's more of an AU than a retelling.