A month or two ago, over on Mastodon, Em serenadestrong posted glowingly about rereading a romance novel called Something Human by A.J. Demas. Em is a true romance novel connoisseur, so naturally, I was intrigued. Now that my semester is over, I've finally had time to read it.

Guys. This book is so fucking good.

I'm stealing Em's plot synopsis/blurb, because I agree that the official one doesn't do it justice:

Adares wakes trapped in wreckage on a battlefield, knowing he'll die there. One of the Luth men who he'd been fighting finds him and instead of a mercy killing, lets him go. But if Adares leaves, the Luth will die of a poisoned arrow wound – and Adares knows where to find the antidote.

They save each other, and in the three days they have apart from anything else in the world, they fall in love. But that's the easy part. Adares needs to get back to the besieged city of Tios he was fighting for. And the Luth will be outlawed by his people if he’s seen in the arms of another man. What if these three days together are all they'll ever have?

The thing is, it's hard for me to capture in words exactly why this novel is so good. I tried to explain to a friend last night why I was loving it so much and I was reduced to just making vague gestures and insisting that she had to read it herself to find out. But I'll try to list a few points here.

The prose is lovely, for one. It's a pleasure to read. It's rare these days that I encounter prose that not only doesn't bother me but actually aesthetically impresses me, and to encounter it in a self-published romance novel? My god, I feel like a miracle has just happened. The setting is richly imagined and feels very real, and the characterization is just...mwah. I love these characters. They feel like people. I love them, and I have no trouble seeing why they fall so quickly in love with each other.

There's a lot going on thematically with duty, desire, societal expectation, and religion, and again, it all works for me pretty seamlessly. The plot never felt contrived to me; the characters' motivations and choices felt natural, because they're firmly grounded in the worldbuilding and in who the characters are as people. To illustrate: At one point I had a little hater moment when one of the leads mentioned a few times that he doesn't like the cultural denigration of women. I rolled my eyes, because I'm jaded after about 15 years of romance novels where authors try to make up for the inherent political problem of, e.g., romanticizing Regency-era England, by shoehorning modern social justice ideas into the mouths of characters those ideas don't belong to. But as I read on, I realized that that isn't what Demas was doing in Something Human at all. The character who dislikes the denigration of women has concrete reasons to have thought about this, despite being a man in a patriarchal society; his social role is one that brings him in closer proximity to women than most other men, that teaches him to revere their skills and artistry and how they exist in the world. This isn't an author shoehorning modern feminism into a setting where it doesn't belong. This is a character who has feelings about gender that are grounded in his social context.

Oh, and the sex scenes are hot too, btw. I should mention that because it's so rare in published fiction. 🥲

If you haven't figured it out by now, I highly recommend this book. It's excellent. I haven't loved a romance novel like this in a long time. Here's Em's review of it as well, if you'd like to read that; I'm glad I did, because it helped convince me to try the book.

It's been months but I finally finished reading a fiction book again. (Grad school has been kicking my ass.) This one was Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim, which I got in a cute little book swap a few of my friends and I did back in early September. I really liked it, and I'm still trying to do the thing where I write down my thoughts about books to facilitate me ever remembering anything about them, so here's a little review.

The synopsis from the author's website describes Beasts of a Little Land as an "epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement", which I think captures the gist of it pretty well. It spans decades in the lives of an array of characters, particularly exploring the intertwined fates of Jade, a Korean courtesan; JungHo, a Korean revolutionary; and Yamada, a Japanese military officer. The "beasts" of the title are tigers but also, metaphorically, the citizens of Japanese-occupied South Korea. I quite like how the Kirkius review summed that motif up:

Late in the book a Japanese general will remark, "How such enormous beasts have flourished in this little land is incomprehensible." He is referring to tigers, but he might as well be talking about the humans who fight here, too.

So, my thoughts, with some spoilers:

This book pleasantly surprised me in a number of ways. I thought I could predict the overall shape of the plot, and I was wrong. The "romance" that was projected from early on is not actually a requited romance. Chekhov's gun went off, but not in the way I thought it would. I worried, based on the subject matter and how some things are framed early in the story, that the novel would take a hardline nationalist stance, and it actually doesn't; as the characters grow up and lose things/people/ideals and face colonial and political violence, the idea that unfolds is more like "you can love your country as much as you want, but your country is never going to love you back." (I'm not at all an expert on Korean history or politics, so please note that it's entirely possible there are nuances that are going right over my head! I suspect that's the case, in fact, particularly in the final chapter, which introduces a few Haenyeo characters. But what I can say is that Beasts of a Little Land did not become the uncomplicated tale of national heroes fighting for the motherland that I, perhaps cynically, worried it might be.)

I'm picky when it comes to prose, and in my opinion, the prose in this book was good but not great. It was certainly more pleasurable to read than a lot of fiction I pick up, but I did sometimes want to take a red pen to it, and it was sprinkled throughout with little pet peeves of mine. Interestingly, those pet peeves were ones that tend to show up a lot in fiction that has been translated from an East Asian language to English (I read a lot of such fiction for job reasons!), except as far as I can tell, Kim wrote Beasts of a Little Land in English from the jump. I mentioned this to Harry, who suggested that maybe the author just reads a lot of translated fiction herself, and I suppose that's entirely possible. But all of that being said...there were moments toward the end of the novel where the prose needed to reach for poetic heights, and in those instances, I really felt Kim rose to the occasion. So I can't critique her prose too harshly overall, because it did great work in the moments where it counted.

Also, the back fifth of the novel made me breathtakingly sad, and I love it when a book makes me sad. So all in all, I definitely recommend this book. Do be warned though that there are a couple of rape scenes which, while not graphic, do not pull their punches.