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Mar. 20th, 2021 01:04 pmOne of the best things about the past year for me, hands down, has been getting to see Penny Aimes' debut romance For the Love of April French grow from the (already fantastic) first draft that arrived in my inbox last April to a book that is going to be on shelves! in bookstores!! this August!!!
So yes, I have read many drafts of this book and am not in any way impartial, but now it is officially up for pre-order and has a cover and a release date and I get to rave about it in public.
For the Love of April French is both by and about a trans woman and that fact is deeply central to the book: when it begins, April has been living as herself for a few years now, and has found a job that covers her basic healthcare needs, and a reasonably supportive community with plenty of opportunities for short-term flings at her local Austin kink club, and has, as a result, settled into a kind of stasis where everything is perfectly fine and acceptable and so much better than it was before that the idea of breaking the perfectly acceptable holding pattern she's in by reaching for anything more -- like actual long-term partnership and commitment! -- seems too risky to even contemplate.
This of course becomes the central conflict of the novel when April meets Dennis, who's new in town, and just returning to the kink scene after a very bad breakup, and is more or less convinced after a spectacular one-night stand that April is The One. April, on the other hand, is equally convinced that as soon as rich, handsome, cis Dennis starts meeting more people he's going to want to move on to the next best thing -- so in the meantime they hit an uneasy balance of almost-relationship that means something quite different to both of them, and figure out whether they can learn to trust each other and themselves enough to build their connection out from a short-term game into something that can last.
I am not super familiar with the kink scene either in reality or in fiction but the way it's written in this book really works for me to show who April and Dennis are and how they click both inside and outside of the roles and personas that originally bring them together. The book as a whole is just full of incredibly rich character work that builds the kind of romance where falling in love with each other is sort of a gateway to remembering how to fall in love with themselves and build the kind of lives they want around them, and it's really good and I am deeply excited for Penny to write a hundred of them so I would definitely like to encourage people to preorder this one! (April is part of an all-transfem D&D group ... so many romance novel heroines in potentia .... >:D)
So yes, I have read many drafts of this book and am not in any way impartial, but now it is officially up for pre-order and has a cover and a release date and I get to rave about it in public.
For the Love of April French is both by and about a trans woman and that fact is deeply central to the book: when it begins, April has been living as herself for a few years now, and has found a job that covers her basic healthcare needs, and a reasonably supportive community with plenty of opportunities for short-term flings at her local Austin kink club, and has, as a result, settled into a kind of stasis where everything is perfectly fine and acceptable and so much better than it was before that the idea of breaking the perfectly acceptable holding pattern she's in by reaching for anything more -- like actual long-term partnership and commitment! -- seems too risky to even contemplate.
This of course becomes the central conflict of the novel when April meets Dennis, who's new in town, and just returning to the kink scene after a very bad breakup, and is more or less convinced after a spectacular one-night stand that April is The One. April, on the other hand, is equally convinced that as soon as rich, handsome, cis Dennis starts meeting more people he's going to want to move on to the next best thing -- so in the meantime they hit an uneasy balance of almost-relationship that means something quite different to both of them, and figure out whether they can learn to trust each other and themselves enough to build their connection out from a short-term game into something that can last.
I am not super familiar with the kink scene either in reality or in fiction but the way it's written in this book really works for me to show who April and Dennis are and how they click both inside and outside of the roles and personas that originally bring them together. The book as a whole is just full of incredibly rich character work that builds the kind of romance where falling in love with each other is sort of a gateway to remembering how to fall in love with themselves and build the kind of lives they want around them, and it's really good and I am deeply excited for Penny to write a hundred of them so I would definitely like to encourage people to preorder this one! (April is part of an all-transfem D&D group ... so many romance novel heroines in potentia .... >:D)
