skygiants | Entries tagged with aster glenn gray

When I say that reading Aster Glenn Gray's Diary of a Cranky Bookworm feels like spending several delightful hours with an old friend, this is just about the least surprising statement in the world I could possibly make, because:

a.) Aster is indeed a longtime friend, and also
b.) both the book and Sage-as-protagonist are drawing explicit inspiration from many other teen-girl-writer bildungsromans (I Capture the Castle, the Montmaray trilogy, the collected oeuvre of LM Montgomery, etc.) that are beloved old friends to me, and also
c.) every character and interpersonal dynamic in this book does indeed feel like an exact portrait of someone I either was or knew in high school, with pitch-perfect and sometimes painful accuracy

Sage Perrault, Our Heroine, is an imaginative, judgmental misanthrope from a small town in Minnesota who was fortunate enough to form a small tight friends group in elementary school who also proved themselves worthy of her affection by being precocious readers:

- Georgie, Sage's best friend since kindergarten, when her mother (terrified of Sage becoming a miserable loner like Gay Cousin Rachel who Never Comes Home For Christmas) seized on the other precocious reader in class and started arranging playdates with feverish speed. Sensible, driven, raised by an overprotective mom who never got out of town and is thus double determined to Get Out Of Town. Friends outside of Sage: church youth group
- Arielle, the dramatic friend, with inattentive divorced parents, a moderate case of main character syndrome, and a rich life of the imagination often expressed through implausible lies about her past. Passionate in her enthusiasms but will not stop obnoxiously sending you fanfiction that you do not care about. Friends outside of Sage: drama club
- Hilary, the chillest friend; always delighted to run with any bit that she's given and make it more fun and funny, but holds her own emotional cards close to the chest. Has a very nice boyfriend and never talks about him. Wonderful to hang out with at any time but is planning for pre-med so will almost certainly be far too busy to stay in close touch with anyone when they scatter. Friends outside of Sage: almost the entire school, everyone loves Hilary because she's a delight, and the fact that she chooses to eat lunch with Sage and Hilary and Arielle is frankly a great compliment to all of them

This has left Sage peacefully free to hold onto grudges also formed in elementary school, continue happily hating the kids in her class that she has hated since they were all eight, and avoid going through the effort of speaking to anybody else. Unfortunately, it's senior year! College is looming, and with it new tensions and unpleasant questions, such as:

- can being a precocious reader really continue as the be-all and end-all of Sage's perception of her own self-worth? and how can she write a college essay about it?
- how much of what Arielle's told them all about her plans for college is normal bad ideas, and how much is outright lies, and how much is in fact a cry for help?
- how can Sage break it to beloved best friend Georgie that she doesn't want to go to the U [University of Minnesota Twin Cities], which is the ultimate apex of Georgie's ambitions, and instead kind of wants to attend a small liberal arts college somewhere in the middle of nowhere?
- but if she doesn't go to college with Georgie, will she ever successfully speak to another human being?
- and on that topic, is it possible that a Longtime Beautiful Enemy is in fact a human being worth talking to, to despite the fact that she's bad at spelling and was mean in middle school?

Sage, early on: Arielle always tries to blow on whatever flickering embers of bisexuality she finds within herself, which I admire. I'd be far more inclined to play Whack-A-Mole. And obviously part of the book is also that Sage has to stop playing Whack-A-Mole, but the big emotional question of the Longtime Beautiful Enemy subplot is less "will they kiss" [though they do, eventually] than "can Sage build an emotional connection with a new person, at the same time as she's facing fundamental shifts in all her other most important relationships?" At its heart this is a book about friendship in all its different shapes, the different kinds of ties you build with different people and the way those change with you as you grow.

And also, of course, about being judgmental about books and films and art. There's a whole other conversation that I feel like I've been coincidentally having in various different contexts about the purpose of the literary cross-reference in this sort of text; I am definitely one of the people for whom there's a profound self-indulgent pleasure in watching characters react to another work [Kage Baker's infamous Cyborgs Watch D.W. Griffith scene my beloved; what a bad idea to spend a whole chapter on it and what a delight it was for me personally] as long as I don't believe that the author believes that all right-thinking people should agree with the character's opinions. Fortunately I am in no danger of this with Sage. Sage has a LOT of opinions about books and films and art, and I disagree with many of them but so do many of Sage's friends; this, too, is one of the important shapes of friendship.

Excited 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!

I am so extremely excited about the release of Aster Glenn Gray's Arthurian novella A Garter as a Lesser Gift! Obviously I am extremely excited for any of Aster's releases but this one in particular I have been Deeply Involved in the creation of (mostly by hissing 'yessssssss do it do it' like Palpatine from the sidelines any time Aster mentioned it) and so in this case my excitement level is more or less off the charts.

This book is a Gawain and the Green Knight riff set during WWII, in which Gawain and the rest of the Round Table are in the RAF, with all the attendant imminent danger and intense homosocial bonding and highly specific cultural norms about honor and ethical behavior. Meanwhile, the Green Knight of course remains a mysterious being who enjoys coming into parties and challenging people to murderous unknowable games about the fear of death, and then setting them up to encounter more romantical but equally unknowable games that also end up being about the fear of death!

Some things I love about A Garter as a Lesser Gift, in no particular order:

- the individual yet immediately recognizable Round Table characterizations
- the way Gawain & the narrative lean on & play in/with/around Rules and Games to explore various types of desire (to be clear this is not an explicit/erotic read but there's a Lot of yearning)
- the intensely ambiguous nature of the Green Knight -- who/what is he? is he immortal? has all this happened before? is this the second or fifty or twentieth Gawain? couldn't tell you but ( spoilers if you're not familiar with the outline of the original story )
- the extremely good yet thematic jokes about midcentury mystery novels
- the lovingly described scones that literally made me get up and start baking at midnight halfway through my first read

Anyway as enthusiastic as I am about the book in and of itself, I also selfishly wish it to sell really well so Aster feels even more compelled to write the sequel about RAF Arthur/Lancelot/Gwen.

One of the many things that Aster Glenn Gray is consistently fantastic at, when writing historical queer romance, is immersing herself and the reader in characters whose cultural and contextual views simply don't map to those of the present; her latest Tramps and Vagabonds is another simply spectacular example of this.

In this one, it's the Great Depression, and twenty-year-old orphan protagonist James has been riding the rails for years out of necessity. After an unusually stable summer at a Civilian Conservation Corps, he sets off again with his new friend Timothy, who asks if James can take him along with him on the road for a while -- ostensibly to ease the stress on his struggling family, but in fact, as it rapidly becomes clear to the reader, because Timothy not only has a huge crush on James, but also already knows and recognizes himself as queer, and is hoping the outsider society of the road will provide a way to live a kind of life and form a kind of relationship that's simply not possible at home.

Unfortunately for Timothy, it turns out that the road has its own, different but equally set rules about sexuality, and James is an expert on survival in every respect: he's more than happy to fool around with his buddy Tim, but he also takes it as his responsibility to take him under his wing and teach him the ropes, and not following the rules that keep you respectable in the eyes of other tramps is one of many, many ways to die on the road.

Which, for the record, is another thing that Aster is really and consistently good at: this book, like many of her others but especially I think The Larks Still Bravely Singing, is really good at balancing extremely charming slice-of-life relationship-building with largely internal tension against a matter-of-fact presentation of relatively grim realities. Timothy and James often have quite a lovely time on the road -- they ride Ferris wheels and camp out under the stars and talk about books and their dreams -- and, also, they frequently go hungry, and get beaten up by cops, and face choices about transactional sex, and are shadowed every day by the awareness that in many ways their life is simply unsustainable; it's absolutely not an unrelenting misery-bucket but it's also not sugar-coated either, and the end result is a story that feels really satisfying and real.

After my leisurely read through The Hands of the Emperor, I zoomed through Aster Glenn Gray's newest romance, The Larks Still Bravely Singing, in one delightful afternoon.

The protagonists of this one, David and Robert, first met at boarding school, during which time Robert decided not to pursue his crush on slightly-younger David out of a lofty sense of nobility and self-sacrifice. When the book begins, they're meeting again in the recovery ward after both have been invalided out of World War I. Robert's missing a leg and David's down an arm, but the physical war wounds matter less than the internal trauma both of them have taken, and the way neither of them can quite recognize themselves anymore as the people they used to be.

As with most of Aster Glenn Gray's romance, the tension and conflicts between the characters are entirely internal and really carefully drawn out of the characters' self-perceptions, preconceived ideas and fears, and hooking up -- even falling in love -- doesn't magically fix any of that. The way in which they're both frequently deeply frustrated with each other, and also simultaneously so terrified of failing each other that the temptation to simply Be What The Other Person Needs becomes a major problem in and of itself, is extremely well portrayed and feels deeply realistic. I love that we see them in several stages of the relationship and in all of them they're still figuring out what they need from each other and what they need from themselves, and that those things are inevitably going to be different.

The other thing that really works for me about the shape of the book is the way that David and Robert relate to each other is so shaped by their first meeting in boarding school and the schoolboy norms they've both internalized -- though the war and their trauma has pushed them in some ways into an early adulthood, in other ways they're still very much the kids they were, which is always one of the things that gets me the most about World War I! Anyway. Extremely extremely good book, and now thanks to the characters being nerds about it I also really want to go reread a bunch of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Given 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. ( Broad spoiler for the back half )

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.

Aster Glenn Gray's new spy romance is up for preorder now, which reminded me that I had not gotten around to writing up her latest, The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball!

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is quite different from the other Aster Glenn Gray books I've read -- it's a really charming kid's fantasy along the lines of Edward Eager or Anne Lindbergh, of the genre "lonely child makes friend via magic, the limits of which imperil the friendship." Eleven-year-old Piper has just moved to a new town with her older sister Angela and their newly-widowed, depressed father when she receives a mysterious note from someone she doesn't know, apologizing for something that hasn't happened to her yet.

The note turns out to come from Rosie, the girl who lived in the house fifty-ish years ago, who has apparently been having time-travel encounters with Piper for years -- always when Piper is aged eleven. Over the course of the next few months (in Piper-time), Rosie and Piper's friendship strengthens even as everything else in Piper's life feels like it's crumbling. But the more important Rosie becomes to Piper, the more worried Piper starts to get about what's going to happen when she hits her twelfth birthday ....

Aster Glenn Gray is really good at writing believable, complex kid-friendships; magic brings Rosie and Piper together, but what keeps them together is a shared sense of imagination and the dramatic, the fact that they're both kids who are willing and eager to lean into the magic and try and figure out its rules. I also love Piper's relationship with Angela, who is trying extremely hard to balance "making new friends and figure out own life in new place" with "be a good older sister to a little sister who's really struggling" and mostly but not always doing an endearingly good job of it, which is deeply important but still not quite enough to be everything that Piper needs.

This could also very easily be the kind of story that ends in a melancholic fashion, with the fading-away of magic, and I'm very glad to report that's not the case! I would have loved this book when I was twelve and I found it extremely delightful to read now, too.

Thoughtfully, Aster Glenn Gray has released a new and incredibly charming threesome novella right at a time when devouring a charming novella in a night was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do!

The Threefold Tie begins at the moment when Civil War vet-turned-bohemian-artist Jack realizes that he has inconveniently fallen in love with his war buddy Everett's wife Sophie. This is especially awkward given that Everett is also his ex for whom he may still have some of the feelings! But obviously one does not bang a married man, and also, as a corollary, one does not bang his wife either, so clearly the only choice is to stoically repress all one's feelings, and/or flee in terror!

Fortunately or unfortunately for Jack, both Everett and Sophie are warm, gregarious, impulsive people who like to both talk about and act on their feelings, so strategy: AVOID! is probably not going to work out so well ...

Threesomes, in my mostly-limited-to-Yuletide experience, are much trickier to write than a two-person romance (so much complicated feelings geometry!) and this book not only does it well but does several things I really like: first of all, it gives all three characters a full POV section, so we get to see why all of them made the (sometimes unfortunate) choices that they did in their respective relationships to date, and what mistaken assumptions have been made about them by the others that aren't borne out from within their interiority; second, it draws all three of them very clearly as from different backgrounds, with different life experiences that color the way they're able to approach the novel concept of 'solve the love triangle with polyamory'; third, it grounds them fully in the complexities of a historical period that has many more interesting ideas about marriage and relationships than are often portrayed in books that take it for granted that literally everyone in the nineteenth century subscribed to exactly the same newsletters and had exactly the same hangups. (

sophia_sol has also pointed out the fun of getting friends-to-lovers, exes-to-lovers, and established marrieds all as part of the romance arc at once.)

For the record, although the novella takes place during the Reconstruction era, it doesn't really engage much with the broader and heavier themes of the Civil War and its aftermath; it's a very cozy, personal book about three people navigating their way to happiness, and as such I found it deeply soothing to read at this time.

My first book of 2020 was Aster Glenn Gray's The Wolf and the Girl, a novella that combines several of my favorite elements: historical revolutionaries, early cinema history, and plucky young women cursed by evil magic who make the best of their situation by developing their own vaudeville acts!

Masha, the book's protagonist, is a nice Russian peasant lass living with her elderly and vaguely magical grandmother; Raisa, the deuteragonist, is Masha's school friend who ran off to join the anarchists! Unfortunately, as a result of some bad revolutionary decisions involving peer pressure and the devil, Raisa has returned home as a transformed wolf, with an evil sorceress in hot pursuit.

The first half of the book focuses on Raisa, Masha, and Masha's grandmother; the second is Raisa and Masha's adventures on the run. The silent cinema bits in the back half were especially fun for me because a.) I got the rec for The Girl From God's Country from the author and it was really enjoyable to see the bits that influenced and b.) I just really dig early cinema stuff!, but the whole novella is extremely charming -- and I've seen so, so, so many Red Riding Hood takes that are just About Sexuality, full stop, that it's so nice to be reminded that there are, in fact, other ways to take the story; going into the woods and coming of age can mean learning how to support your friends! or stand up to evil possibly-demonic sorceresses! or come into your own as a silent film ingenue!

My love of Briarley turned Aster Glenn Gray's works into an instant buy for me, so I was extremely pleased when her new novella Ashlin & Olivia turned up just in time to get me through my last plane flight of May!

In junior high, Ashlin moved to Olivia's school, where the two immediately struck up the kind of obsessive preteen friendship that sometimes means ignoring all your other friends and interests in order to dive deep down into this particular shared world. Unsurprisingly, this eventually ended in Drama and Friendship Disaster. (Not, like, Beautiful Creatures level drama, this is not that kind of book, but the kind of drama that for sure feels extremely intense and terrible when you are twelve.)

Now Olivia has bumped into Ashlin again on a week-long art study trip to Florence, which leads to a couple of important realizations:

- maybe all the things she had defined as Definitely Ashlin's Fault as a tiny angry junior high schooler were actually ... perhaps .... both their faults?
- Olivia is still extremely gay for Ashlin

It's a quiet and thoughtful story, not particularly interested in standard romance beats but very deeply interested in the joys and balances of extremely intense relationships -- how to make space for overwhelming feelings in your life without losing the rest of it and vice versa, how to learn from and avoid past mistakes. And the mistakes are VERY RELATABLE; a lot of the juggling-social-dynamics scenes in particular, both in the past and the present, made me had to put down the e-reader for a second in an 'oh god too real' sort of way.

Without spoilers, some of those questions remain in the ending, but that's OK -- they're big questions and I really like the space this novella provides its protagonists for figuring them out.

I was saving Aster Glenn Gray's Briarley and I'm so glad I did; it was a perfect comfort read for a multi-city work trip and is also, coincidentally, my new favorite version of Beauty and the Beast.

This particular variant on the story is set during WWII, and begins when a nice country parson stops at a Mysterious Villa on his way home to grab a rose for his on-leave WAAF daughter.

...and then, when an enormous beast (in this case a dragon) appears to demand that he send his daughter to the castle in exchange for his liberty, flat refuses, because what? no?? what kind of father???

The dragon accedes, with bad grace; however, upon meeting the household's invisible servants and learning about the imminent B&tB Curse Deadline, our hero decides that it is his responsibility to stay and at least see what he might be able to do to help the household with this unfortunate situation. For example: rational curse interpretation! Who said love and be loved had to refer to a young woman? Has the dragon considered getting a puppy?

(He has not, but he will!)

The book's charm lies not just in its hero (who is indeed vastly endearing, just a tremendous sweetheart) but also in the sense of place and time: the first sign that Something Is Very Weird in the household is the giant groaning table that's never heard of rationing; the parson keeps wistfully thinking about how many refugees or wounded soldiers the cursed household could take in; when the parson's daughter valiantly DOES come to trade herself for her father everyone is like "YOU CANNOT, YOU ARE A WAAF, THAT WOULD BE DESERTION." And, of course, the parson's own experience with trauma and recovery comes out of his time serving in WWI.

It's a really lovely little book and I recommend it highly, I may end up rereading it on my plane home!