Marked by Scorn: An Anthology Featuring Non-Traditional Relationships by Dominica Malcolm

Marked by Scorn: An Anthology Featuring Non-Traditional Relationships Reviews

• 
  Jaymee Goh

  Content warning for biphobia, misgendering, tragic queers. I was excited to read this anthology but could barely finish the first three. I pressed on because I really wanted to support it, but the stories are really not all that strong: they read like confessions, or they read like generic slice-of-life arguments with no verve, no reason for me to feel emotional investment in the characters or their problems. Even competently-written stories are lackluster or bogged down with cliche. Queer characters who are long-time partners bicker as partners do, but to the extent that I have no idea why they are together or why I should care that they are bickering. At least one story has the polyamorous relationship in it feel like the punchline, the "tee-hee!" pay-off, which... is not much of a pay-off when I don't even know or care about the characters involved.
  
  The standout story for me is the story that bothers me most of all for its transphobia: "Keeping Mum About Dad," in which a teenager goes on and on about her clearly-transgender father, only to turn around and claim that her parents are a "loving lesbian couple"--WTF? You don't get to claim that a character is a "lesbian" after using male pronouns and identifying him as a male parent--even moreso when it's the narrator herself who "outs" the father's identity to the reader. Even with a generous read--that the father DOES identity as a lesbian and as a woman despite chest-binding and presenting as male to everybody--this should come from the voice of the father character, not the narrator! This struck me as so problematic I almost didn't read the rest of the anthology.
  
  Many stories fail under interrogation of character-building and internal logic--for instance, how does a city guy partnered to a redneck have never gone hunting with the latter despite the two of them being intimate enough to live together?--and I suspect that addressing those issues would have made the stories cave. There is often no build-up, like I'm expected to care about these characters populating these stories simply because they're queer or poly.
• 
  G.K. Hansen

  I'm in this, so I am clearly biased, but the rest of the stories were also a delight--my personal favorite is what I have been fondly referring to in my head as the Gay Werewolf story (I am a huge sucker for queer monsters), but I enjoyed them all. A+
  
  
  Editing to add, some years later: I think I was too delighted to receive the first physical book I was published in to be objective, because some of these stories are. Not good? I still love the Gay Werewolf story and the poems, and clearly my own work is Great, but I'm disappointed upon my rereads in the quality and content of many of the others, especially Keeping Mum About Dad, which just comes off kind of transphobic.
  
  Still glad to be able to hold it in my hands, though.
• 
  Lily

  Biphobia, transphobia, misgendering. I'm out. DNF-ing this mess. There was one story I loved, hence the two stars instead of one.
• 
  Jeffrey

  A fantastic anthology of stories of relationships of the heart. Most outside religious or societal 'straight norms'. A breath of fresh air; excellent choices in international writing styles, with high quality in narrative.
• 
  Julia

  I really wanted to like this collection but most of the stories didn't really do it for me – too plodding and expository, like they were trying to explain or justify non-traditional relationships instead of just showing them in all their complexity. That said, I liked almost all the poems.
• 
  Dominica

  I'm the editor of this book so I'm not writing a review. But if you're interested in getting a copy of this book prior to the release date (at least a month early), I'm currently crowdfunding it until early June. Check it out at
  https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ma...