Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Razorblade Tears

2.5 stars. Well this was a bummer. I found Cosby's BLACKTOP WASTELAND tropey fun that knew its tropes. He's still good at plotting, the structure here and the raising and raising and raising of the stakes is good, but the emotional arc of this book falls worse than flat. I would warn queer readers in particular that homophobia is integral to the central plot and involved in great detail for the whole book.

The main trope we're working in here is the opposites have to work together buddy crime story. Often you see this with cops, like LETHAL WEAPON, but this time it's too aging ex-cons out for revenge after their sons, a gay married couple, are murdered in what looks like a hit. While both Ike and Buddy Lee ran in bad circles in their younger days, they've both gone straight. Ike is Black, married, and runs a successful landscaping business. Buddy Lee is white, divorced, and drinking himself to death in a trailer. They do not appear to be much of a match at first, Buddy Lee is a casually racist good old boy and Ike does not have much tolerance for his bullshit. But they are able to put that aside because they both have an overwhelming sense of regret that their sons died while they were not on good terms. Both fathers rejected their sons sexuality and neither fully understood how badly they acted until their sons were dead.

I'm not unsympathetic to their plight. And as a premise I'm with it. The problem is that we stay in this exact same emotional state for the entire book. No real progress is made, we hash out the exact same beats over and over again, and instead of rejecting and moving on from harmful homophobia, we just wallow in it for the entire book. They want to be better, but they can't change overnight, that's true, but every single conversation is back to the same things over and over again, their work not just that of revenge but of a kind of talk therapy. Which is fine for them, but for me as a reader it was just a near-constant barrage of homophobic acts and language that I didn't need. I got it. They were bad dads, but it's dwelt on to such an extent and without much of a journey, and includes a violent reaction in a gay bar that I extra didn't need.

I think we are supposed to find these men charming, supposed to see that they mean well and want to be better. And I did. Their dialogue is often hilarious, Cosby has a knack for action scenes and one-liners that should have him scooped up by the screenwriting industry. But once I know how badly these men acted towards their sons, it didn't help me to go back over it so often. It only made it harder for me to read and only made me more resentful of them instead of finding them more relatable. On top of that, the bad guys have to be distinguished from our two good guys by being even worse. There is an awful lot of racist, sexist, and homophobic language here, a whole litany of slurs, just to make it clear how bad the bad guys are. Didn't need that either.

On top of all that, the bones of the plot didn't make much sense to me after the mysteries were all pieced together, and there was even more problematic stuff in those twists. Details after spoiler tag. (view spoiler)[We never understand why Tangerine decided to go after her boyfriend in the first place. It's unclear why two gay men would want to write a story that involves publicly outing a trans woman who may not be publicly out, and that seems to be shaming a straight man for being with her. That I could never quite figure out. While some queer folks have been known to publicly shame and out conservative straight men, this felt like something the very good men we are told about over and over again would not do. I didn't get it. I also felt like the reveal of Tangerine's gender was not great. Someone being trans should not be a plot reveal! It didn't help that I guessed at it quite early in the book and spent the next hundred pages or so dreading it. Not to mention that I don't understand how two 27-year-old men already have a 3-year-old daughter, but then again she only exists to eventually be kidnapped so we can raise the stakes to the highest possible level. (hide spoiler)]

Eventually this turned from a read I was enjoying to one I was actively not enjoying, which is always an unfortunate turn of events. I had issues with some problematic sexist elements in Cosby's first novel, MY DARKEST PRAYER, this is more slickly written than that one, but somehow more problematic. I know my experience here won't be everyone's, but for readers that are sensitive to issues of parental rejection and queerphobia, there is just an awful lot of it to digest here and for me it didn't go down pleasantly.