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When Viola learns of Gracewood's distress, she and her sister-in-law, the Lady Marleigh, decide to intervene. Viola knows she's playing with fire—how long can she hide her very-much-alive presence from her oldest friend?—but the choice is a done deal. She is going to help Gracewood no matter the cost. Alexis Hall is giving us a historical romance with a trans heroine??? If god hates the gays WHY DO WE KEEP WINNING I was excited to read a story about a trans woman in a historical romance setting. They’re usually my favorites. They say they don’t want to book to be about her being trans but it kind of is. It does focus a lot about who she is and how she came to be. It doesn’t consume the book but it’s enough that I would have preferred less. The writing is witty, and [the] chemistry is irresistible, but it's Hall's insights about trust and self-worth that set the story apart. This is a triumph' - Publishers Weekly on Boyfriend Material
This is a love story that is so tender and beautiful and so so palpable. The epilogue was wonderful and beautiful. I've used beautiful a lot, I know, but I can't think how else to explain how this story is so precious in its entirety. The Rt Hon (the) Lord/Lady Smith Lord President of the Court of Session/Lord Justice General of ScotlandThe relationship between Gracewood and his little sister Miranda makes me think of Darcy & Georgiana in a sweet way. If Georgiana was a wee bit more adventurous, and turned out to be potentially bi. She was also a great character to help question the societal norms of the time period. A judge's first name only forms part of their judicial style if, at the time of their appointment, there is a senior judge with the same or a similar surname. Thus, if there is a "Mr Justice Smith", subsequent judges will be "Mr Justice John Smith", "Mrs Justice Mary Smith", etc. High Court Judges and above who are King's Counsel do not use the post-nominal letters following appointment or after retirement. This feels like a nonanswer but sort of both? The answer I usually give to the plotter versus pantser question is that it fails to take into account that pretty much all books go through multiple drafts and you need to use different techniques at different parts of the process. Like, I’ll usually have an outline for the first draft, but then the first draft is itself kind of the outline for the second draft. And there have been books that have looked, in their final form, quite similar to how they looked when they started, but there are others that are almost unrecognizable. So I guess I’m organized when I need to be organized and chaotic when I need to be chaotic. To be fair, I’m sometimes also chaotic when I need to be organized.
I love you with the unfading flame of my friendship. With every drop of ardour in my blood. I love you with my soul, as some reserve their faith for absent gods. I love you as I believe in what is right and hope for what is good. I love you with everything I am and ever was— and if you will only let me, with every day that comes, and every self that I could ever be.” The rough seam between the life she used to live and the life she lived now" Here is where we need the perspective of a trans woman. For Viola though, there is a clear line of demarcation between the life she lived before presumed dead in the war and the authentic life she lives now. And it's her interaction with Gracewood, who knew her before and after transition, that forces her confront the place where her "old life" and her "new life" intersect. In the book, AJH calls this intersection a "rough seam". I would like to know how this - the description of a demarcation and the reference to a "rough seam" weaving the two lives together - lands with trans women readers. The Duke of Gracewood is in mourning for his lost best friend. He blames himself for the loss, the war, and for his disability returning from the warfront. Gracewood is slipping into an opium dependency and a depression with no light in sight. Things are dire.I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with writing historical fiction like A Knight’s Tale instead of The Lion in Winter.” There's often resistance among fans of historical fiction...to writing stories about LGBTQ+ people that don't just consist of wall-to-wall bigotry and misery, on the basis that it's "historically inaccurate." So two questions: Firstly, is it, in fact, historically inaccurate? Secondly, does it matter? Is the purpose of historical fiction only ever to imagine historical societies as they were (or as we are in the habit of imagining that they were)?
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