A Wonderful Book: "Without Words"

I have been reading a number of books on Kindle, as I said, and I have come across a dozen great authors, about whose existence I had not been aware.  Unfortunately, in the literary environment in which we find ourselves, you can't depend on an author who has written a fantastic book to keep repeating the same feat with subsequent books.  (I mean, you never could, really; the best indication of how good a book is, is to read the first quarter or so of it.)

The book, a fantasy, was Without Words, the author is Cameron Darrow, and I'm close to being without words to sing the praises of this particular book!  The title refers to a really unique character in the book, who has difficulty with language.  All through the book, this character struggles to communicate with her tribe.  She is not unintelligent; the conceit of the book is that, due to an extreme effort needed to save her life when she was an infant, the required magic damaged her language ability.  There are a handful of wonderful other characters, but this central, linguistically challenged character, Zifa, carries the entire story, and the entire book.  With careful skill, the author succeeds in describing Zifa's---often complex---thought processes, which she struggles to convey purely at the vocabulary level, being unable to use sentences at all, except ones that she has memorized.

Many of the stories that I have read have the theme of prejudice running through them, sometimes even racism.  On the other hand, a lot of the stories are close to being potboilers: stories that are close to being formulaic, focusing on comfortable themes, of coming out, or 'friends to lovers,' or 'age-gap romances,' or any number of such frames.  This is not to say that the authors do not take time to invent an interesting plot, and interesting circumstances, and insert interesting details, and set these stories in interesting locations, or create glamor by making one or both protagonists fabulously wealthy, or powerful, or a movie star.  It is interesting, but natural, though, that authors of lesbian romance novels are sensitive to the existence of prejudice.

Another fascinating fact is how these stories deal with sex.  (I had to resist trivializing the word 'sex' by placing an exclamation point after it.)  Sex is dealt with in various ways; some authors are at pains to describe exactly how each partner pleasures the other; some authors do not focus on sex at all; some authors describe the opening moments of an intimate encounter---especially if the level of intimacy escalates throughout the story, and then 'fade to black' a very clever phrase that describes, rather graphically, a literary device where the description of the sex is gradually faded out.  The number of acronyms used with lesbian romance is vast; it is clear that lesbians have no patience with long phrases that could be abbreviated into a few initials.  A few are HEA ('Happily Ever After'), a description of an ending, which allows the option for a reader to not choose a book that ends in too trite a fashion, HFN ('Happily For Now'), and I suppose there is some acronym for a story that ends tragically.  Without Words is a HEA book.