I Remember You, by H. L. Logan

[scioscribe]

Gloriously unrealistic soap opera-esque amnesia is one of my absolute favorite tropes. I Remember You runs with all the different levels of fun, angst, and mystery inherent to its premise and keeps things just a little bit more emotionally complex than it's required to, which made me very happy. The writing is sometimes a little clumsy and the resolution is somewhat rushed, but the overall experience is still very enjoyable.

Following one of fiction's more random head injuries, college senior Cara wakes up in a hospital with no memories of her life past prom night senior year of high school, where she wrapped up a disappointing dance by enjoying Good Omens out in her car and acting as designated driver. Now she's surrounded by people calling her "Care," a nickname she's always hated, she regularly drinks and skips class, she listens to hip-hop, she's friends with a huge group of girls who party and exercise and speak almost exclusively in drawling jokes, and she has no idea what's happened with her life. At least she has this super-hot girlfriend, Bibi, who's sitting by her bedside holding her hand. She always knew she'd come out in college--she'd already almost done it a few times in high school. Now if she can just make sense of the rest of the changes she's gone through...

Of course, the dueling POVs quickly tell us what we've already guessed: Bibi isn't Cara's girlfriend, just her close friend and roommate who is repeatedly reassuring herself that this physical contact "isn't gay." And Cara isn't out at all. That last part adds a bit of genuinely mournful wistfulness to the whole premise, as Cara's biggest disappointment upon realizing how much she's misunderstood is that somehow she still hasn't been confident enough to admit the identity she's always known to the people around her. The misunderstanding about Bibi is well-handled, too: when Bibi (obviously) decides to go along with Cara's presumption and starts finding herself genuinely attracted and attached, she knows she eventually has to admit the tangled circumstances, and Cara doesn't hate her for them, but she does, understandably enough, have trouble trusting her for a while.

I liked how Logan set up the mystery about Cara's personality changes. On the one hand, other characters often point out that it's not unusual for a high school-to-college transition to transform someone, so it's not like there's something sinister about Cara having changed: instead, the reader's unease with it all is rooted in how rapidly the change seems to have occurred. At one point, looking for clues about, at least, what she would have read and liked in the intervening years so she can revisit favorite books she doesn't remember, Cara consults her Goodreads account--only to find out that she hasn't updated it since that night at prom. (Mild spoiler: the mystery thankfully doesn't involve sexual assault in any way, and I appreciated Logan steering wide of that cliche.) There's also some fun with Cara's single recovered memory, where she finally flashes back to a family Christmas where her dad wasn't present, but has trouble figuring out if he really wasn't there or if she's just remembering a moment around the table when he happened to have gone to the bathroom. But they were serving lamb, and he hates lamb. A clue? And why is her older sister confiding ominous secrets to Bibi?

Most of all, I really liked how the dilemmas and the supporting cast were granted a good bit of complexity. Both Cara's parents and Bibi's are heavily flawed but still very human--they have trouble doing what's actually best for their daughters, but they clearly love them. There's no annoying geek superiority over "coolness": Cara really does like hip-hop when she starts listening to it and the raunchy party girl friends are ultimately supportive and the source of lasting attachments. Her emotional journey is about balancing her old self with the parts of her new life she actually likes and would freely choose, not about reclaiming some kind of authorially defined purity.

Also, the sex is pretty hot, and often both funny and emotionally rich. There's a great moment where Cara, who knows how high her own sex drive is, assumes that she and Bibi have basically been banging on every available surface in their apartment and she can't wait to get back to that. Bibi's step-by-step discovery of her own real sexual desires, and therefore of her sexual passion, is also well-done (and again, hot). The first spark of romantic interest between the two of them is a little forced, but both their chemistry and the working-out of their relationship is believable and compelling.

Overall, I Remember You strikes a good balance between fun tropes and valuable complexity and makes for an f/f New Adult romance that genuinely captures the weird, unstable-identity aspects of becoming the person you really are/really want to be.

Wild Beauty, by Anna Marie McLemore

[mllelaurel]

The Nomeolvides women carry the power to make plants grow - whether they like it or not - and a curse which makes those they fall in love with disappear. When the current generation of Nomeolvides girls realize they are all falling for Bay Briar, a dapper, black-sheep scion of the family that owns La Pradera, the land which they garden, they realize they have to do something before Bay disappears too. By way of answer, La Pradera gives them Fel, a boy who doesn't remember his past, and who might have disappeared generations ago.

The writing is lush, almost fairy tale-like. However, there's a tendency to belabor already touched-on emotional points, which left me frustrated and disconnected. Some of the reveals fall flat, and one of the most significant reveals makes all the characters who had not figured it out up to that point look like idiots.

As for the characters, it's been a bit since I've read this book, so my memory's faded, and I can't help comparing it to Labyrinth Lost, which also featured a sprawling extended family of Latinas. To me, at least, the family in Labyrinth Lost was much more vividly rendered and believable. The characters in Wild Beauty are still good, they're still likable. They're just not as real. Fortunately, Bay is one of the better efforts, sharp and likable as a romantic interest. She does eventually come to return one of the cousins' feelings for her, though it's not Estrella's (the POV character.) Estrella's own romance is also likable, though it's with a boy and thus outside the purview of this comm.

On a side note, I had a hunch as I read that Bay might be better described as genderqueer rather than female, and my hunch was borne out by author's notes, but she does go by she/her pronouns, and I figure more genderqueer representation can't hurt.

To sum up: this book is pretty good on both sexuality and gender representation, but occasionally frustrating when it comes to its own narrative.

Fair Play, by Tove Jansson

[rachelmanija]

Review on my DW. Fair Play, by Tove Jansson. A lovely, funny, wise book about an artist and a writer who have been together for many years and are now in their seventies, by the author of the Moomin books, who also had a fifty-year relationship with an artist.

Fic rec: In Another Time (The Count of Monte Cristo)

[el_staplador]

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my very favourite books, and part of the reason for that is the relationship between one minor character and one even more minor character, which ends up about as close as one can get to canonical lesbianism in a book published in France in 1848. Eugénie Danglars is an heiress. Louise d'Armilly is her friend. Louise is destined for the opera stage. Eugénie would like to be.

There is not a huge amount of fic for the fandom, but a happily disproportionate quantity of it deals with Eugénie and Louise. In Another Time, by Gentlezombie, is one of my favourites. It imagines four possible futures for the pair after they escape canon, in a delightful pastiche of Dumas' lush descriptive style, and there's a lovely twist.

The Akeing Heart

[oursin]

Posted in my own journal for FF Friday, discussion of The Akeing Heart. Letters Between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White, by Peter Haring Judd.