Lessons in Temptation, by Charlie Cochrane - Cambridge Fellows Mystery

Lessons in Temptation

Charlie Cochrane

Cambridge Fellows Mystery #5

What can i say?  It's Jonty and orlando.  They are wonderful, the book is bound to be too.  And in this volume we finally get to see orlando get over himself and get with the program.

Our two darlings are on a working holiday in Bath, Orlando to look at some old mathematics materials to see if they are worth the college purchasing, and Jonty to work on his first book, a work on Shakespeare's sonnets.  Of course it does not take long for a murder mystery to crop up.  In this case it is the 25 year old murder of a prostitute.  It seems the tone-y bath house.. and remember we are talking about Bath here...  went through a scandalous period when the owner was away, hosting orgiastic mixed gender parties.  During or after one of these, said prostitute was found dead.  The authorities, because some prominent and even titled men were involved, hushed it all up.  The owner always felt he had let the poor girl down, so our darlings take up the challenge.

Surprisingly, Orlando and Jonty are able to find some of the pricipals in the case, and slowly but surely they arrive at a solution to the whodunnit and why.  Now, here's where it gets strange.  They work on the case mostly separately.  That is because, i n part, Jonty has run into the 1907 equivalent of Brad Pitt., and American actor who turns his head.  Jonty feels terrible that he would even consider another man but Orlando, and Orlando dearly wants to punch "Mr. Smarmypants" in the nose.  Said Mr. Smarmypants does get punched, but that's as much as I am going to say about it.

Of course, I loved this book.  That goes without saying.  i adore these two fellows.  The mystery is pretty neat and Miss peters shows up so that's good too.  I wanted to smack Jonty, as the author would put it, for thinking he would be that easy of prey for the actor, but Orlando's reactions are so charming it was worth it.

OK, there were a couple things I thought lacking in this novel.  One is that one suspect I thought of immediately doesn't even get a look by our brainy sweethearts.  that is, the guy who minded the baths while the owner was away.  It just seemed to me his n ame should have come up.  The other is just that this volume in the series was altogether too short.  I wanted at least another forty pages of Orlando and Jonty.

The novel is the usual, an affectionate look at the couple, full of hilarious remarks, satisfying love scenes, but a thin mystery.  I dread #8 so I am glad I still have #s 6 and 7 as a buffer.

Backwards To Oregon, by Jaee

Backwards To Oregon

Jae

Rebiew originally publilshed in Bosom Friends: lesbian historical Fiction.
Luke Hamilton is a woman living as a man. S/he has just left the army to head down the Oregon Trail with a wagon train and claim the land the territory will give any man… and notice I said "man"... so s/he can begin a horse farm. S/he meets and asks a prostitute named Nora to marry him... her.. oh heck, let’s just stick to the biological. Her. Though I admit I don’t much like calling Luke what she would not call herself.. him.

Nora accepts Luke’s proposal not knowing Luke is a woman. How this is possible is that Luke from the start tells her she is proposing only a business partnership, not a real marriage with conjugal rights and all that. She explains she needs someone to help out with the wagon, though her real reason is that having a wife and child, Nora’s daughter Amy, helps her maintain her cover of being a man.

Most of the novel is about the journey and the negotiations Luke and Nora make between them to live harmoniously together. I don’t think it's much of a spoiler to say that Nora does eventually find out Luke is a woman, so the question changes from “Will she find out?” to “What will she do about it?” When Nora turns out to be pregnant by one of her brothel customers the plot just thickens, though for the two women it is less of an issue than Luke’s obvious growing attraction to Nora.

The story is told in a combination of short vignettes and more involved subplots along the Oregon Trail. You can almost see a list of the possible plot twists of any pioneer journey story being checked off: a child’s illness, a life-threatening accident , fear of Indians, tensions within the wagon train, childbirth in the wild, deprivation, weariness, despondency, hunger and so forth. But it works. Beautifully. It actually made me want to follow the trail myself, to see what they were up against.

Jae, the author, is a psychologist, and she says right off the bat that she writes to explore how individuals grow and overcome fears and learn to trust. You can follow the evolution of Nora and Luke, as well as a couple other characters. This could be tiresome if the characters were standard, but they are not in this novel. Luke is fully realized, complex, credible, appealing, and natural, and so is Nora. You learn why they are the way they are, not only in how their personalities originated but also what influences either helped them or held them back. Luke was on her own from the age of twelve and took on a male identity to survive. There is a wonderful line that says, perhaps not in so many words, that the clothing and personality she has adopted are now the only way she can be herself. That resonated with me since my own Elisabeth says much the same thing in Beloved Pilgrim. Nora was betrayed by a man and thrown out by her parents, needing to fall back on joining a brothel just so she and her daughter would survive. She has had the worst experience of men being exposed only to the worst among them, so it is no wonder she accepts Luke as a means to an end and constantly judges her actions and intentions based on her jaundiced view of men.

This is a love story. It is developed excruciatingly and deliciously slowly. It is easier to understand how Luke comes to love Nora, but how will Nora handle Luke’s being a woman? how can she possibly actually love her.

Another thing I liked about this story is watching how, in their separate ways, Luke and Nora come to an understanding that being female does not mean you are weak. Luke learns about women’s strength by watching the pioneer women work and cope with hardship. Nora is challenged in her assumptions about what it is to be a woman when first Luke treats her with respect and support and then when she discovers this person she thought was a strong man is really a strong woman.

In short, I just loved this novel. It is intelligent, well conceived and developed, full of heart but sparing with sentiment. That English is not Jae’s native language surprised me.. there is no way to tell reading her work. I am so happy to learn that there is a sequel, Hidden Truths. I thank Jae for making sure both books are text to speech enabled on Kindle so I could have the wonderful experience of getting to know and love Luke and Nora.

Lovers Knot: An M/M Romance, by Donald Hardy

Lovers Knot: An M/M Romance

Donald Hardy

Stop and think about what “lovers knot” means to you. Does it mean a symbol of deep and lasting love, hearts entwined, and all that? Now think about your interpretation of “deep and lasting love”. Does it give you warm fuzzies or does it scare the hell out of you.? That little exercise will prepare you for Donald Hardy’s Lovers Knot.

Fittingly set in a rather Gothic setting, the fog bank cloaked seascapes of Cornwall in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the novel is two stories. One is the return of Jonathan Williams to the Cornish estate of a cousin, now left to him in that cousin’s will. It is 1906. The journey brings Williams back in time as well as distance, the other half of the story being his 1892 visit when he was eighteen and just lost his mother. The events of that summer in Cornwall have haunted him for his entire life and, further, crippled him for love as an adult.

While the young Williams grieves both for his mother’s death and being able to trust his philandering father, he wanders about Trevaglan Farm and meets Nat Bosawen, one of the farmhands, and soon is in love. Nat is a charming scoundrel whom Williams’ cousin warns has a violent streak. Nat and Williams become lovers quickly, breaking the rules not only against same sex relationships but also crossing of the class barrier. The lovers knot comes in the form of little straw talismans Nat leaves for Williams but also in the close and even obsessive attachment he forms with and the blood oath he forces on Williams.

In 1906 Williams is confronted with all the troubling memories from that summer, startled immediately when a young boy who is Nat’s double comes to meet him where he and his long time flat mate, Langsford, arrive in Penzance. He thinks he sees a ghost, and the ensuing events seem to simply affirm this assessment, no matter his dismissing them as coincidence and superstition. In fact, the reader is left throughout this story wondering about the interpretation. There are what appear to be unquestioningly paranormal events, but at least some of them turn out to be planted by quite living beings.

The roster of characters boils down to, for 1892, Williams, his older cousin, Nat Boscawen, and Rose, a maid, and her future husband James Hale other farm employees. In 1906 you get the same roster but with the subtraction of Nat, whom you learn fairly early in the novel died while Williams was still there, and the addition of Rose’s son Alec, the look-alike of Nat, Langsford, Williams’ flat mate who both loves Williams and is loved by him, though neither has ever dared to reveal their love. Langsford seems to be the target of the ghostly dirty tricks, suggesting a jealous lover, and as you get to know him, you become aware that Nat is just such a one. The conflicts within virtually every character make both the 1892 and 1906 stories nothing less than a powder keg, with the aptly-named “Lucifers” (matches) primed to ignite destruction. An additional character in both time periods is the witchy Mistress Bannel who sees into the souls of the people she cares for and is instrumental in how Williams copes with the trauma of both visits. Though she is the archetypal outsider, she manages to bridge all worlds. Her deaf mute son is a striking character, rather messianic, and I will admit his disability was more than a little troubling for me*.

This brace of stories is exceedingly complex. Hardy had not only to create the elaborate development of characters and plots but also figure out how to tell them in an interwoven style that effectively lets the reader in on the complexities. He manages it in such a way that they learn only as much as they should to pull it all together.

Hardy also took a step that many authors who deal with gay characters have to agonize over. I know because I did too. He risked criticism for a predatory gay male character and a rape of one man by another. There is a taboo in the genre against what might be acceptable in any other form of romance. I applaud Hardy for doing what was right for the story, which should always be the responsibility of an author. That the man who was raped has the courage to call it what it is is a moment in the book when I admired the character and the author who birthed him the most.

Hardy h as accomplished a sensitive and intelligent story that blends the paranormal with just plain scary reality with characters you will find utterly credible.

I thank Hardy and his publisher for making the novel enabled for text to speech on Kindle so I could read it.

* See my article, A Plea To Authors of horror and Mysteries..

Affinity, by Sarah Waters

Affinity

Sarah Waters

Margaret tried to kill herself  after her father died and the friend with whom she was in love married her brother.  Her overprotective mother is dubious when an old friend of her husband suggest that Margaret might find volunteering as "a lady visitor" at the prison where he works healing.  The women's prison and its inmates are a revelation to her, but none more than Selena, a spiritualist convicted of assaulting a young woman who had come to her for help with depression.  Margaret befriends Selena, becomes obsessed with her, and Selena seems to return the regard.  Ultimately Margaret agrees to help Selena escape prison.  The odd thing is that Margaret is willing to believe that Selena has powers that will allow her to dematerialize in prison and come through a "spiritual cord" to her.

The use of dual first person in this novel is effective because it is in the form of two separate journals, Margaret's and Selena's from before she was imprisoned.  Since everything that happens is reported immediately after its occurrence, the reader is fed the story gradually, so impressions and deceptions are credible.  It is  not a matter of someone telling the story sometime later, which always makes one wonder how they can be so objective about earlier events knowing the conclusion of the matter.    In Margaret's journal you hear her reasoning for accepting what she does, while with Selena's the reader gets an unfiltered look into what happened in her life but without much insight on the part of the young woman.  Thanks to this you will find yourself going back to reread earlier parts and reinterpreting them in light of later knowledge.

That is as close as I am going to come to a spoiler.  All I will add is a recommendation to look at every prop as a symbol.  Especially look at symbolism around clothing.

Besides being a wonderfully written and terribly chilling story, this novel offers a look at the prison system in Victorian England, one that is run on religious principles, harsh and far from enlightened thought.  The women inmates and their lives are complex and range from pathetic to outright repulsive, but the prison matrons are no better.  Margaret can be credited with the self knowledge that because of her class her attempted suicide makes her a candidate not for prison but for medical help..

This is an intelligent, thoughtful and compelling novel that will haunt you for a long time.

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Did women fight in the Crusades? Elisabeth did! Read Beloved Pilgrimby Nan Hawthorne, available at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Smashwords.com.

Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Joheved: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France, by Maggie Anton

Rashi'sJoheved: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France

Maggie Anton

Part of a three volume series, Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Joheved: A Novel of Love and the Talmud in Medieval France offers a quite unique glimpse of a long ago time and a rare cculture, the insular and fragile community of European Jews.  It takes place in Troyes in France during a period of perhaps some of the greatest peace for Jewish people in the early Middle Ages, all the more precious to see since just years later with the First Crusade that peace will be shattered.

This novel is something of a "Little House in the Jewish Quarter" in that it tells the story of a strong father, loving mother, and their three daughters.  The eldest daughter, Joheved, longs for scholarship in her own right.  her father, the historical Rashi (see Random Biographies) struggles with whether teaching girls the Talmud is appropriate, but lacking a son relents and agrees to teach all his daughters.  Fears that their education will scare off potential husbands proves needless, and the conclusion is that the fruit of two intellligent parents is bound also to be a scholar.

Much of this novel is about the family's life and specifically Joheved's courtship, marriage, and troubles.  One very non-Ingalls-like aspect is the Jewish view of marital relations.  I doubt little Laura Ingalls ever heard sex referred to as "the Holy Deed" in real life, no less in the children's books.  Adn that's too bad.  That at least is a step in the right direction towards homane concepts of sexuality.  The elaborateness and depth of superstition in this Jewish community is either hilaious or alarming as you see it.  Nevertheless the deep caring within the families in this n ovel, and no doubt the two sequels, is a joy to share with them.

This book and its two sequels are all on Kindle and text to speech enabled, making them all accessible for people like me who can't read prrint.  I am grateful.  I fully intend to read the two remaining novels.

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, by Geraldine Brooks

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

Geraldine Brooks

The famous story of the village of Eame, which faced plague in the mid 1660s, inspired this novel that amplifies or alters some of its elements but takes off from there to focus on themes of punishment and forgiveness.  The basic plot is there.  A tailor named George Vickers unwittingly brings plague to a small rural town in a shipment of fabric.  He is the first to die.  By the time the two clergymen take their famous stand to islate the town, many more have succembed.  The Anglican vicar, here renamed Mompeliaon, and the historically named Puritan preacher Thomas Stanley rather than causing a wall to be built around the town so "the plague will be contained" simply procure an oath from the town's citizens to stay put.  Throughout the concept that the plague is some sort of punishment by God for the people's wickedness throws the townspeople into strange and often deadly actions.

The story is told by Anna, a young woman whose miner husband has just been killed.  She is a daily servant at the vicarage where she comes into close contact with the vicar, Mompelion, and his bright and caring wife, Eleanor.  When the plague hits Anna and Eleanor take on the responsibility of caring for the sick and dying.  At first the two "wise women" in the town are blamed for the disease.  No one is safe after that, as whether or not an individual is blamed, he or she may take the brunt of the anger and grief of  neighbors.  When Anna's own drunken father in his greed buries a living man to get his possessions, he is tied out on the structure at the mouth of the mine and dies.s  His widow turns bitter and loses her mind, adding to the victimization of the desperate.l

The relationship between the precociously intelligent and resourceful Anna and the strangely wistful Eleanor becomes stronger as they try to take the place of the "wise women" and learn their herb lore.  In the meantime the morality in the town is disintegrating, the formerly Puritan becoming libertines and the pious Mompelion growing more and more unforgiving.  It is in fact his inability to forgive that brings this odd and wrenching story to its unexpected crisis.

The facts about Mompelion are central to a problem I have with first person narrative.  I firmly believe that this style should be used only when it will reveal something third person cannot.  This novel might be seen in that light, but the fact that a woman who has her world turned upside down in what she believed is true telling her own story from before her illusions are shattered disturbs me. Knowing that Anna learns some dreadful things later on makes the concept of her telling such an intricate story as complimentary as she does seems false to me. 

Her own intellectual and emotional development, however, are fascinating and well conceived by the author.  The small dramas in the large tragedy are interesting, often disheartening, and sometimes admirable.  The epiloguee is rather outlandish,  however.  My husband would say, "It's fiction!"  but I answer that it has to make at least some sense.  It may have been a wise decision to skip that part.

This book was available on Kindle, making it possible for me, who cannot read print, to listen to it, and for that i am grateful.

Just Released! The Tudor Throne, by Brandy Purdy

The Tudor Throne

Brandy Purdy

My regular readers know I have strict standards where first person narrative is concerned.  I believe it should only be used if the voice can reveal more than the usual narrative style can.  I have reviewed books that were at best lackluster and at worst clumsy because of inappropriate use of first person.  This book, like at least one other of Brandy's three, uses first person in a skillful, effective way.

After a narrative prologue depicting the death of the great King Henry VIII the novel splits into two voices, is daughters Mary's and Elizabeth's.  The tale starts with the three children, the girls and their brother the new king Edward VI at their father's deathbed.  From the very start the two distinctive voices not only are easy to identify, but also tell much the same story but with different minds analyzing events. 

We follow both girls through their brother's short reign, living with the young boy's imperial behavior and often fickle affections.  The sisters are still fond of each other at this point, but a scandal involving Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour threatens to destroy that.  Mary clings desperately to a spinsterish Catholicism while Elizabeth, her own woman, nevertheless learns one more lesson in not trusting men to have power over her.

When Edward dies Mary takes the throne.  Though Elizabeth has done nothing to earn it, she distrusts her younger sister, convinced there are plots to dethrone her.  Purdy shows Mary trying at first to return Roman Catholicism to its preeminence in England through her confidence that "the people" wanted it, then through gentler efforts, but when it becomes a bargaining chip in her marriage to Philip of Spain, her zeal takes its famous "Bloody" turn.  Elizabeth can only hang on, playing the game as best she can, until, some day, her older sister dies without issue.

It is both satisfying and enlightening to watch Mary reach out for love in the wrong place, to watch her health, both physical and mental, deteriorate and to see what impact a monarch who is desperate and going mad is on her people.  At the same time, the smarter more reflective Elizabeth learns hard lessons that will ultimately make her a glorious queen, perhaps the best monarch England has ever had.  Purdy's skill in bringing these two women and others in their world to life demonstrates great skill as a novelist, one that deserves more notice than she got with her earlier novels.

If you are a reader of Tudor novels who relishes the catwalk of the women's and even the men's fashions of the day, you will adore this novel.  It seems that every time someone comes on the scene, you get a top to toe description of what she is wearing.  The author clearly relishes the Tudor court's finery and knows enough to describe it faithfully.

For me the history, the speculative peeks behind the scenes, and more than anything the sensitive exploration of the two women's emotional development is the attraction for this novel that I fully anticipate will take its place as one of the best loved and respected novels in the genre of Tudor-era historical fiction.