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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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...

We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal (Sands of Arawiya, #1)

People lived because she killed. People died because he lived.

Zafira is the Hunter, disguising herself as a man when she braves the cursed forest of the Arz to feed her people. Nasir is the Prince of Death, assassinating those foolish enough to defy his autocratic father, the sultan. If Zafira was exposed as a girl, all of her achievements would be rejected; if Nasir displayed his compassion, his father would punish him in the most brutal of ways. Both Zafira and Nasir are legends in the kingdom of Arawiya--but neither wants to be.

War is brewing, and the Arz sweeps closer with each passing day, engulfing the land in shadow. When Zafira embarks on a quest to uncover a lost artifact that can restore magic to her suffering world and stop the Arz, Nasir is sent by the sultan on a similar mission: retrieve the artifact and kill the Hunter. But an ancient evil stirs as their journey unfolds--and the prize they seek may pose a threat greater than either can imagine.

TITLE: We Hunt the Flame
AUTHOR: Hafsah Faizal
PUBLISHER: Square Fish
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 480 pages
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Yes

Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s). Discussed in more detail later in the review.

WE HUNT THE FLAME drips with lush descriptions and evocative imagery, linked by the often scattered thoughts of two very different narrators as circumstances and a bit of a death-wish pull them inexorably closer.

I loved the setting and most of the characters. I was frequently lost in the prose of an individual moment but I find myself now able to recall the entire story, somehow whole in my mind even as the scenes sometimes felt scattered. If you’re reading this for the beautiful setting, twisting quest of a plot, and intense yearning to belong, you’ll love this. I plan to read the sequel because I want to know how this story ends. It’s literally part one of two, so a lot of stuff was left open to be handled later, but there’s a definite endpoint to the initial quest which brought everyone together. 

The world-building is really really good, especially around language. The text is full of places where a word is left untranslated from the speaker's dialect (or possibly a completely different language, depending on the instance) and the point-of-view character thinks about the meaning in a way that conveys the translation. It happens a lot and helps to deepen immersion in the setting, since the the various regions having different dialects/languages is a very important part of this world.

If you’re planning on reading this because you heard it was queer, my answer is that it probably is, but I cannot predict whether you’ll be satisfied by the portrayals within. 

**Minor spoilers to follow.** 

There’s a character whose every word drips with what looks like queer longing, but the main person he’s been possibly flirting with is completely off limits for plot reasons and he knows it the whole time. There’s a woman who dresses as a man and jokes about kissing her sister of the heart, but they don’t kiss, she drops the masculine guise very early on, and she ends up with a guy. It feels either like it was heading for maximum queerness in a society which punishes women simply for existing (the male guise was necessary for the main character to feed her family), or one which describes very intense bonds but resolutely caps any possibly queer bonds at platonic, no matter how intensely they banter and stare at each other. I don’t know whether almost everyone was straight or if several key characters were bi, but the book also doesn’t provide an answer. And so I’m left with “is it queer? Yeah, probably.

CW for xenophobia, sexism, misogyny, kidnapping, confinement, child abuse, blood, gore, violence, torture, murder, parental death (backstory), animal death, child death (backstory), major character death, death.

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A woman in a dark blue cloak with a quiver of arrows on her back stands in an archway looking out at a palace in a desert at night, lit by the crescent moon.


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