*de-lurks* I hope no one minds me bumping an old thread, lol.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Synergi
The Surrogate by Ann Somerville,
I bought it on Amazon and it comes with the sequel attached at no extra charges. This is a big book.. I think about 100 thousand words for the two books together. I'm still reading the second book but the first one was excellent. There is a rape of one of the major characters..(but not by the other main characters).. I don't want to give it away, but there was no mindless sex in the book. There was only sex when it made sense and moved the story along. It was all story and character driven and a breath of fresh air. I can't tell you how sick I get of seeing a sex scene every other page, as if it is filler, which it probably is! The blight of the character really move you.
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I tried this one based off this rec and... kind of disliked it, honestly. And its sequel. :/
Don't get me wrong, the first 2/3 or so of the first book was good! But right around when Big Plot Stuff Happened it just fell flat to me. It was like the author got bored and hit the fast forward button. And then the second book... meh. It didn't even have the interesting setup of the first, IMO.
Just an opinion, though.
As for recs:
A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
The Tempering of Men by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Amazon links for the sake of description. My own is clumsier: the setting is sort of... Valdemar horses / Pern dragons done, IMO, correctly. The main character of the first book isn't precisely gay, but it's a huge theme in the books (as the wolfcarls tend to be gay).
After reading those, I went and looked up more by Monette and stumbled across this other series:
Melusine,
The Virtu,
The Mirador, and
Corambis.
The setting is interesting, although again... one of the main characters is straight, the other just-as-main character is markedly not. I really dig both Mildmay and Felix, which is a switch for me since I usually only end up liking one main character of a book enough to really remark on. Several of the side characters are damn neat, too, but I can't say much more about them without spoiling stuff.
Note that all of those recs come with some heavy adult warnings. There's no smut
for the sake of smut, but it's involved pretty deep in the plot of all of those, and they definitely don't shy away from darker subject matter therein. Which I dig, because it's used to further the story and doesn't feel cheep to me, but I know not everyone handles it well.