One graphic novel and two (cough) graphic novels

Chivalry
by Neil Gaiman
illust. by Colleen Doran
Recommended Ages: 12+

Winner of the 2023 Locus Award for Best Illustrated and Art Book is this tall board book/graphic novel by the author of Good Omens, American Gods, Stardust, Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, etc., etc. – in short, He Who Can Do No Wrong – with soft, watercolorish pictures in a Howard Pylesque strain of Arthurian romance. Doran also illusrated two other books by Gaiman: Troll Bridge and Snow, Glass, Apples.

This is such a short, quirky romance that it's almost a pity to summarize it, for fear of giving away too much. One of its quirks is its rather unromantic approach to romance (in the sense of tales of chivalry). When elderly widow Mrs. Whitaker peels back a fur coat at the village thrift shop, she immediately and matter-of-factly recognizes the Holy Grail and buys it for 50 pence, then stops at the butcher's to buy a piece of liver for her dinner. She gives it a polish and sets it on the mantel, next to a shirtless photograph of her long-dead husband in his prime. If memory serves, there was a ceramic dog on the other side of it. Modern-day visitors aren't very impressed. But then a man out of time shows up on her doorstep – Sir Galahad himself, pursuing his quest across centuries.

The effect Mrs. Whitaker has on this gallant knight, and that he has on her neighborhood, are low-key hilarious. As adventures go, it's very mild and gentle, with a sensible and strong-willed old lady making one of the heroes of British legend seem like an over-excited child who needs but a plate of cookies and a glass of milk to calm him down. There's a wry touch of the other type of romance (with the lovely local girl riding off into the sunset with the comely knight), and a softly ironic twist at the end, and a general sense that the story is really about how lonely it is to be a widow of modest means who has outlived her husband by decades.

It's built like a children's picture-book, but the art is really too good to be kept for children. Everybody should look at it and have pictures like these in their imagination, even if their life is as matter-of-fact and prosaic as Mrs. Whitaker's. This is artwork so beautiful that it must put some who look at it, at least, in a frame of mind to look for miracles in everyday places, like Oxfam or Goodwill.

Gathering the Sun by Kelly Moore
Taste by Melanie Harlow
Recommended Ages: 18+

In contrast to the above-reviewed high-quality work of subversively chaste fantasy, I also recently picked up a couple of naughty titles. One was a western romance that I halfway expected to be kind of like the "Harlequin Intrigue" title I read a few months ago – more mystery/adventure than anything else, with an everybody-keeps-their-hands-to-themselves romance. The other, I thought might be similar Hallmark movie stuff, with a couple of hot chefs cooking up sensually delicious food while losing their hearts to each other. Well, they weren't like that after all, which I should have guessed upon seeing the sexy cover art. And I'm humble enough to admit that when under-the-clothes body parts started having conversations, I didn't set the book aside.

The western one is by Kelly Moore, whose Fantastic Fiction page (see link on her name, above) is loaded with thumbnail images of book covers dominated by buff, bare torsos. Unsurprisingly, the male protagonist in this book has trouble keeping his clothes on around the female lead, despite the fact that her family is threatening to drive him off the Wyoming ranch land he recently bought. He should also be concerned, above all, for the little kid he has adopted as his own son, after the boy's father murdered his mother, for whom the would-be rancher carried an unrequited torch. The female romantic lead is a teacher who is trying to break free of the toxic control of her father, who corrupts everything he touches. I'm sure there will be blood if ever this storyline comes to a conclusion. This installment doesn't hold back from spilling other bodily fluids, however. The sexy main couple moves fast in their relationship, for sure.

Unfortunately, the writing isn't great. Some of the not-greatness could have been cleaned up by a good, on-their-toes proofreader. Some of it could simply be the artifact of a writing career that emphasizes quantity over quality. I mean, this Kelly Moore has written something like 56 romance novels. There's a certain quality of being rushed to it. Guilty pleasure that it was, it really didn't have the lyricism to go with it. And it isn't a complete story; it peters out in a "to be continued" kind of thing. I'm not going to pursue this series further, thanks.

As for the Hallmark movie type book, well, it was smut, too. But it was much better smut, from a literary standpoint. Well, "literary" may be too strong a word. It was comparatively well-written, though I really would have been more turned on if it had made more of the sensual possibilities of a chef and a sommelier together in the kitchen, exploring food and drink that look and taste so good that the hero and heroine kind of make love without even taking their clothes off. It's what the concept cries out for. But the food gets disappointingly short shrift and once the hero couple finds themselves stranded together in a single-bed motel room during a blizzard, the pent-up sexual tension that has existed between them since they were, like, five years old goes "twang" like a rubber band and the ensuing shtupfest seems to absorb all of the author's considerable powers.

Eventually, things do start to get genuinely romantic between these two, particularly after the girl realizes that she has fallen pregnant and the guy starts to rethink his love-em-and-leave-em ways. Since I suspended my morality so far as to read it to the end, I won't scruple to spoil the ending: they end up getting married and starting a family together. So it turns out to be a Hallmark movie, after all – only with a handful of scenes that you'd only see on the "unrated, mature audiences only" DVD.

I shouldn't have to say it, but Adult Content Advisories are in effect for both of these books. Melanie Harlow, whose oeuvre is slightly smaller (around 33 novels) and less prone to featuring beefcake on their covers than Kelly Moore's, could probably write something really worth reading, on the strength of good prose, if she could only think up a story structure whose main points weren't pegged to steamy bedroom scenes. Maybe she could start by rewriting this book so that, instead of boobs and buttocks, the main attractions were mouthwatering wine and food and no-holds-barred repartee between the romantic leads. Heck, that story might even make it onto the Hallmark Channel.