The High King's Golden Tongue. Megan Derr.

Derr, Megan. The High King's Golden Tongue. Less Than Three Press, 2015.

The first thing you should probably know when figuring out whether you'd enjoy this book is that the author is particularly into writing m/m slash. "I love writing slash," she says on her website, "it works for me in a way that writing other things never did." I don't quite know how to describe what this means, but you'll know it if you're into the stuff: The book reads a lot like m/m slash. I guess in part what I'm identifying is that it's kind of a lot about the sex...but it's not porn or erotica, exactly. It's slash. If this isn't making any sense, you could just read the book to get a sense of what I mean.


The author's Amazon.com profile says that she's "a long time resident of LGBTQ romance," and the press that publishes her is specifically an LGBTQ romance...run by, among other people, the author herself. I don't know exactly what her identity is, but I do know (based on her blog) that she at the very least does date women. I admit I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to straight women writing m/m slash (though I have a stronger negative reaction to straight guys writing lesbians), so I appreciate that this writer of m/m stories is somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum.

...though apparently some people don't feel the same. Check out this post on her blog. Someone was rather upset about her writing m/m stories. Yikes. I don't entirely agree with all the arguments she makes in her post, but I think she also makes some solid points and identifies some real problems that the gay male community should fess up to and start dealing with--and I think the person who attacked her over her m/m stories is a jackass and treated her poorly. You wanna have a conversation about the issues? Fine. You wanna be a jerk? Not so great.

Anyway, back to the book! I liked the protagonist, which is a big deal. If you're going to follow along with a POV-character for hundreds of pages, s/he'd better be likable. Or, hey, not necessarily likable, but...interesting? Engaging? I found this protagonist met that mark. And I liked the way the reader slowly learns more details about him and his background, often through things like what he wears and why, or how he interacts with servants.

I mostly enjoyed the relationship between the two main characters, though I think the way their relationship shifted from antagonistic to romantic didn't quite work. They needed to build toward that change...and that didn't really happen. It seemed oddly sudden, and so there wasn't the sense of satisfaction and payoff I was expecting. I read somewhere that this book was based on a short story, so maybe it's a pacing issue...?

Back to character stuff...All of the protagonist's other relationships are interesting, too. I suppose it's largely because, as I said, he's interesting, himself. I enjoyed his interactions with all different characters, whereas often I find myself impatient for conversations with "minor" or "unimportant" secondary characters to end so we can get back to the main m/m relationship.

I love worlds in which gender works differently than it does in ours. The fact that in this world a man could be another man's fiance--no fuss, no bother, totally normal--kind of thrills me. I enjoy imagining how things might be different in such a world, and this book was fun on that level.