Review: Gay Gene Rising

Gay Gene Rising by Jeffrey Jude

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"When the insane becomes probable, the mind wraps itself in a veil to block out the light."

I know I complained a lot about this book in my status updates, so I'm sure some of you are like "Why the hell is he giving it four stars?!"

Well, here's the thing: there is a lot to complain about in this book:

- The writing is inconsistent. Jude has an amazing hand for detail and is very good at making technobabble sound not so technobabbley, but at the same time his writing can be stilted and awkward, particularly dialogue. In fact, his dialogue sucks.

- Straight women in this book? Pretty much non existent. There are two who we see. The first, Diana, is dating Michael's (one of the MCs) friend Christopher. All we hear of her from the other characters is that she's horrible and awful, and all we see of her is her being horrible and awful. This bothers me. Because I feel like the only reason she is horrible and awful is because she's dating someone Michael likes. Which is bullshit. Straight women aren't horrible people because your best friend is straight or bi or confused and closeted. IT IS NOT DIANA'S FAULT THAT CHRISTOPHER IS NOT DATING MICHAEL.

- The other straight woman we see is Connie, she's married to the owner of Silver Paws Ranch where they raise Wolf-hybrids. Connie is pretty much a one note character.

- In fact, most of the side characters, including Connie's husband, are one note characters. I feel like Jude should have cut down his cast list because he doesn't have enough space to develop all of these people so he just doesn't and it gets irritating. Not as irritating as the misogyny, but irritating.

- Towards the beginning, all of the lesbians we met all seemed the same. And then later one of the lesbians was talking about how they're women so they're maternal. No. Not all women are maternal. Not all lesbians are the same.

- In fact, Jude has a habit of making sweeping, generalized statements about entire groups - including Gay men. Which is just all kinds of annoying. I realize that it has to do with the nature of the story, but that's not that hard a thing to fix, so...

So, I'm sure you're all still sitting there wondering "why the hell is he giving it four stars?!"

Here's why: I really liked it.

The story is captivating, Jude's world building is very well done, even if some things within said world building make me roll my eyes. I found myself invested in what was going on and I really could not put it down, as evinced by the fact that I completely neglected the other two books on my 'currently reading' list for the sake of finishing.

Jude's writing isn't the greatest. He needs practice and a good beta reader to get on his ass about the grammar, the dialogue, and the other little technical errors that are frustrating. Not to mention the side characters and the whole sweeping generalizations thing...

But, he has a gift for detail - his descriptions are gorgeous, particularly when the main group goes camping. And he does a wonderful job with the technobabble, making it sound interesting and understandable.

So, yeah, the book needs a lot of work, but I wound up really liking it. So it gets four stars.



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