User Profile

Jack 💜

WaferBiscuits@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 months, 1 week ago

He/Him 🎉🏳️‍⚧️ Big fan of cozy gay romance, sci-fi, fantasy, and any kind of xenofiction. Exhausted, but happy to be here! 🕺✨

My longterm goal is to read every published book with a transmasc lead that I can get my grubby little hooves on. Feel free to lob stuff over in the list I’ve been growing!

Please pardon the mess - I imported my GoodReads data and it’s gonna take a lot of fiddling to get everything ship shape. 🧹

This link opens in a pop-up window

Jack 💜's books

Currently Reading

2023 Reading Goal

96% complete! Jack 💜 has read 96 of 100 books.

Rainbow Rainbow (2022, Catapult) 2 stars

It’s OK

2 stars

2.5. Conklin’s writing is tight and impressive, but man. Most of these stories felt uncomfortable and spiteful for the sake of it.

There are some major standouts. “Pioneer” and “Sunny Talks” were my favorites, with an emphasis on the latter for being a sympathetic look at the gap of understanding between younger/older queer culture and expectations.

The elephant in the room is that so many of these stories involve heavy themes of child sexual assault that are touched upon, but don’t really seem to say anything other than be there as depressing shock value. Maybe I’m just not the right audience, but those stories (the majority of them, really) just didn’t click with me at all.

Not a big fan of two separate transmasc characters forgoing HRT because of worries about increased aggression, baldness, cancer, etc. Characters are characters, and they can have their own motivations, but it feels a …

Act Cool (2021, HarperCollins Publishers) 4 stars

It’s okay

3 stars

2.5. Rounded up because this is one of the very few books out there that has a straight transmasc MC. The theater culture stuff is good, and I can tell all of that is coming from a place of passion by the author.

August isn’t very likable. Not in a dumb teenage way, but in a ‘hon, you need therapy way’

Touch Me Gently (Paperback, 2010, Dreamspinner Press LLC) 4 stars

Don’t look at me

2 stars

Starts out decently enough, I thought, but maybe I was just willfully ignoring the problems out of desperation. Hurt/comfort cowboy mlm isn’t the most popular genre, and in a lot of cases I’m happy to just take what I can get.

This isn’t written very well. Dialogue is forced and robotic and there’s a hell of a lot more telling than showing especially the closer you get to the end. You know that once you’ve introduced a sick kid in a hospital, it’s all over.

Suspension of belief is par for the course in this kinda thing, but it is really hard for me to buy that Logan somehow immediately knows all of the ins and outs of gay sex with zero experience.

I Think Our Son Is Gay 03 (2022, Square Enix) 5 stars

The warm and loving Aoyama house continues to run like clockwork. Mama Tomoko keeps her …

Love it love it love it

5 stars

Love the way this series is progressing and its display of good allyship. Tomoko loves her son and continues to be supportive as she can, confronting her husband’s homophobia in a way that doesn’t out Hiroki.

I Think Our Son Is Gay 02 (2021, Square Enix) 5 stars

A doting mother and her two beloved sons, one of whom she thinks is probably …

Very sweet and good

5 stars

Okura wrote in the afterword of this volume that he ended up coming out to his own mom while this manga was ongoing, and that’s just icing on the cake for how much I love this series.

The mother character never pushes her son to come out before he’s ready, and she tries to be supportive in ways that don’t let on what she has already intuited herself. I don’t know, as someone who has a lot of childhood emotional trauma from my own mom, there’s just something really healing I can get from something like this.