Okay, so AJ Demas is the author of the really excellent One Night in Boukos, and, as Alice Degan, the even more excellent and completely different From All False Doctrine.
This, The House of the Red Balconies, is, as you see, from the Demas name. That means it’s set in a sort of alternate Classical Greece/Persia type of world. They basically read like historicals. There’s no magic, so “alternate world Classical Greece/Persia historicals” is probably the best description of this sub-sub-sub-genre.
Like all the Demas titles, this is a romance; like most, it’s m/m romance. The House of the Red Balconies offers exactly what we’ve come to expect from AJ Demas: good writing, good plotting, sympathetic and well-drawn characters, great worldbuilding, enough depth that it’s not pure fluff. I liked Red Balconies quite a bit, but what I want to mention here is something that … I’m not completely sure was a thing in the other books? Or not nearly as much so.
This is: secondary characters who are first drawn as pretty unsympathetic, but then are gently nudged toward the sympathetic end of the spectrum. This reminds me a lot of Barbara Hambly, except that when Hambly does this, it’s usually in one fast moment. She sets you up to think of a secondary character as unpleasant and unsympathetic and then in one or a few sentences, completely reorients your opinion. This was a lot more subtle, which is why I say it’s a kind of gentle nudging.
In Red Balconies, there are two secondary characters who are handled differently, but both fit this pattern.
The first is Governor Loukianos. He is ineffectual. He doesn’t take his job seriously. He is impractical. He is shallow. He is passive. And yet … and yet …
This is a character I would ordinarily not like at all. It’s not that Demas makes him not be the way he is. It’s that Loukianos tends to rise to the occasion and do better than the protagonist really thinks he will (or than the reader might think he will). Right at the end, when the primary protagonist basically tells him firmly to straighten up and fly right, Loukianos is at a point when he can and does listen.
The second is the mistress of the House of the Red Balconies. This house is one of half a dozen or so houses of … um … medium repute? Not really ill repute. They’re houses where “companions” live, and the companions hang out with visitors and make themselves good company, and yes, this can extend to sexual relationships, but the actual companionship does seem to be primary a lot of the time. Some of the companions are indentured to the houses, others are free. The mistress of the house in question seems like just the sort of character I most dislike — petty, selfish, none too bright, mean-spirited. But, the thing is, she isn’t. She is in fact none too bright, which is why she comes off like that, but she isn’t actually as petty and not nearly as mean-spirited as she sometimes seems.
This is really unusual! Both these secondary characters are unusual! They could so easily have turned into such complete cliches, but they didn’t! Both of them were better people than they seemed at first, and they both had character arcs that led upward, and that was not just an interesting way to handle them (looking at the craft of the story), it was also a nice way to handle them (looking at the story as a reader). It’s not like every single character in this story is nicer than he or she seems, because no. But it is true that only one unpleasant guy is actually no-fooling unpleasant. Every other character is a pretty nice person — or gets nicer as the story progresses. That is unusual, to take minor characters who are presented fairly negatively and then gently nudge them along until they turn out to actually be okay after all. I appreciated that a lot.
Also!
In the back of Red Balconies is a reference to an upcoming story called Lion and Snake, which is described thus:
In a walled fortress with no way in or out lives the beaten hero of the Western Mountains, imprisoned by his enemies. Up the mountain one spring comes a young man to be his bride—and to kill him. But nothing goes according to plan.
That’s a really good two-sentence teaser. I mean, for me. This sounds like a Beauty and the Beast setup, which is almost guaranteed to make me sit up and take notice.
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I didn’t know Alice Degan and A.J. Demas were the same person, but now you mention it I can see some similarity in their positive worldview, where most people are basically good, or at least trying to be decent human beings just living their lives the best they can.
Do you know her Heaven & Earth series? Urban fantasy novellas about supernaturals living in a magical apartment in Toronto. The first one is from the POV of Claire who works for an agency that organizes supernatural hunts for tourists. In the original version Claire starts out pretty unsympathetic, a villain actually, then begins to redeem herself.
In the new edition though, she rewrote it and Claire has no idea what’s going on, she thinks they are hiring actors for fake hunts. I have both versions and it’s fun to see the little edits that make Claire a nicer person. E.g. her opinions about the neighborhood.
I didn’t know there were two versions, Maria, but yes, I read the first couple and liked them.