Good morning, everyone! It’s a slow content day today so you all get to enjoy Wednesday Links a little early. It’ll pair just as well with your morning coffee or tea, as it does with your mid-afternoon snack break.
Calling all gamers! I’m all the Baldur’s Gate 3 train for now. Is anyone else joining me? I have my eyes on the posh elf rogue for my romance character. Trying to avoid mentioning any spoilers! However, not sure how long the bug will last as there are a couple new MMORPGs dropping this week and next – Palia and Wayfinders – that I’m interested in trying. Any exciting new gaming obsessions on your end?
…
Webtoon extraordinaire, Sneezy, let us know that Bromance Book Club is getting the webtoon treatment on September 3rd! You can find the new adaptation on Manta.
…
Personally loved this piece by Jenny Hamilton on Tor.com about the issue with witchy, small town romances. Do you agree?
…
Did you know Lara runs a book club in Cape Town, South Africa? Next week, they’ll be discussing Rosie Danan’s The Roommate. You can find more info on their Instagram account.
…
From Sue: This something that’s in the works in my neck of the woods (Vancouver, WA) that would be of interest to local bitches! We may get a romance bookstore!
It looks like there’s a GoFundMe link in their bio to help them out! I’m so excited to see more romance bookstores popping up. There’s even one in New England now, located in Maine and it’s called Grump & Sunshine.
…
This horror movie starring a killer sloth was the talk of the office last week.
…
Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
I haven’t read any of the cozy witchy books Hamilton mentions in her post, but wonder what she would have made of two I did read recently, Cackle and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches (set in Britain, though). The same argument could be made for many small town shifter romances, or heck even small town contemporaries in general. She’s certainly not wrong when she says that quaintness = erasure (see Hallmark Christmas movies, for example).
I read books 1 and 2 of Fix-it Witches and I bounced off hard. (Reading book 2 was me giving the series another chance.) Alexis Hall’s review of Witch Please on Goodreads says what I think but better-put.
My husband and daughter are both playing BG3 so I get an earful of their romantic discoveries whenever we catch up. They’re both having loads of fun seeing who can be romanced and how. Kudos to the game designers for making such a robust and replayable social element of the game!
Sadly, I’m sick of my PC at the end of the workday, so no BG3 for me until that eases up- only books or cross-stitching!
I could not agree with the small town witch article more or articulate it better! Every time I see them described as fun or funny it’s that same sensation as when someone describes sexual harassment as just a joke, where it’s such a disconnect it doesn’t seem like the same universe.
Wow, great insight from Jenny Hamilton on Tor.com regarding small town witchy stories. Despite loving magical stories and being surrounded by wiccan and pagan practices and practitioners I have never been able to really enjoy any of those stories. Usually even just reading the storylines leave me repulsed by the unethical behaviors of the protagonists (or their families) and the magical systems generally seem superficially created and without the layer of responsibility I like to see. Jenny has voiced another thing that always seemed to invalidate those stories for me, namely the general lack a any true evidence for their persecution and lack of grounding in real world issues. The book that comes to mind when I think of really well done wiccan stories is The Bast Mysteries by Rosemary Edgehill, where the author addresses the real cost of magic and the dangers of magical work without an ethical guide.
Thanks for the link to Jenny Hamilton’s article! And @footiepjs, thanks for pointing me to Alexis Hall’s GR review of Witch Please!
I don’t usually like MMORPGs, but I’m excited about Palia!
The Bast Mysteries by Rosemary Edgehill, where the author addresses the real cost of magic and the dangers of magical work without an ethical guide.
I read these in the omnibus edition years ago and really enjoyed them.
The article on cozy witches also linked to similar articles about Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series and Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes. But the points were valid. I guess we’ve all got to be more careful what parts of society (and who!) are cut out from our cozy novels. I don’t want to give up on the genre entirely, but I hope to be more critical the next time I read one.
I highly recommend Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson if you want a book that delves straight into the exact witch politics mentioned in the tor.com article. There is racism, sexism (misandry rather than misogyny in this case), transphobia and TERFS, and an alternative coven for people of colour. It’s set in the UK but the issues are similar to the US. It is dark!!! There is a romantic subplot but it’s not at all a romance or cozy but if you’ve felt a bit nauseated by small town witch stories (like too many marshmallows) this is the tonic.
Appreciated the Tor essay and also the prompt to go and (finally) organize myself about Goodreads a bit. There are a few authors I’ve been meaning to follow there just to see what they say about books. 🙂
Having grown up in a small town in the Deep South, and having fled that environment by stages – now living in Los Angeles in a majority nonwhite neighborhood, working in a majority nonwhite department for an international law firm, and married to a nonwhite person – I really can’t enjoy the ‘cozy’ subgenres at all. Because erasure. My best friends are 1. Jewish 2. pagan, I have dear friends and family who are queer, and I want books that reflect the full beautiful spectrum of humanity in respectful ways. If a book is set in what’s meant to be historically-based America, and it’s written as if white colonialism was Manifest Destiny rather than one of the greatest sins of human history, I can’t deal.