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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou...
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Timekeeper by Tara Sim (Timekeeper, #1)

I was in an accident. I got out. I’m safe now.

An alternate Victorian world controlled by clock towers, where a damaged clock can fracture time—and a destroyed one can stop it completely.

A prodigy mechanic who can repair not only clockwork but time itself, determined to rescue his father from a Stopped town.

A series of mysterious bombings that could jeopardize all of England.

A boy who would give anything to relive his past, and one who would give anything to live at all.

A romance that will shake the very foundations of time.

TITLE: Timekeeper
AUTHOR: Tara Sim
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster
YEAR: 2016
LENGTH: 414 pages
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Historical
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s).

A slowly-growing mystery and a sweetly anguished romance, TIMEKEEPER is perfect for anyone who wants some steampunk with their time-manipulation, the stuff of ancient deities in their veins. 

The characterization and worldbuilding are great, I like the ways it implies that the world is different from ours without the characters saying it outright (because of course they don’t have ours as a point of comparison. The particulars of the MCs position are more explained because the story really needs that, but things like “what would the existence of the clocktowers change about reality” are mainly implied. The blend of these is nice, I liked trying to puzzle out some of the changes but if you don’t want to devote that energy to scrutinizing the background details the story will still make sense. 

The romance is sweet, I especially like the moments when the MC figures out that something is playing out differently than he might expect because of who and what the love interest is. I love a good interstitial between chapters and the ones here were great, building up the shape of the world in ways that complemented the main story. There also were some heisty elements, and a fantastic sequence with time manipulation which was one of my favorite scenes in the whole book. 

CW for panic attacks, sexism, homophobia, blood, violence, explosions, parental death (not depicted), major character death, death.

BTB 2021 Reading Challenge (QAOC)

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A large clock face with scratched and shattered glass.


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