Ron Does Stuff

So, aside from finding The Secret of Derek Guerrero, the Philippine Book Fair also helped me to reconnect with some of the publishing people I knew when I still covered the books and publishing beat for the newspaper I used to work for. After catching up on the literal past decade, I got contact information as well as an offer to get copies of certain books.

This is how I ended up with a list of queer books on Edelweiss and after perusing the titles and finding out what it is I’m allowed to get — I didn’t get carte blanche or anything! — I was immediately hooked by this book’s premise.

Now will this book deliver on that cute premise? Let’s see!

We Could Be Heroes is about Patrick and Will, two gay men whose lives couldn’t be any more different. Will works as a drag queen and a bookseller at a secondhand bookstore, while Patrick is the main star of a superhero franchise. Their paths wouldn’t normally cross but since Patrick is doing reshoots of his movie right in Will’s neighborhood, a chance encounter brings the two of them together.

That chance encounter soon becomes a friendship, which soon blossoms into a relationship. But with such a wide divide between the two of them, the cracks soon begin to show and they’re soon forced to make a choice. Will their blossoming relationship survive or will it end up shriveled instead?

First off, I can’t be the only one who immediately visualized Chris Evans as Patrick Lake. Because not only did the physical description generally fit him, even the “Aww shucks” demeanor seemed copied directly from the way Chris comported himself during the entirety of his time as Captain America. Not that I mind or that this is a negative, mind you. It even made me nostalgic for Flaunt magazine Chris Evans, which you can reminisce about in the gallery below.

The Chris Evans visual definitely gave the book reading experience a little extra oomph, to say the least. It was immediately easier to see him as a romantic lead and while this book isn’t particularly spicy, what little spice we do get is immediately enhanced by the Chris Evans visual in your head.

Will was also easy to emphatize with, at least in the beginning of the novel. It’s not so much that he does something horrible in the story. In fact, between him and Patrick, Will is the more principled of the two and is definitely the one wronged later on in the novel. It’s just that at certain points in the novel he starts sounding like those insufferable white gays on stan Twitter and it doesn’t help that Will’s stan list reflects that particular demographic as well. And those gay guys like to weaponize their identity in fandom wars and use it on POC gays like yours truly and I just ended up transferring my bad feelings about that group onto Will and yes I know I need therapy.

BESIDES THAT, I really liked how Philip Ellis built up the relationship between Patrick and Will early on in the novel. It reminded me a lot of Notting Hill which is totally fine since I love Notting Hill. There’s the quirky side characters and even a similar awkward family dinner where Patrick makes an appearance and it’s all very enjoyable.

Another work this book paid homage to is Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — Philip Ellis mentions it in the acknowledgements — which is another book that I love. I really enjoyed the snippets featuring the creators of the Captain Kismet comics and it added depth to the story once Philip Ellis brings the two timelines together near the end.

I also appreciated the acknowledgment of gentrification and the COVID-19 pandemic and the effect both have had on queer spaces. I don’t know if it’s exactly the same since this novel is set in the United Kingdom and I’m all the way here in the “Global South”, but I’ve seen how gentrification has almost completely erased Malate’s gay past.

That’s another added layer that I appreciated about this book. It’s a queer romance that isn’t divorced from the issues that queer people face out in the real world and Philip Ellis does a good job of putting that in without sacrificing too much of the romance element of the book. It’s a hard balancing act that is hard to get right, because you either end up making your romance too preachy or have it entirely divorced from anything a queer person recognizes as the real world.

The book generally zips merrily along until around the 60 percent mark, where the big conflict between Patrick and Will happens. While Patrick explains his breakdown near the end of the book, it really didn’t make sense to me while I was reading it so pretty much the next 40 percent or so of the book left me a little cold since I didn’t understand why they had to break up in the first place. It finally makes sense near the end of the book, but I wish it had been a little clearer when it actually happened.

But at the end of the day, it’s not really a dealbreaker when it comes to this book. I found it to be an enjoyable queer romance that isn’t just about masc for masc gays falling for each other while being all masc. It doesn’t shy from showing readers some of the very real things that the queer community faces while also giving them a cute queer romance that they can gush about. Check it out when it comes out on June 4!