(no subject)
Sep. 20th, 2020 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsGiven the year it's been I've actually read surprisingly few romance novels, which is going to give it less heft than I mean when I say that Aster Glenn Gray's Honeytrap is I think the best romance I've read this year. It's just very good!
Honeytrap follows Daniel and Gennady, an FBI agent and a Soviet agent, who are assigned to work together on a mission to find a lone gunman who fired a relatively useless shot at Khrushchev on his tour through the United States. No one actually expects them to succeed on this, but both sides see it as a potentially useful opportunity -- Gennady's sleazy boss would like Gennady to gather blackmail material on Daniel, including honeytrapping him if at all possible, and Daniel's bosses want him to convince Gennady to defect.
... and in the meantime, Gennady and Daniel get to take a really nice road trip! They talk about books and eat at diners and inevitably have to share motel rooms with only one bed and fall a certain amount in love, because that's often the kind of thing that happens when you spend quite a lot of time with someone -- but life is complicated, and people's lives take different directions, and falling a certain amount in love with someone you can't quite trust on a road trip across the country is a large chunk of but in no way the end of this love story, which spans thirty years and a whole lot of Gennady and Daniel's lives.
The thing I love most about this book is the length and complexity of the relationship dynamics -- it's in no way Unwise Lust At First Sight, you get to see these people growing to like and (perhaps unwisely) trust each other on the page, and the strength and nature of their feelings is often unequal at different times as they hit different points in their lives. In particular, I really, really liked the cross-section of Daniel's later marriage to Elizabeth, and how that's warm and loving and inclusive of his romance with Gennady, and still fails for unrelated reasons. This isn't a book about One True Love, it's about making the most of love in the places you can and do find it, and I love that! so much!! I also love how complex it is about queerness in 20th-century America and people's various messy and complicated attitudes about it -- Daniel's ex is as confidently gay as an FBI agent whose job depends on being closeted can be, but refuses to believe in Daniel's bisexuality; Daniel himself is horrified when he learns that the guy who kissed him and then beat him up in college is now out and proud and mentoring openly gay students, not because he doesn't believe he can change, but because he's encouraging these kids to ruin their lives by coming out -- and the way the timespan of the book allows these attitudes to shift and change over time.
I also extremely appreciate that this is also not the kind of book about a Romance Across the Iron Curtain where it's assumed that the happy ending will by default involve the character from the Soviet Union coming to golden America. It reminds me a bit of Crash Landing On You in the way that it validates and centers Gennady's relationship to the Soviet Union, and parallels it to Daniel's relationship with the States: ideology and propaganda and legitimate flaws abound on both sides, but your home is your home and the people you have there, and in order for the romance to succeed that needs to be balanced. It's really well done and really good, and also consistently surprised me in ways that I enjoyed! I did want a longer last section but that's mostly because I was enjoying the whole thing so much that I truly did not want it to end.
Honeytrap follows Daniel and Gennady, an FBI agent and a Soviet agent, who are assigned to work together on a mission to find a lone gunman who fired a relatively useless shot at Khrushchev on his tour through the United States. No one actually expects them to succeed on this, but both sides see it as a potentially useful opportunity -- Gennady's sleazy boss would like Gennady to gather blackmail material on Daniel, including honeytrapping him if at all possible, and Daniel's bosses want him to convince Gennady to defect.
... and in the meantime, Gennady and Daniel get to take a really nice road trip! They talk about books and eat at diners and inevitably have to share motel rooms with only one bed and fall a certain amount in love, because that's often the kind of thing that happens when you spend quite a lot of time with someone -- but life is complicated, and people's lives take different directions, and falling a certain amount in love with someone you can't quite trust on a road trip across the country is a large chunk of but in no way the end of this love story, which spans thirty years and a whole lot of Gennady and Daniel's lives.
The thing I love most about this book is the length and complexity of the relationship dynamics -- it's in no way Unwise Lust At First Sight, you get to see these people growing to like and (perhaps unwisely) trust each other on the page, and the strength and nature of their feelings is often unequal at different times as they hit different points in their lives. In particular, I really, really liked the cross-section of Daniel's later marriage to Elizabeth, and how that's warm and loving and inclusive of his romance with Gennady, and still fails for unrelated reasons. This isn't a book about One True Love, it's about making the most of love in the places you can and do find it, and I love that! so much!! I also love how complex it is about queerness in 20th-century America and people's various messy and complicated attitudes about it -- Daniel's ex is as confidently gay as an FBI agent whose job depends on being closeted can be, but refuses to believe in Daniel's bisexuality; Daniel himself is horrified when he learns that the guy who kissed him and then beat him up in college is now out and proud and mentoring openly gay students, not because he doesn't believe he can change, but because he's encouraging these kids to ruin their lives by coming out -- and the way the timespan of the book allows these attitudes to shift and change over time.
I also extremely appreciate that this is also not the kind of book about a Romance Across the Iron Curtain where it's assumed that the happy ending will by default involve the character from the Soviet Union coming to golden America. It reminds me a bit of Crash Landing On You in the way that it validates and centers Gennady's relationship to the Soviet Union, and parallels it to Daniel's relationship with the States: ideology and propaganda and legitimate flaws abound on both sides, but your home is your home and the people you have there, and in order for the romance to succeed that needs to be balanced. It's really well done and really good, and also consistently surprised me in ways that I enjoyed! I did want a longer last section but that's mostly because I was enjoying the whole thing so much that I truly did not want it to end.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 05:46 pm (UTC)omg I also loved Gennady's teasing and Iron Woobieness and general shield of grimness so muchno subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:36 am (UTC)(And Gennady was SO charming!)
no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 09:48 pm (UTC)That is attractive to me!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 10:21 pm (UTC)(vibrating with attention)
> It reminds me a bit of Crash Landing On You in the way that it validates and centers Gennady's relationship to the Soviet Union, and parallels it to Daniel's relationship with the States: ideology and propaganda and legitimate flaws abound on both sides, but your home is your home and the people you have there, and in order for the romance to succeed that needs to be balanced.
Okay, SOLD, this was overdetermined. Thanks!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 12:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-23 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 03:40 pm (UTC)