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Review: Love & Limitations

Just got a great review of Love & Limitations from Jim Comer. 🙂

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Love and Limitations is a collection of short stories, romantically themed, which feature gay and trans men. There is not a unifying theme or characters; each stands on its own. Coatsworth is known as a writer of fantastic literature, much of it SF-themed, but these stories are mundane in their settings.

“I Only Want To Be With You” is a more-or-less vanilla holiday romance, but “The Boy In The Band” relies on Coatsworth’s knowledge of Arizona, where he lived for many years, and his adolescence, with the horrors of gay life in high school transferred to a trans boy who becomes suicidal, and is saved by an older gay man. This semi-autobiographical story was very affecting to read, and one of the two best in the book.

“Translation” draws on Coatsworth’s close familiarity with the Italian language, portraying a bilingual workplace romance.  The long tale “Slow Thaw” is the most serious and the best researched work in this collection: set in Antarctica, it recounts the adventure of two LGBT polar explorers as they seek to measure global warming, amidst the dangers of the ice.

The last story, “Ten”, counts down the days before Christmas, and a man’s search for love. This story was truly well written, with attention to both the characters’ emotions and the readers’.

What can we make of this? I would probably not have picked this book up without the intervention of Coatsworth, who is its author and a friend of mine. I was given the book without strings attached (that is, without the expectation of a review), and was surprised by the quality of the work.

I enjoyed “Slow Thaw” and “The Boy In The Band”, with their characters’ rich development and the well-researched settings. “Slow Thaw”’s characters seem strong enough to carry a novel, in particular.

Other works were written to enter contests, or something similar, and Coatsworth’s SF talents are mostly missing from this book. All in all, it wasn’t bad, and romance lovers as well as Coatsworth completists should look this one up. 

The Reviewer

J. Comer is a writer and teacher who lives in Northern California.

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