The Road to the Stars

DNF - PG 31

Why?

There's actually two reasons why and, as such, I'm dividing this book into the two reasons. The first part is going to be about the book the second is going to be about the author (so you already know it's going to be one of those reviews.

The Book

This books starts off with some fake news articles showing the passage of time and humanities future. The chapter one treats us to a character dump. Note: this is not an info-dump, because not a lot of information is offered here. Just that earth is basically being stripped of all value by people that no longer live here and the people that do still live here are desperate to stop this by...building spaceships of their own?

Anyway, all these characters are introduced that I have no prayer of ever keeping straight and, interestingly enough, it doesn't seem to matter because the next two chapters changes the focus with only one of these characters seeming to have any importance.

Also, the chapters introduce head hopping. Or maybe it was already there in chapter one but because I couldn't keep the characters straight I didn't notice it. (And if you know me, you know that head hopping is one thing I cannot put up with.)

The book's days were already number though, for giving me such a boring first chapter and, instead of doing something interesting in the next chapters, we get our two mains talking about how upset they are for being contacted by the character in the first chapter, and an entire female cast. There were two men mentioned, but one of them was there just to deride. Look, I do get what the book was trying to do - but every important character being female feels just as disingenuous as every important character being male.

I would like to note, though, this is one of the few sapphic books I have come across that does not perpetually exist in ‘male gaze'. (Even the ones written by women!) However, this book was just not working for me due to the boring start, irrelevant info dumping in chapters two and three, and the very borderline chick-lit vibe with the married couple, the daughters, the huge house, ect.

Which lead me to checking out the previous book in the series to see what I'd missed, because at times it does feel like I missed something.

Which lead me to discovering some very important, interesting information about:

The Author

So...

Adam Gaffn is a middle aged cishet man with a wife. Now, I'd like to say, I'm not against straight men writing Sapphic fiction, no more than I am against straight women writing Achillean. Some are good. Some are awful. (To be fair, I have read my fair share of Sapphic fiction written by women that exist in that gross, male-gaze-y area. I was honestly expecting this book to be like that - because the cover does nothing to dissuade me from those thoughts.)

But, anyway, the gender and sexuality of the author is not a issue for me.

However, instead of being happy to write Sapphic books as a cishet man, he decided to catfish his readers. He created a fake persona, AC Adams, that claimed to be a lesbian with a wife and was a professor of English in Boston. His work goes beyond a pen name, right into lying through his teeth about who was writing these books.

If you would like to fall into this rabbit hole, the way I've been doing the past four hours, I shall leave you links:

https://jae-fiction.com/catfishing-in-the-sapphic-fiction-community/
https://thesapphicquill.com/it-wasnt-a-pen-name-guest-post-nat-paga/
https://www.jscottcoatsworth.com/author-spotlight-a-c-adams/?cn-reloaded=1
http://adrianjsmithbooks.com/uncategorized/web-of-lies-the-untangling/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnWCjnSjNX4

I would like to mention that I have searched for these ‘apologies' that were mentioned a couple of times that he gave, but they seem pretty well hidden or like he deleted them in the hopes that this would disappear.

Please do not let it disappear. Make authors be held accountable for their actions. Authors need to learn that their poor actions do not get wiped away. They can learn and do better, but they cannot make us forget their previous actions.

(I don't do it, but I'm starting to think that I should google new to me authors and find out if they have any skeletons in their closets that I need to be aware of.)