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A rec from mcc!

if your goal is a good all around yuri experience do NOT miss "how do we relationship" which is just so brutally real

Like most readers who end up reading at least some romance, I tend to try very hard not to worry about things like realism or historical accuracy. But this novel set in the (all white, all Christian, all conforming) American suburbs in 1969-we-can-just-taste-the-70s blew me away. I later learned the writer has a background in both history and research, so chef's kisses all around! If you know anything about the 70s and USA queer history, there are a lot of tiny details that are going to jump out at you and grip your heart.

I'm going to be rereading this book on a regular basis, that's for sure. It's just beautifully done. There are a couple of scenes that are going to live rent-free in my head, forever!

As I wrote about the first book in this series, everyone wants to see love stories about gay hockey players and I am so here for the masc representation this book is giving me.

Especially compared to the first book, I found the circumstances surrounding JT (who has a very memorable but small part in the first book) really well done and compelling. It's really hard to return to the small town you grew up in when you're visibly queer and gender non-conforming and Cochrane does a really good job of painting the feel of rural New Hampshire.

While Yours for the Season is reasonably tropey (I mean, to start, it's set around the holidays!), the mechanics feel less obvious than in the first novel and it was easier to turn off my brain and just enjoy the ride. For example, I'm usually not into "Hallmark Christmas Movie" type films or books, but I got on board with this one from pretty much the first page of the first chapter, because Cochrane figures out how to mix just enough bitter with the sweet without everything getting either melodramatic or treacly-sweet.

For what it is, it's a fun read. Some bits of Nat in particular were very well executed and compelling. Second chance romances (un peu à la Persuasion de Austen) are in particular a special interest of mine, so I could not not love to see this one.

It does, however, contain my writing technique arch-nemesis: NOOOOOOO to flashback chapters! (I don't know why but 2025 was the year I decided I really disliked almost all iterations of this technique and while it was more tolerable here than in most things, I still was very annoyed. Mon royaume pour un second chance romance sans chapitre flashback!!)

Très recommandé, bouquin trouvé dans la newsletter Out of Your League (qui est super bon d'ailleurs)

@s_mailler@bw.heraut.eu Ah mais c'est un peu ça la brillance d'Austen elle dissimule une vue extrêmement limpide des tensions entre les classes dans des histoires d'amour!

1) "It was YouTube's algorithm that catapulted me to prominence with an essay on a hidden secret in Shadow of the Colossus and that algorithm (for now) continues to favor even my most esoteric topics. Is it a deeply alienating experience to surrender success to an unknowable piece of code that understands neither quality nor morality? Yep!!!!!! But that code also helped most of you find this book, and for that, I'm appreciative."

2) "While writing this book, the entirety of Game Informer's website was unceremoniously shut down; decades of reviews, interviews, and more (like everything I wrote as an intern), flushed into the same non-existence as my original blogs. Every disappeared article, every piece of lost media, hurts our understanding of its subject. Simply playing a game (or watching a movie, or reading a poem) cannot contextualize its impact. Conversation defines a piece of art's cultural legacy. This is how a game dies: when all the context of its life is stripped away."

3) "This tendency for conceptual art to provoke thoughts even after the viewer rejects it is what makes it defensible as art. It is also what makes it threatening to fascists."

4) "Part of being a kid is wondering why a grown-up is crying while reading a book about a tree out loud, and a part of being an adult is being the crying reader."

5) "I will not attribute my current-day politics to Animorphs. I do not think they're the reason I don't like war. But I read these books so much as a kid. I read them far before I read about World War II, or Vietnam, or Iraq. And Applegate knew that, one day, I and all the other kids reading her books would read books, and watch movies, and consume propaganda, about war. She knew that the world we lived in wasn't frictionless, and to pretend it was would be doing us a disservice. The darkness wasn't just Animorphs' hook — it was central to the series ethos."

6) "The problem, ultimately, is what that darkness leaves you with. I could write 90% of an essay on how any of these games are the darkest in their series, but then you get to the end, and... what? 'Isn't it crazy how messed up this is?' It's an empty reading, substanceless. Ironically, it's juvenile. Being 'messed up' is not a theme. Darkness is not a narrative. Violence on its own is not mature. Every description I've given thus far is missing the crucial piece, the so what, the why should I care? [...] Every Zelda is the darkest Zelda because every Zelda is about growing up. Every Zelda is about gathering the strength and grace you need to face a world that is fundamentally harsh, alienating, and unjust."

7) "It seems like every few months, we have the same conversation about game reviews: should they factor hour count into their assessment? Is a 100-hour game inherently better for the money than a two-hour one because you get this much entertainment per dollar? I, as expected, don't like this idea. I don't judge my favorite TV shows on number of episodes, my favorite songs on their runtime. While I understand the desire to stretch one's money as far as possible, this equation just seems like another way to throw the dial all the way toward games-as-product. I have an alternative proposition, although even more impossible to implement. What is the hour count that a game lives in your memory? How often do you think of it, reference it, dream about it?"

Un beau bouquin. On sent pointer le "réalisme magique", sans magie mais avec beaucoup de réalisme. Une riche plongée dans un village colombien reculé, au début des années 60 ou fin des années 50 (le livre semble très ancré dans cette époque historique et politique très particulière de la Colombie, la sortie de la Violence et ses répliques). C'est aussi une satire très caustique de la société colombienne rurale à cette époque.

Un livre pas forcément très chatoyant, moins spectaculaire que d'autres œuvres du même, mais vraiment une bonne lecture.