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Jul. 23rd, 2023 10:01 amExcited to report that Aster Glenn Gray's The Sleeping Soldier, a book I have read several times in draft form, is now available for preorder!
One of my favorite things about Aster's books is how a.) interested and b.) convincing she is at writing genuinely non-modern attitudes towards queer romance and sexuality. The Sleeping Soldier gives an incredible double dose of this, as the protagonist is a gay college student in 1965, who accidentally finds himself responsible for a Union soldier from 1865 who has just woken up from a hundred-year sleep and now also needs to enroll in college in 1965.
Russell, the soldier out of time, is charming, outgoing and adaptable; Caleb is careful, serious, and repressed. Both of them are desperately lonely in their own ways and for their own reasons, and both of them are aware of how important their friendship is, and how much it's a lifeline to the other person, while also hoping for more out of it than they're afraid the other can provide. A fraught position! Also occasionally the fairy-tale logic of Russell's Curse slides its way into the profoundly down-to-earth experience of College In The Sixties to cause disarray. (One particularly fun element is that the curse causes everyone to believe in its existence as part of the magic, which means that on the one hand there's no need to pretend that Russell is just a normal student, and on the other hand means that Russell is constantly fending off both positive and negative attention from other students who want to come introduce Modern Life to their new classmate Surprise 1860s Guy ....)
1865 and 1965 are wildly different countries to each other, and both of them foreign lands to us reading in 2023. Caleb and Russell care about each other enormously and both want the other to be happy -- this is never in doubt -- and spend the whole book trying to understand each other (and themselves!) from their very distinct positions and perspectives as they figure out whether it's possible or fair to ask the other person to love them in the way that they want. When they fail, it feels inevitable, but when they succeed, it's a genuine and satisfying triumph. I love all of Aster's books and I am also of course biased but I do think this is one of her best, and I'm very excited for other people to get to read it too!
One of my favorite things about Aster's books is how a.) interested and b.) convincing she is at writing genuinely non-modern attitudes towards queer romance and sexuality. The Sleeping Soldier gives an incredible double dose of this, as the protagonist is a gay college student in 1965, who accidentally finds himself responsible for a Union soldier from 1865 who has just woken up from a hundred-year sleep and now also needs to enroll in college in 1965.
Russell, the soldier out of time, is charming, outgoing and adaptable; Caleb is careful, serious, and repressed. Both of them are desperately lonely in their own ways and for their own reasons, and both of them are aware of how important their friendship is, and how much it's a lifeline to the other person, while also hoping for more out of it than they're afraid the other can provide. A fraught position! Also occasionally the fairy-tale logic of Russell's Curse slides its way into the profoundly down-to-earth experience of College In The Sixties to cause disarray. (One particularly fun element is that the curse causes everyone to believe in its existence as part of the magic, which means that on the one hand there's no need to pretend that Russell is just a normal student, and on the other hand means that Russell is constantly fending off both positive and negative attention from other students who want to come introduce Modern Life to their new classmate Surprise 1860s Guy ....)
1865 and 1965 are wildly different countries to each other, and both of them foreign lands to us reading in 2023. Caleb and Russell care about each other enormously and both want the other to be happy -- this is never in doubt -- and spend the whole book trying to understand each other (and themselves!) from their very distinct positions and perspectives as they figure out whether it's possible or fair to ask the other person to love them in the way that they want. When they fail, it feels inevitable, but when they succeed, it's a genuine and satisfying triumph. I love all of Aster's books and I am also of course biased but I do think this is one of her best, and I'm very excited for other people to get to read it too!
