The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Lion’s Tale (The Pride, book 2)
By Jordan L. Hawk
Published by the author, 2024
Five stars

Set in 1924 Chicago, in Hawk’s fascinating “Hexworld,” Lion's Tail is filled with witches and magic and animal-shifter familiars who bond with them for life—and sometimes for love.

This second book carries on the story of Alistair Gatti, a cheetah shifter who has found a family of choice with a group of big-cat shifters in a speakeasy called The Pride. Alistair has found “his” witch in Sam Cunningham, a young man who fled an emotionally abusive family in small-town midwestern America.

But Alistair has not bonded with Sam, over lingering anguish at the loss of his first witch in the aftermath of horrors of World War I. That resistance on Alistair’s part is at the center of this story, in which the Gatti family run afoul of a crooked Prohibition officer and a vicious witch mobster.

The characters, especially Alistair and Sam, are wonderfully drawn; but the whirl of other players in this drama are equally interesting. The moral ambiguity of Prohibition-era Chicago is intense…the grandiosity of the rich mobster bosses are an American archetype, played out expertly against the background of a world filled with hexes and magic. The Gatti family (gatti being Italian for ‘cats’) are technically criminals—but they’re really a family of outsiders serving their community (and nobody today thinks Prohibition was a good idea, right?).

My bias in favor of these books is because of my lifelong love of cheetahs (of all the big cats—they can purr, and can nearly be domesticated). But more than this, Hawk’s world of hexmakers, incorporating magic into the most mundane parts of modern life, as well as its use as a tool of war, creates a vivid realm both familiar and tantalizingly alien.