Moggie finished reading We Could Be Heroes by P. J. Ellis
I read this book for the Queer Romance Club on Mastodon, because this month's main selection wasn't available where I live. I thought I was going to hate this when I first started to read it. It's about a closeted movie star who plays a superhero; he basically doesn't have a social life outside of coworkers due to a strict morality clause in his contract. It is very contemporary, filled with pop culture references. (All of this is stuff I have zero interest in.)
The book is really too preachy. It feels like the characters exist to support the sociopolitical commentary, rather than the sociopolitical realities underpinning the characters' lives and motivations. The romance part of it is ok, nothing special; the main feature of it is the movie star's gradual realization that he wants to come out publicly.
But there's a subplot, and that was the thing that made …
I read this book for the Queer Romance Club on Mastodon, because this month's main selection wasn't available where I live. I thought I was going to hate this when I first started to read it. It's about a closeted movie star who plays a superhero; he basically doesn't have a social life outside of coworkers due to a strict morality clause in his contract. It is very contemporary, filled with pop culture references. (All of this is stuff I have zero interest in.)
The book is really too preachy. It feels like the characters exist to support the sociopolitical commentary, rather than the sociopolitical realities underpinning the characters' lives and motivations. The romance part of it is ok, nothing special; the main feature of it is the movie star's gradual realization that he wants to come out publicly.
But there's a subplot, and that was the thing that made the book worth reading. The superhero story is based on a series of comic books written in the 1950s. There's rumored to be a finale to that series that was never published. The original series was attributed to the magazine owner who published it, but we see the story of the real authors, a married couple. The wife wrote the stories under a pen name, the husband was the illustrator. They were good friends, but they were married to each other mainly to conceal the fact that both were queer. What happens to them as a consequence of that would have made a more interesting book on its own.
If I say how that ended, it will be a pretty big spoiler.