Missing Review
Posted in My ParSec reviews, Writing at 12:00 on 1 May 2025
In my post about the latest issue of ParSec magazine I said it would contain my review of Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto.
Well; it didn’t.
After the issue had been released I received an email from ParSec’s editor saying that just before the issue went live he had received a letter from the book’s publisher demanding that my review be taken down.
The letter apparently described my review as “hugely upsetting to the author and a lot of people.” Quite how that could be the case when the review had yet to appear is a point to ponder. The author maybe – if the review had been shared with them – but a lot of people?
The letter claimed that I had misgendered the book’s protagonist, Edie, throughout as “they are explicitly known as they/them throughout the entirety of the book” and I had failed to follow that designation.
Now: the book was written in the first person singular by a narrator who was clearly not male. With such a narrator occasions on which the use of they/them will describe the protagonist will be vanishingly rare.
Regular readers of this blog will know how unlikely it is that something as striking as a still relatively uncommon use of personal pronouns would pass me by.
Nvertheless, just to check, I did a quick scan of the Advanced Reading Copy sent to me for review and, as I had recalled, the pronouns used to describe the protagonist are actually ‘I’ and ‘me’ (naturally so for a first person narration) – or ‘you’ when the narrator was being spoken to by other characters. I could find no instance of ‘they/them/their’ at all. In this circumstance it can surely be understood why a humble reviewer would assume that the normal pronouns for a female character would apply.
My review, as reviews must be, accordingly was based on the text as written – or at least as published in the ARC.
In the cold light of day and coming to the review afresh there was a three word passage which perhaps came across as more flippant and thoughtless than I intended. Had I been contacted directly about this I would have acceded to its removal/replacement without hesitation. I was not given the opportunity.
I will nevertheless alter that when I post the review here in due course.
I have no quibble with ParSec’s editor’s decision not to publish the review. He has after all a relationship with the publisher to nurture but I would add he has enough on his plate without having to deal with a back and forth about something so trivial as a book review.
I must add that it used to be considered bad form for an author to complain about a review.
But that a publisher can all but demand a review not be printed is surely a bit over the score.