Post election all I wanted to do was read and sleep. Not news reading or nonfiction reading or anything like that. At a minimum I wanted to escape and at best I hoped for medicine.
I asked AI to recommend speculative fiction with LGBTQ themes. The first one I picked – Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree – was 800+ pages! What shocked me most were the deaths. This is a dragon-fighting-end-of-the-world story, and the carnage was thick. The sexuality wasn’t. Two of the female main characters do couple up, but their relationship was to my eyes strangely devoid of emotion, perhaps because both were also pledged to a (different) people. Escapism to medicine rating: 1 star
On to the next.
That was Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. This was a fun read, with interesting characters and a cool plot. There were far fewer deaths, even though the story was about a whole galaxy at war. The “LGBTQ” part of the book was two female shipmates hooking up. Sweet, but not particularly hot. It was fun to read about a heterosexual couple whose relationship was forbidden, and how both the couple and their coworkers worked to deal with the prejudice and protect their relationship. Escapism to medicine rating: 3 stars
It was no surprise that Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys was filled with dead people. Luckily, many of them end up getting resurrected. More importantly, the main character is a gay transmasculine teenager. He has a best friend who totally has his back, but he’s fighting an anti-trans belief set in his family that threatens more than one of his identities. His binders are almost a character, given how often they are referenced. But that’s not the point of the book: falling in love is. This time, the love and longing (which isn’t consummated on the page) are palpable. Escapism to medicine rating: 4 stars, despite the death theme.
Freya Marske wrote the next three: A Marvelous Light, A Restless Truth, and A Power Unbound. This series is set in the Victorian era, in a world in which magic exists but is kept secret by those endowed with it. Many characters of multiple classes are involved in efforts to find hidden parts of a magic tool that could harness all individuals’ magic. Some involved in the chase want to use the magic tool while others are trying to find it and re-hide it. Here the deaths are fewer (at least until A Power Unbound). What makes the series particularly interesting is these are the sexually hottest books in the group. In A Marvellous Light, there is a dance between two main male characters who are trying to keep their gayness hidden whilst also falling in love with each other. This time there is sex, on the page. A Restless Truth’s sex is between a seasoned courtesan and a young woman new to – but extremely interested in – sex. These scenes are quite detailed and hot. Hottest of all for this reader were the sex scenes in A Power Unbound. Here class warfare, personal power, and privilege erect an unbreachable wall between two men until they figure out how to use them for very pleasurable ends. Series rating: 4 stars. I can’t say they were medicinal, but they were definitely entertaining!
There’s neither sex nor death in the book I really want to recommend, TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea. While it was likely written for young adults it was exactly the mix I needed post-election: an engrossing, entertaining story filled with hope. As in the Marske books, this world – set in a time when bureaucrats all used typewriters – includes magical people, but they are feared and circumscribed. Magical children are placed in “orphanages” run by the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). One orphanage contains a particularly unusual group of inhabitants, and DICOMY’s most hide-bound worker is sent there for a month to painstakingly document the place. During that time Linus has to confront his assumptions about the children and system he’s been working for. What he learns about the orphanages’ charges and adult caregivers and through interactions with nearby villagers changes his understanding of both himself and his place in the world. He falls in love not only with a magical man, but also with the magical children. And he resolves to fight for them. It was medicine for a badly-bruised post-election heart. Escapism to medicine rating: 5 stars.