Third in the Tor.com collection of 4 queer-authored novellas, I bounced hard off this story. Please note that, unusually for me, this review will include spoilers for the entire story.

Queer Black author Kai Ashante Wilson’s Hugo, Nebula, Locus and WFA-nominated novella A Taste of Honey sees a romance between 2 young men, one a 22yo soldier visiting from abroad, where queerness is accepted and understood and one a 17yo minor royal from a culture where homosexuality is not discussed at all — Aqib is not even aware of the concept until he’s told that Lucrio’s catcalls are the result of sexual interest.

Even ignoring the problematic beginnings of a relationship between a very naïve teenager and a more-confident, more-experienced young-adult, even ignoring that Lucrio persuades Aqib to run away with him after a whirlwind 10-day “fleet week” style romance (when 1 participant was unaware of the concept of homosexuality beforehand), the story then goes on to see Aqib’s attempt to flee be thwarted by his family, before he is brainwashed to forget the romance (!!), pushed into a straight marriage, fathering an amazing daughter, abandoned by his wife who goes to do magic-science with the gods, and eventually dying wondering about the blurry gap in his memory. That bulk of the story is literal erasure and I found the story to be really hard-going. It is very much not the queer joy I was looking for.

And then, at the very end, we discover this was all Aqib learning from an Oracle what might have been had he never left Olorum with Lucrio. The main portion of the book is a fucking dream. The payoff is joyful and the novel is well written, with Wilson conjuring a rich and detailed world but, for me at least, it didn’t compensate for the unremitting awfulness and mindwiping erasure of the main plot. It was clever and an interesting look at that world but, aside from the sense of being cheated by having Bobby walk out of the shower, the story dragged me for miles through thorns only to tell me that everything’s ok, you just imagined the pain.

There are lots of positive reviews on Goodreads, with an average of 3·84 stars out of 5. But I hated it. I’m genuinely still angry about it, nearly 6 months after reading it.

CN: homophobia, brainwashing, gaslighting, erasure, probably more