Thursday Recs

[soc_puppet]

Welcome once again to Thursday Recs!

This week, I'm recommending The Shivadh Romances by Sam Starbuck, AKA copperbadge/copperbadge. Three books are currently available: Fete for a King (m/m), Infinite Jes (m/nb), and The Lady and the Tiger (bi f/het m).

Fete For A King introduces Crown Prince Gregory, who needs both a husband (sooner rather than later) and a caterer for his coronation. His assistant and friend Alanna won’t help with the husband hunt but has hired Eddie Rambler, an American celebrity chef with a penchant for kitsch, to cater the coronation. He’s not who Gregory would have chosen, but he’s a surprisingly good chef, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s both handsome and obviously into the king-to-be. Gregory was looking for a much more proper chef and a more appropriate husband as King Consort, but Eddie just won’t stay out of his mind, or his kitchen.

Infinite Jes follows Gregory’s widowed father Michaelis into retirement, a difficult transition he isn’t making easier by moving out of the palace and avoiding appointments to dictate his royal memoirs. When nonbinary broadcast journalist Jes Deimos and Jes’s teenage son Noah happen into his life, he isn’t expecting anything more from them than a little help making a podcast. Still, Jes — surprising, different, challenging Jes — is starting to inspire emotions he didn’t think he was capable of anymore. Now if only Noah would stay out of life-threatening trouble for more than a month at a time, Michaelis might be able to figure out exactly what those feelings are.

The Lady And The Tiger finds Gregory’s assistant, Lady Alanna Daskaz, transported across the border to Galia, a nearby micronation that claims she’s the heir to their throne. Bringing her best friend Gerald, Duke of Shivadlakia, along with her, Alanna sets to work figuring out how to escape becoming Duchess of Galia without destroying Galia in the process. Jerry, who has a complicated life at the best of times, is trying to solve a few problems of his own along with helping Alanna solve hers. None of this is made easier by the fact that Alanna’s had a secret crush on Jerry since they were at school together, and Jerry’s just starting to believe he might be someone worthy of the Lady Alanna.

These stories are available for purchase at the link above as both hard copy and epub, as free PDFs here, and as less polished, pre-final-edits versions on AO3.

Upcoming in the series is Twelve Points, starring a trans man from Askazer-Shivadlakia competing in Eurovision!


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!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!

Comments

Fic rec!

[fyreharper]

Ran across this pair of Good Omens fics (mostly the rec is for the first one, but the second makes a decent epilogue), in which things get better (and queerer!) in the non-awful subset of the Dowling family.

Spider Queen
Author’s description:
The Dowling family, in the aftermath of the Apocanope. Contains a complete lack of male boy sons.

[readera]

My rec is a video by a wlw couple talking about fashion & one of them finding her style. They review the 10 years of her style since coming out.

https://youtu.be/lSAffXnD1no

[alexseanchai]

I hesitate to say this is a rec since it's clumsily handled and there are Other Issues, but this author was a favorite for a long time and thus this pleases me:

I just marathoned the Elemental Masters series by Mercedes Lackey, having not read any new books almost at all (certainly none from this series) since 2016, and in those books I hadn't read before, there's a prominent trans secondary character! the …fourth? fifth? person named Peter in this series is introduced to us by his deadname as a woman's ghost, and when he changes his name is also when he gets to live his life on approximately his terms; this is all very literal, but also entirely not. he's in The Bartered Brides and The Case of the Spellbound Child.

(the marathon reread, right after a marathon reread of Valdemar, has also highlighted Lackey has quite a few villains whose sexual violence and violence against especially children are depicted in great detail, even if the worst bits are offscreen. and lots racism issues I hadn't picked up on before. in particular, though it is possible to argue that the attitudes described re Chinese people are exactly what one would expect of white people in these places and times, those attitudes come up fairly often and without counterbalance in the form of sympathetic Chinese characters: there are exactly two and they only appear in The Fire Rose, while unnamed and voiceless Chinese characters being subject to violence are at least mentioned in Several books. racism against Black people hardly comes up at all, though mostly because the only Black characters are people Sarah remembers fondly and/or with great respect but who don't actually show up onscreen. racism against Native Americans literally only comes up in explicit context of it being a problem, but implicit context of it isn't, that is to say, a Wild West show doing poorly in Germany because popular novels have primed Germans to think of Native Americans as heroes and the show starts out depicting the other thing. racism against South Asians is discussed frequently, and the only prominent character who thinks British imperialism might be bad actually is the villain of The Serpent's Shadow, but there are lots of sympathetic South Asian characters, including the female lead of The Serpent's Shadow.)

[bluapapilio]

Thanks for the rec, got the PDFs!