Quote: A twelve-year-old boy pretends to sleep while his mother touches him. Both are naked in the boy’s bed.The woman is frightened of the changes puberty might bring to their relationship. He's all she has. That son’s mind is elsewhere as his mother masturbates beside him.
i WANT TO FUCK YOU was designed to be read in seven sittings over the course of one week.

i WANT TO FUCK YOU 
LOCATION: TOKYO 
TIME: THE RECENT PAST

i WANT TO FUCK YOU traces the erotic imagination of a pre-teen Japanese schoolboy one week away from his first orgasm. 
i WANT TO FUCK YOU follows that boy’s shifting fantasies over the course of seven days.The boy's name is Takeo and, like many a twelve-year-old, he’s more than a little curious about sexual possibilities. 
This ground-breaking novel by P-P Hartnett also features Liam, recently arrived from London to work as a fashion model.

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 Equally caught up in this pantomime of early lust is Handa himself, who keeps repeating his mantra that he would never fuck young Takeo, an innocent boy in his charge, though every urge makes him want to do just that. Young Takeo has no concrete idea of what form sex between the two would take, but he desperately would like it to happen; a manly closeness, a smothering embrace, a rapture to bond him with this symbol of strength and gentleness.

Takeo's story seems central to this novel, perhaps because it is the freshest and the least clouded by past disappointments. The other characters who live in the danchi or use the building have been bruised by the buffeting they have received from the outside world. Akio knows that at age eighteen his body can excite many men and women, and his own thirst for new experience leads him to take up a job as a rent boy catering to the requests of older men, a situation he ?nds not at all unpleasant. Jeff, twenty-something, gay and a professional model from the United States, is confident and offensive, but also only one step ahead of whatever he is running from. Shigeru is nineteen and has been secretly meeting men for sexual encounters through the popular gay magazine Barazoku (The Rose Tribe). He perhaps represents the ultimate fear of all of the people in this novel who labor to keep themselves protected from the outside world, and maybe the ultimate liberation from that fear, when he decides that suicide is the answer to his situation.

The women who appear in the novel inhabit the same emotional world of need and searching as do the males, though whereas the males reach out to other males for their adventure, most of the women turn to their opposites, to males, for deliverance. The most confused among the females might be Takeo's mother, who crawls in bed with him so that her body can touch his, and though Takeo keeps breathing quietly in order to play the sleeping boy, both of them know the essence of what is taking place.

P-P Hartnett's book has a lot of Tokyo ambience in it. A glossary at the end of the text explains the Japanese words and phrases used in the story. He clearly has immersed himself in life as it is lived in Japan's capital city and everything he describes, regardless of how it might seem to have been crafted purely for symbolic effect, is, from my experience, based on real places and things that really happen in Tokyo. It is a story structured clearly and told in a straightforward manner.

My one reservation is that the author has given his Japanese characters Western personalities. I cannot help but feel the Japanese tend to use an inner logic for processing con?ict and desires that is different from the emotional matrixes of Westerners. But then again, since human beings the world over share physical and genetic material that is identical, it may be that only differences in language usage between my Japanese and my Western friends mask what is after all a largely similar process.

   

Quote: War hovers in the wings with the fate of the Republic at stake when the old doge dies. Fourteen-year-old Nico, a street urchin from the poorest Venetian parish, is chosen at random to tally votes in the upcoming election for a new leader. Uprooted from his old life and transplanted to the doge’s palace, Nico becomes an alienated outsider at the mercy of scheming nobles.
Andrea Contarini, sixtieth doge of Venice, wants the ducal throne less than Nico wants to be ballot boy. Both walk a golden tightrope over treachery and deceit. When he witnesses a court clerk burned at the stake for being gay, Nico despairs. His romantic attraction to men is as powerful as his fear of fiery death and an eternity in Hell.



Taking advantage of the fraught transition in the Doge’s Palace, the hostile duke of Austria pushes Trieste to rebel against Venetian domination, jeopardizing her mastery of the Adriatic Sea. The Venetian nobles split, trapping the doge between hawks rabid for war, and rich merchants desperate for peace. With his own life on the line, Andrea Contarini opts to attack decisively and end the crisis swiftly, but his gambit is sabotaged. Trusting only the boy at his side, Contarini sends Nico to Trieste to be his eyes and ears. As the Venetian commanders wrangle over tactics, Nico falls for Astolfo, the young, charismatic lord of Castle Moccò, an indispensable but unreliable ally.