review: mark alders - mama's heart [glbt]

[piranha]

i bought this as m/m, but it isn't really. i still view m/m as primarily erotica, and while this has some sex, it's not particularly erotic. i am trying to be fair to it even though it wasn't what i expected, especially not coming from extasy books, and described on the author's site as "sizzling and action packed" -- i guess he was being sarcastic, but not knowing him it just felt seriously misleading.

so that's what it is not. what is it then? it's an quiet little story about a boy's coming of age and growing up, with a wee bit of what could be seen as paranormal from his loving mother. but it's not a real coming of age story either, because it feels too light, too short; i remained at too much of a distance from the main character to feel his anguish. it's got more of a vignette feel even though it covers a much greater time span than a vignette usually does. it is well-written, and there was definitely an attraction there for me. i liked the depiction of both the mother and the father, and especially the quiet interplay between the mother and the main character. i sort of enjoyed it overall, but i'm unlikely to reread it.

oh, and warning: character death. it didn't hit me particularly hard because i stayed remote from the characters, looking into their lives from the frame of the vignette, but still.

Comments

[alex_beecroft]

Thanks for the review! It sounds like it wouldn't be my thing either. I tend to be looking for big 'real novel' type novels in the m/m genre rather than erotica, so the lack of sex wouldn't bother me, but the too light and too short would.

[piranha]

yeah, i am hanging sort of in between -- sometimes i want to read big, meaty novels (with no more sex than the characters would normally be having), and sometimes i want to read, well, wank material. m/m started out being that wank material for me, and has since been changing.

i think it's annoying that really good novels have to cower in genreville instead of being marketed as LGBT romances, and i feel it's unfair to readers to sell something as erotica when it doesn't even have as much explicit sex in it as a harlequin. so i am a little on the outs with m/m now; it seems it's in constant flux.

and i could make points about how this all is sexist, but it's really too early in the day for me to start ranting about women being relegated to genreville, of course, and then i'd get the lambda awards stuck in my craw, and...

i'm stopping now. :)

[alex_beecroft]

I've found that I've become pretty saturated with m/m as erotica, and I largely don't find it all that sexy any more - which is an enormous change for me. I suppose I see the growth of the genre into other areas as a good thing, and I very much agree that labeling something as erotica just because it's m/m is objectionable in lots of ways as well as being disappointing for the reader.

LOL! Yes, the Lambda awards thing was an eyeopener. RWA to the left of me, LLA to the right, into the valley of obscurity rode the female writers of m/m fiction :)

[piranha]

i don't know if i'll ever get tired of m/m erotica while my libido is active (it shuts down for years at a time, and then i don't care about any erotica). it's much more satisfying for me than non-m/m.

it's probably time for m/m to have its own awards, and a nice variety thereof, for the literary works as well as the hot-n-smexy ones.

as somebody who loves literary fiction, i find the general disdain for genre fiction superficial and unfair. there are fantastic literary works hidden in various genres, and it's a pity that snobbery wins out over actual appreciation of quality.

[alex_beecroft]

Well there are now elisa_rolle's Rainbow awards, which she put together in record time and has managed to get some impressive judges for. And I think that the RWA Rainbow Writers chapter are thinking of doing their own too.

I agree with you about the artificial distinction between literary and genre fiction. I'm an out and out genre fan (whether that's SF/F, Mystery, Age of Sail or Romance) and don't tend to read literary fiction, and the idea that there's something lesser about someone like Ursula LeGuin because she writes genre is a bit laughable to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey, thanks for the review.

It's always interesting to see what other people think of my writing, good or bad.

I hope you give some of my other stories a go. Then again, maybe they may not be what you're looking for either. I don't mean to mislead in anything I write, so sorry you felt that way.

*hugs*

Mark.

[piranha]

hey mark!

i don't know whether you'll come back here, but i am wondering why you called it "sizzling and action-packed". i would have liked it better if i hadn't had that expectation.

yes, i wil definitely try your other stories, because the writing was competent, and one strike doesn't usually put me off if it was just a mismatch.