Jacob’s Ladder – Louis Flint Ceci (Les Croyens/Beautiful Dreamer Press)

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Les Croyens/Beautiful Dreamer

Ceci’s third installment in a 1960s small town high school drama centers on an ascendant boys’ basketball team and the community’s private struggles. Deft and subtle handling of the economic and racial tensions of the time grounds the story and provides a realistic and compelling atmosphere.

It’s reminiscent of a soap opera, not to suggest melodrama, but Ceci employs a huge cast of characters and quick, alternating viewpoint scenes to build his narrative. The story opens with the lead character, sixteen-year-old Malachi “Jake” Jacob, stumbling upon the Stonewall riots while visiting New York City, which draws his curiosity as a budding gay teen. When violence increases on the streets, Jake takes refuge in an apartment building lobby and meets a young, more sexually liberated man, Vince. Romantic sparks ignite.

But Jake’s journey to figure out how to live as gay is just one of several themes. The narrative jumps back and forth between many people who make up fictional Croy, Oklahoma. The result is a well-realized American “everytown,” a character in and of itself, though readers will likely want to start with the first book in the series, which I didn’t have the advantage of doing. In some instances, it’s hard to follow the characters’ motivations, lacking a full grasp of their personal histories and their histories with each other.

Jake is welcomed home from his summer in New York City by his best friend Joanie, who is dedicated to managing the high school newspaper and in an on-the-rocks relationship with Jake’s friend Randy. Randy then enters the story as a young man who keeps a lot beneath the surface. His storyline is one of those instances where it would help to have read the earlier books. Randy’s father is a fugitive from a crime that’s not explained and meanwhile Randy comes into a sizeable inheritance through circumstances that sound significant to the town’s history though the details must’ve come up earlier in the series. There’s tension between Jake and Randy regarding Jake’s gayness, and the boys’ relationship is depicted with intriguing complexity. Does Randy’s anger toward Jake stem from homophobia or is he jealous of Jake’s boyfriend and/or Jake’s easy friendship with Joanie?

Interwoven with that love triangle of sorts, the three leads characters’ family members are introduced and present new dramas. Jake’s mother Susan is a hometown hero, having made it as a TV soap opera actress. She’s also a patron of the town’s conservative, Christian restorationist church and largely an absent parent. Jake’s father was a reverend of some notoriety in town, and Joanie’s family, the Tibbits, who have taken on informal guardianship of Jake, are devout Catholics. The religious affiliations of Croy’s inhabitants are an important layer to the community, which like many small towns is a patchwork of Christian denominations that influence social transactions and personal biases.

The big news that school year is Croy High School will be hosting students from a largely Black high school, which lost its roof in a storm. One consequence is that Black students will be joining Croy’s basketball team, and that presents a challenge to Jake, his teammates, and their families. Ceci depicts the circumstances with just enough attention to spoken and unspoken tensions to make the reader think about the realities of racial integration in the 1960s. One admires the author’s restraint and effective storytelling.

Supporting characters provide some of the story’s most engaging moments. The basketball team rallies around their co-captain Al Mattingly, who becomes gravely ill mid-season. A young diabetic girl, Bobbie, struggles to understand the world as she begins to step out from her family’s Christian fundamentalist home. A bookish young man, Beau, suffers ridicule and violence from his peers for being soft and presumably queer. A basketball coach and a male teacher try to maintain a secret affair within a community that would condemn them. In contrast, the basketball court scenes that take up much of the latter half of the book lack a bit of universal appeal, but there’s a lot to enjoy about Ceci’s Croy. A great book for readers with a sense of nostalgia about the late 1960s as well as those who enjoy well-crafted period dramas.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Peters

Foxhunt – Rem Wigmore (Queen of Swords Press)

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Queen of Swords Press

In the far, far future, humanity not only has pulled itself from the brink of planetary collapse but has even managed to create a utopian society where the Earth is honored, and inclusion and diversity are celebrated. The poisons of the Industrial Age have been eradicated, solar power has replaced fossil fuels, and the Order of the Vengeful Wild punishes resource hoarders and energy criminals. Into this world the singer Orfeus (she/her) finds herself the target of the Order—specifically, of the Wolf, the preeminent bounty hunter of the Order. When the Elders—near-immortal preservers of all the old lore deemed worth saving—can provide Orfeus with no clear reasons why the Wolf should be hunting her, she makes the ultimate gamble and joins the Order itself in order to learn who placed the contract on her, and why.

Rem Wigmore’s novel Foxhunt is a delightful mixture of high fantasy, science fiction, and dystopian fiction. And benefiting such a genre-mashing novel, Wigmore’s cast of characters encompasses all aspects of the LGBTQ+ spectrum and expresses numerous genders. Moreover, it is not surprising that “magic” can exist side by side with super advanced technology, or that the quasi-medieval setting with itinerant bards and common inns would also include surgically augmented mercenary soldiers who fight with super-powered weapons. (Rarely, Wigmore’s world of contradictions includes a jarring note, for example, when they describe a character as “Vietnamese” when no other current nationalities or place-names are mentioned; such a description seems anachronistic and out of place.)

Unlike most post-apocalyptic dystopias, the far-future Earth that Wigmore writes about in Foxhunt did not suffer an actual apocalypse—or at least, not quite: humanity apparently reached the brink, but was able to retreat in time and reverse the damage. So Foxhunt is far more optimistic in tone than most dystopian fiction; which is not to say that Orfeus does not have to wrestle with moral ambiguity: in a world where resources are rationed and (presumably) shared equably, she notices that members of the Order eat meat every day. Her decision to join the Order results not in answers to her questions, but rather further questions: What is the true purpose of the Order? Has it strayed from that purpose? Can it be reformed? Is it worth saving? (To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, you have a Utopia only if you work to keep it.) As Orfeus gradually uncovers answers (and more questions), she is forced to make some difficult decisions.

Foxhunt is a welcome addition to the Queen of Swords catalog: truly imaginative world-(re)building, diverse characters, breathtakingly paced action, a sense of mystery, and moral complexity will keep readers engaged, turning pages until the end, and wondering when Orfeus’ adventures will continue.

Reviewed by Keith John Glaeske