Scan barcode
A review by justabean_reads
The Cure for Drowning by Loghan Paylor
2.0
I think there exist two books: the book I wanted to read, and the book this actually is. I (to a certain extent) believe that both have their place, but I sure spent a lot of time reading this book wishing it was a different one.
We have is a story of two teenagers in a farming town in Southern Ontario: the middle-class only daughter of a German doctor and a French-Canadian socialite, and the working-class middle child of a marginal Irish farming family. They meet in the late 1930s, fall in love, and then their lives blow up. One has to move back to Montreal due to anti-German sentiment in the town, the other runs away from home after a huge fight with their brother (who was also courting the doctor's daughter). They start living as a man, first in logging camp, then joining the RCAF and crewing Hurricanes as a navigator. Oh, also, there's a family story that the (however many) great great grandmother in the Irish family was a selkie; the middle child drowned in a stream as a girl and was resurrected by blood magic, and now the voices in the forest talk to them, and they've got super-intuition for navigation. More or less nothing magical is going on with the French-German family.
The book I wanted to read was about how genderqueer people historically dealt with society, and the ways they managed to survive and thrive despite the obstacles set against them. I would take, "And they used magic to help out," if that were explained in any detail whatsoever, or the magic were in a balanced system of advantages and consequences, or was part of a world where underground magic was a thing. You can make underground magic a steam alongside the underground queer community even, like in Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful! Not that there was anything like queer community in this book, either, though we got solidarity between individuals who randomly ran into each other.
What the novel was actually doing, as far as I could tell, was a genderqueer author wanting to see themself reflected in the period, and handwaving to make it happen. To be clear: in the Canadian armed forces during WWII, you could be any gender you liked to serve in combat, but you pretty much had to have a dick. There are no records of anyone at all pulling off a Polly Oliver after WWI (at least in the Anglosphere's official armed forces; the Soviets had their own thing going on, as did various partisan groups). Here we come to a conflict: most people are super not into questions about their genitalia, and even more so for trans and non-binary people who get way too many of same, because randos feel entitled to know, and it's unfair and awful. So the point of this book, to a certain extent, is that the reader never finds out if our NB-Polly Oliver now has a dick due to seal fuck shapeshifting magic, or if somehow the generalised luck magic keeps everyone from noticing that they do not have a dick, or what. The character is certainly never at any time worried that the men they serve with will discover that they're AFAB, and court martial/murder/disown them. This includes the guy they're casually having sex with. I think that's the wish fulfilment of it all? That you can just go forth and be the gender you want, and everyone leaves you alone, and you don't have to worry about it.
But I was not satisfied with that explanation! I wanted some kind of sense of the character considering how magic wove into their life and allowed them to live as they wanted to, or having feelings about gender at all beyond, "I don't want to wear dresses, and Mom making me put them on for church sucks." I'm not demanding extended dick-thoughts or a miserable well of dysphoria, but I'd have taken euphoria? Or any kind of mental/emotional interaction with what was going on in terms of gender. Not having anything like that made it difficult for me to connect to the character, or to the period setting. This is the 1940s! It's very unlikely that people are going to intuitively get how they/them pronouns work, or the small town that was all set to tar and feather the German doctor would be completely okay with one of their own coming back from war with a different gender.
And again, I'm not looking for a novel about queer suffering, but I'd like a novel with some connection to reality? And this just had so many things that rang false for me: we hear about the selkie story because it's traditionally told in the family, specifically by the conservative Irish Catholic father, but the story as told on page is very new age woo retelling including fairly graphic details of seal fucking, which... no. He wouldn't tell about his great-whatever grandfather having sex in evocative erotic prose. (The character voices were all over the place generally.) We have basically a flash hate mob that chases the German family out of town, but they're okay with whatever gender is happening. There's some general prejudice in the town against the Catholic bog Irish family, but the French-Canadian socialite mother has zero problems with her very proper daughter dating the son. Some American fighter pilots show up on the British airbase more or less solely to spew vile homophobia all over the place and then vanish, while none of the British or Commonwealth pilots or airmen agree with them. (Please look up how the UK and Commonwealth countries treated queer servicemen! It was not good!) One of the brothers turns out to be The Worst just to yeet him from the love triangle. We never get any sense of what the fey living in the river are, or how they're connected to seal fuck magic. Stuff just shows up, then vanishes again, and there's no sense of it being structured into the narrative!
So at the end of the day, the novel felt sort of floaty and vibe based, and it was hard for me to get invested in anything, mostly because I was pretty sure it would all literally magically turn out to be fine, and no one's actions seemed to have much in the way of motivation or consequences, and none of the main characters were going to have any flaws.
The following may be a personal quibble: I generally don't like romances with very short sections of alternating first person or even quickly alternating limited third (which can feel like someone's RP logs), because it so often feels like the author doesn't trust the reader, and wants to reassure them of what's going on in each character's head: just to really make sure that we're not worried about feelings being reciprocated, etc. Paylor (mostly) avoided the worst sin of this format: telling the same scene over and over again from different points of view, but it still felt muddy and over explaining feelings when what I really wanted explained was the magic.
Though it does get points over Masters of the Air for several characters considering that maybe firebombing the shit out of civilians wasn't the best path to victory. I'm giving it a whole extra star rating just for that.
We have is a story of two teenagers in a farming town in Southern Ontario: the middle-class only daughter of a German doctor and a French-Canadian socialite, and the working-class middle child of a marginal Irish farming family. They meet in the late 1930s, fall in love, and then their lives blow up. One has to move back to Montreal due to anti-German sentiment in the town, the other runs away from home after a huge fight with their brother (who was also courting the doctor's daughter). They start living as a man, first in logging camp, then joining the RCAF and crewing Hurricanes as a navigator. Oh, also, there's a family story that the (however many) great great grandmother in the Irish family was a selkie; the middle child drowned in a stream as a girl and was resurrected by blood magic, and now the voices in the forest talk to them, and they've got super-intuition for navigation. More or less nothing magical is going on with the French-German family.
The book I wanted to read was about how genderqueer people historically dealt with society, and the ways they managed to survive and thrive despite the obstacles set against them. I would take, "And they used magic to help out," if that were explained in any detail whatsoever, or the magic were in a balanced system of advantages and consequences, or was part of a world where underground magic was a thing. You can make underground magic a steam alongside the underground queer community even, like in Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful! Not that there was anything like queer community in this book, either, though we got solidarity between individuals who randomly ran into each other.
What the novel was actually doing, as far as I could tell, was a genderqueer author wanting to see themself reflected in the period, and handwaving to make it happen. To be clear: in the Canadian armed forces during WWII, you could be any gender you liked to serve in combat, but you pretty much had to have a dick. There are no records of anyone at all pulling off a Polly Oliver after WWI (at least in the Anglosphere's official armed forces; the Soviets had their own thing going on, as did various partisan groups). Here we come to a conflict: most people are super not into questions about their genitalia, and even more so for trans and non-binary people who get way too many of same, because randos feel entitled to know, and it's unfair and awful. So the point of this book, to a certain extent, is that the reader never finds out if our NB-Polly Oliver now has a dick due to seal fuck shapeshifting magic, or if somehow the generalised luck magic keeps everyone from noticing that they do not have a dick, or what. The character is certainly never at any time worried that the men they serve with will discover that they're AFAB, and court martial/murder/disown them. This includes the guy they're casually having sex with. I think that's the wish fulfilment of it all? That you can just go forth and be the gender you want, and everyone leaves you alone, and you don't have to worry about it.
But I was not satisfied with that explanation! I wanted some kind of sense of the character considering how magic wove into their life and allowed them to live as they wanted to, or having feelings about gender at all beyond, "I don't want to wear dresses, and Mom making me put them on for church sucks." I'm not demanding extended dick-thoughts or a miserable well of dysphoria, but I'd have taken euphoria? Or any kind of mental/emotional interaction with what was going on in terms of gender. Not having anything like that made it difficult for me to connect to the character, or to the period setting. This is the 1940s! It's very unlikely that people are going to intuitively get how they/them pronouns work, or the small town that was all set to tar and feather the German doctor would be completely okay with one of their own coming back from war with a different gender.
And again, I'm not looking for a novel about queer suffering, but I'd like a novel with some connection to reality? And this just had so many things that rang false for me: we hear about the selkie story because it's traditionally told in the family, specifically by the conservative Irish Catholic father, but the story as told on page is very new age woo retelling including fairly graphic details of seal fucking, which... no. He wouldn't tell about his great-whatever grandfather having sex in evocative erotic prose. (The character voices were all over the place generally.) We have basically a flash hate mob that chases the German family out of town, but they're okay with whatever gender is happening. There's some general prejudice in the town against the Catholic bog Irish family, but the French-Canadian socialite mother has zero problems with her very proper daughter dating the son. Some American fighter pilots show up on the British airbase more or less solely to spew vile homophobia all over the place and then vanish, while none of the British or Commonwealth pilots or airmen agree with them. (Please look up how the UK and Commonwealth countries treated queer servicemen! It was not good!) One of the brothers turns out to be The Worst just to yeet him from the love triangle. We never get any sense of what the fey living in the river are, or how they're connected to seal fuck magic. Stuff just shows up, then vanishes again, and there's no sense of it being structured into the narrative!
So at the end of the day, the novel felt sort of floaty and vibe based, and it was hard for me to get invested in anything, mostly because I was pretty sure it would all literally magically turn out to be fine, and no one's actions seemed to have much in the way of motivation or consequences, and none of the main characters were going to have any flaws.
The following may be a personal quibble: I generally don't like romances with very short sections of alternating first person or even quickly alternating limited third (which can feel like someone's RP logs), because it so often feels like the author doesn't trust the reader, and wants to reassure them of what's going on in each character's head: just to really make sure that we're not worried about feelings being reciprocated, etc. Paylor (mostly) avoided the worst sin of this format: telling the same scene over and over again from different points of view, but it still felt muddy and over explaining feelings when what I really wanted explained was the magic.
Though it does get points over Masters of the Air for several characters considering that maybe firebombing the shit out of civilians wasn't the best path to victory. I'm giving it a whole extra star rating just for that.