Shiver me Timbers–I love Our Flag Means Death!
The buzziest romance show streaming this spring turned out not to be season 2 of Bridgerton, but HBO Max’s pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death (you can watch the trailer on HBO’s site here). OFMD stars Rhys Darby as the foppish and massively unqualified “Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet and Taika Waititi as the legendary Blackbeard (Edward Teach, or ‘Ed’ to Stede). Along with a crew of generally incompetent misfits, the two men misadventure their way across the 1700s Caribbean, and find themselves in the most unlikely of opposites-attract romances.
The show has been praised for its inclusivity. It rejects the common TV practice of queerbaiting, and actually allows Stede and Ed to explicitly fall in love. I watched with my husband, and when we hit the episode where Ed kisses Stede – well, I’d never heard a grown man squee before. (I told […]
I’ve known for a while that of all the reviewers at AAR, my opinions of books most closely align with fellow reviewer (and my editor) Caz Owens. In fact, her reviews are one of the ways I found our site in the first place! These days, we’re often reading and reviewing many of the same books, and sometimes duking it out for a book we both want. 
Once upon a time there was a romance novelist who blithely signed up to retell Jane Austen’s Persuasion.