It’s no secret that I am a big fan of Lev AC Rosen’s Evander Mills series. The first two books, Lavender House and The Bell in the Fog were on my favorites lists for the past two years. When I interviewed Rosen last year he spoke about how Lavender House was his Agatha Christie, and The Bell in the Fog was his Raymond Chandler. So I was extremely curious to see what the vibe of Rough Pages would be. I am thrilled to say that he has really defined the voice of this series and that this book is no author’s but Lev AC Rosen.

Though stories of queer people pre-Stonewall are becoming more common, I have yet to find a series that encapsulates the day-to-day lives, hardships, and joys as effectively as the Evander Mills series. Rosen always does his homework and tends to feature an aspect of 1950’s queer culture in each book, this one getting a little meta and diving into queer book services. These were basically subscriptions that independent sellers would set up and send you a queer book every month, quarter, etc. This had to be done incredibly carefully because as Rough Pages gets into, it was illegal to send “obscene” material through the mail at the time. Rosen masterfully weaves this bit of history into his characters and setting in a way that is immediately compelling and sets up what I think is the best mystery he’s had yet.

For me what makes this book the best of the three so far is the balance of emotions that the characters and the reader go through. It would be extremely easy to make these books into sadness porn about the very real struggles, discrimination, and violence queer people faced at this time. Where Rough Pages in particular shines is in balancing the precariousness with the joy. There is fear, there is stress, but there is also love, community, and connection. It’s goddamn beautiful and I almost teared up at multiple points throughout the book.

Rosen also excels at putting his protagonist through his paces and building real character growth. Detective novels can often be static, the leads set in stone as eccentric but effective investigators. Andy is a vastly different character even at the beginning of Rough Pages than he was in Lavender House. And notably, just because Andy is a gay man does not mean he is immune to the structural problems around him. In both The Bell and the Fog and Rough Pages Andy interacts with queer people of color and doesn’t quite get right away what a different experience they have compared to him. Realizing and navigating his white privilege is an important part of his growth and like a lot of people he is not great at it all the time. 

I wanted to end this review on something I don’t normally do, which is to include a fairly long quote from the book. But I genuinely couldn’t think of a better way to communicate how I felt about this quote rather than to just include, and if you don’t end up reading the book I think it’s important that everybody reads this.

“If people are afraid of you reading a thing—a reporter, the mob, the government—that means they’re afraid of reading it too. Afraid of knowing what’s in the book, whether it be some personal secret, or just some story of love that could make someone feel less alone. Books are just as dangerous to the people who don’t want us to read them as they are to us. Because they make us less alone. They make us see ourselves. They make us realize what we deserve. And sometimes they make people who aren’t like us realize it, too. That’s why they’re dangerous. And that’s why we all have to live dangerously—so we keep reading them.”

—Rough Pages, chapter 18

It’s worth noting that Rosen’s young adult novel Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) is one of the most banned books in the U.S. right now because it talks about *gasp* the fact that teenagers have sex! So he knows a thing or two about censorship, the power that books can have and the fear they inspire.

Do yourself a favor this fall and check out Rough Pages and then maybe a banned book or two? It’s the coziest way to be dangerous.