Elizabeth Hopkinson's Hidden Grove

I’m in love!! ♥️ I’ve fallen deep in fandom with quirky pirate rom-com, Our Flag Means Death. It’s been so long since I’ve had this kind of a fangirl high that I was starting to worry I no longer had it in me. But fear not! I may have the body of a middle-aged woman, but I have the heart and stomach of an asexual, greygender teenager, with a thing for the Golden Age of Sail, impossible love, and black-clad men who are vulnerable little boys underneath. Comedy. Romance. Representation. What’s not to like?   Fan art by  Anna Hopkinson  I’m not going to give away any spoilers for those who have not yet had the pleasure. But let me just say that Blackbeard and Stede (in the picture above) totally give me Tammo-and-Carlo vibes. (That’s Tammo and Carlo from my forthcoming novel Cage of Nightingales.  I wrote a bit about it in my previous blog .)  Cage is not about pirates, although it is set in a similar period. It has more of a Venetian Carnevale/ Amadeus/Phantom of the Opera flavour. And t

  Me and Carlo: BBFs (by Kirsty Rolfe) I’d like to introduce you to Carlo. Some of you may have met him before, but he’s one of the two heroes of Cage of Nightingales , the first of my Angelio novels, which is finally due to be published this year by Deep Hearts YA . Carlo is a castrato singer. When we first meet him, he’s thirteen years old, a student at the Conservatorio Archangeli, a prestigious music school in the city-state of Angelio. He’s talented, kind, loves beautiful things, hates arguments, can be flirty, and just wants a friend who sees him as more than a beautiful voice. And he’s canonically asexual and biromantic. Just thought I’d get that out there. Carlo is named after Carlo Broschi (aka Farinelli), the most famous of the castrato singers of the 18th century. I’ve written quite a bit about Farinelli and the other castrati on this blog, but as it’s LGBT+ History Month (in the UK at least) I thought I’d share with you a few facts about them. “Portrait Group: The Singer Fa