Thursday Recs

[soc_puppet]

Sliding in under the wire in my timezone, it's Thursday Recs!

My rec for this week is the book Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree:

Come take a load off at Viv's cafe, the first & only coffee shop in Thune. Grand opening!

Worn out after decades of packing steel and raising hell, Viv, the orc barbarian, cashes out of the warrior’s life with one final score. A forgotten legend, a fabled artifact, and an unreasonable amount of hope lead her to the streets of Thune, where she plans to open the first coffee shop the city has ever seen.

However, her dreams of a fresh start filling mugs instead of swinging swords are hardly a sure bet. Old frenemies and Thune’s shady underbelly may just upset her plans. To finally build something that will last, Viv will need some new partners, and a different kind of resolve.

A hot cup of fantasy, slice-of-life with a dollop of romantic froth.

(Summary via Amazon.)

Overall, a very quiet, feel-good kind of book, with relatively low stakes and an eventual f/f romance.


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Comments

[tei]

Ooh-- well, I just posted a review enthusiasm about Elif Batuman's latest book, which is-- well, I don't think I can explain the queerness of this book in fewer or more coherent words than I did, so: https://tei.dreamwidth.org/262209.html

[goatgodschild]

I'm listening to Gideon the Ninth right now, the sword lesbian book of the moment. I'd recommend it, even if the main focus is the SFF intrigue over a directly queer narrative.

A book I recently ran across from my childhood was The Prince of Shadow, a novel that I forgot has at least one Token Gay, a young man named Bixei and his boyfriend Stipes He's not a stereotype, not particularly fashionable or gossipy or anything, he's just gay.

I was trying to find if there were any books under my bed, since I am going through my collection again, and I ran across The Fangirl's Guide to the Galaxy. It's very much of its time (2012), but it's very queer indeed, as you might imagine!

[lilysea]

I <3 your bisexual sheep icon! ^_^

[alexseanchai]

I am blanking on how queer the Rook & Rose trilogy by M. A. Carrick (that is, swan_tower and co-conspirator) actually is—I'm not sure either the noblewoman currently on her severalth wife or the wife herself counts towards making the books queer, they're both pretty minor characters—but I did notice that the worldbuilding doesn't have clockwise and counterclockwise, it has sunwise and earthwise, and "sunwise man" is explicitly defined in a manner that makes it unmistakable the phrase means "trans man". by the later point at which we meet a character who's an earthwise woman, we're clearly expected to figure it out for ourselves. idk I think that's clever and sweet.

also at some point I need to reread swan_tower's "rook and rose" tag to figure out wtf that's all talking about in context of two-thirds of the end result

[silveradept]

I have been meaning to read that, but as a Kindle format exclusive there aren't many ways of getting it on my preferred devices without having to install a Kindle reader app.

Instead, I'm waiting for And Seek (Not) To Alter Me to arrive, an anthology of queer works based around Much Ado About Nothing that I backed from Duck Prints Press.

[soc_puppet]

I swear I read something about Amazon being forced to switch to epub soon...

[silveradept]

If so, I would expect it to be only in the EU, since they're the government entity trying hardest right now to prevent lock-in.