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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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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City of Secrets by Mary Hoffman (Stravaganza #4)

When Matt is unexpectedly transported to the Scriptorium of Padavia University, he discovers he is a Stravagante who can travel through time using his talisman, a leather-bound book. Together with Luciano and Arianna, he must fight the dangerous di Chimici clan who are on the verge of making a terrifying breakthrough into our world.

TITLE: City of Secrets
AUTHOR: Mary Hoffman
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing
YEAR: 2008
LENGTH: 382 pages
AGE: Young adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Historical
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

DNF 31% in.

CITY OF SECRETS drops any coyness about being a magical cure narrative and goes for it almost immediately. Matt is dyslexic and struggles with reading, but in Talia he can read easily. It’s true that in Talia Luciano was always cancer-free, but somehow this feels more egregious to me, even though neither boy can take this “cure” home to England with them.

Ultimately I became frustrated with the strange pacing and the way this doubles down on treating the Manoush as magical, where Aurelio (a blind Manoush man first appearing in CITY OF STARS) is extra magical even for them. My original impression of the Manoush is they're the Talian version of the Romani, so their increasing role as oracles who pop in and have special powers plays into a bunch of real-world stereotypes.

I don't like Matt, I don't like how he treats his girlfriend. He spends so little time with her that I got a third of the way in and all I know is she's named Ayesha, he's jealous when she has male friends, and a little of what she looks like.

Quitting while I'm ahead, this was better as a trilogy. Georgia and Nicholas's storylines were specifically, definitively wrapped up in CITY OF FLOWERS, so them hanging around now feels so pointless. The scenes don't even focus on them when they do show up, it's just like "hey, remember characters you actually like? here they are!" I don't like that at all.

Partial CW for ableism, alcohol, pregnancy, violence (backstory), murder (backstory), parental death (backstory), death (backstory). TW for Harry Potter reference (brief).

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A green-eyed guy's face is above a pillar with three people tied to it, burning in the middle of a city square.


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