ROBBY RIVERTON: MAIL ORDER BRIDE, a classic 1940s comedy Western with a gay couple for once

ROBBY RIVERTON: MAIL ORDER BRIDE
ELI EASTON
Pinkerton Road LLC (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Being a fugitive in the old west shouldn’t be this much fun.

The year is 1860. Robby Riverton is a rising star on the New York stage. But he witnesses a murder by a famous crime boss and is forced to go on the run--all the way to Santa Fe. When he still hasn't ditched his pursuers, he disguises himself as a mail order bride he meets on the wagon train. Caught between gangsters that want to kill him, and the crazy, uncouth family of his "intended", Robby's only ally is a lazy sheriff who sees exactly who Robby is -- and can't resist him.

Trace Crabtree took the job as sheriff of Flat Bottom because there was never a thing going on. And then Robby Riverton showed up. Disguised as a woman. And betrothed to Trace’s brother. If that wasn’t complication enough, Trace had to find the man as appealing as blueberry pie. He urges Robby to stay undercover until the danger has passed. But a few weeks of having Robby-Rowena at the ranch, and the Crabtree family will never be the same again.

My Review: One entire star off for four uses of the dreadful, icky, overused-in-MM-romances w-verb. It's lazy and it's bad writing. *tsk*

The story itself sparkles and fizzes with excitement. The murder Robby witnesses in New York City is chilling and makes his terror and his addlepated decision to run away make perfect sense. I'd be terrified and addled as well! Robby's wagon train trip west isn't very detailed but it's got the sense of urgency that a more thorough explanation wouldn't serve. And the real Rowena Fairchild is a major pill, despite her perfect depiction:

She was statuesque, well-bred, and finely dressed. She had light-brown hair that flirted with the idea of being red and a starry sky’s worth of freckles on her nose and cheeks.

Oh my. I can see her. I've known ladies who fit this description to a T. Author Easton makes them appear before my mind's eye.

The way Robby and Trace Crabtree get entangled on Rowena/Robby's arrival in Santa Fe is farcical fun. I loved that they knew right off the other was attracted to their real selves. It makes the sexual tension so much more delicious, like Jack Lemmon finding out Joe E. Brown knew he was in drag all along in Some Like It Hot.

"God, I need one hour without skirts wrapping around my knees every time I move—and this blasted bonnet! I swear it was designed by Satan himself. I will be in heaven the day I can set fire to the cursed thing.”

The Crabtree family secret was a little out of left field, but made me laugh out loud when it was discovered by a stunned Robby. Their antics were just so innocent to cause all the angst they did, but I could believe them in this context. I sure as hell would laugh at the Crabtrees for doing what they do.

{Pa-Pa} pointed a finger around the table.

“Ya need to be on your best behavior for two whole weeks. And no you-know-what!”

Robby blinked. That wasn’t ominous at all. No what? Dancing naked in the living room? Cooking human body parts? Smacking around the wives?

Robby's ability to talk Pa-Pa Crabtree around to being sweet on him in no time flat was a little bit of a stretch, but I could see the dramatic need. I know Robby would've talked anyone around in the end, so I went with it. I loved the way Robby dug out the big family secret and made the whole troop of men confront their fears and pain without judgment. That was a lovely touch.

Trace felt a pang of warmth at Pa’s praise. It was so rare. And goddamn but he hated that he could still want the old man’s approval.

The events leading to the ending had me clenched in tense anticipation and I was saved from nervous collapse by the fact that this is a happily-ever-after genre. I do declare I'd've been prostrated if it wasn't. I was gnawing my knuckles for the last 20% of the book! The tension was skillfully ratcheted up and the stakes as high as they get for everyone. Trace shines in his focused obsessive need to fix what's broken throughout the book.

The idea that Robby might find that someday, with someone else, caused such an awful, crushing feeling that Trace had to stop that line of thought dead.

The others' reactions to Trace and Robby after the game is revealed are...well...I don't know, maybe some more conversations around the subject? I was a little left out, it seemed, of the consequences of Robby's deception to the Crabtrees, with the exception of Clovis the defrauded groom.

“There ain’t a person alive who could cast you into shadow, Robby Riverton. I can’t imagine you’re ever in a room where ya ain’t the most fascinatin’ thing in it. I can’t keep my eyes off ya. Guess that’s what they call charisma. No wonder you were a star in New York.”
–and–
“I just want you to know,” Robby said, his voice thick. “That I love you, Trace. I really do. And I know that doesn’t change the way things are. But I just...wanted you to have that to keep. However you want to keep it. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping me.”

Also...1860, when the story was ostensibly set, was President Buchanan's term in office. I think the year Trace ran off is more like 1865 or he wouldn't have joined the army as a sharpshooter. Either he fought in the Civil War, at the tail end of it, or joined up and fought in the Plains Wars against the Comanche or Apache that hotted up around 1867. "President Hayes" is mentioned, making the earliest date for the story 1877; all in all, I think 1880 works, and that'd also explain the railroad fever mentioned at the end of the story.

As an experience of storytelling, this was a solid hit for me. I need to escape reality right now. I make no bones about it. Serious and weighty things are happening in the bigger world and in my own stretch of it. My reading needs to soothe me, not challenge me. And this story was just what the escapist ordered.

“Honey, I’m just as happy to sit in this here town with you until we grow old.” And so . . . that’s what they did.

A SECOND HARVEST & TENDER MERCIES, the two "Men of Lancaster County" QUILTBAG novels

A SECOND HARVEST
ELI EASTON (Men of Lancaster County #1)
Self-republished ebook (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: David Fisher has lived by the rules all his life. Born to a Mennonite family, he obeyed his father and took over the family farm, married, and had two children. Now with both his kids in college and his wife deceased, he runs his farm alone and without joy, counting off the days of a life half-lived.

Christie Landon, graphic designer, Manhattanite, and fierce gay party boy, needs a change. Now thirty, he figures it's time to grow up and think about his future. When his best friend overdoses, Christie resolves to take a break from the city. He heads to a small house in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to rest, recoup, and reflect.

But life in the country is boring despite glimpses of the hunky silver fox next door. When Christie's creativity latches on to cooking, he decides to approach his widower neighbor with a plan to share meals and grocery expenses. David agrees, and soon the odd couple finds they really enjoy spending time together.

Christie challenges the boundaries of David's closed world and brings out feelings he buried long ago. If he can break free of the past, he might find a second chance at happiness.

My Review: An enormously resonant story for my elderly self. I knew and tricked with these men most of my life. Had one terrible relationship with one of them, a horrible, painful experience of being the agony and the release from it at the same time. He died of liver cancer after over two decades of alcohol abuse, and a few months later I moved to New York City.

Because life wasn’t worth much before Christie appeared, and it would be worse having had this and lost it. The mere thought ripped his guts out.

Yes, exactly that. So David's story, his wretchedness, moved me deeply. Christie's part I lived in reverse...after getting to Paradise I was a busy, busy boy for a few years. Over a decade, in fact, and I adored all but the last 18 months. When my life unravels, it does the job with verve and gusto. Anyway, Christie deciding to move to Auntie's place made perfect sense to me...I ran back to Austin...and his ultimate fate there mirrored my own, if mine was less painful.

Every time he said no he thought about how much of himself he’d given away all those years. This was a life he definitely didn’t want to return to. But if things with David didn’t work out, he could see himself getting sucked back into this because… what else was there, really?

I left Austin because, after one night of gay-barring, I was followed home by two tradies (google it) who'd been somewhat unsettlingly focused on me. The truck they drove had a gun rack.

It wasn't empty.

Nothing happened.

I don't care. I am never, ever again in all my life going to live in a place where guns are anything other than tightly regulated. I'm also deeply averse to going west of the Hudson or north of the Bronx. When home doesn't want you, it's not home, so here I stay.

This book made all the same feelings as I felt then come roaring back, strong as ever, nauseating as ever. The highest function of storytelling is catharsis, it's why myths are evergreen and stage/screen drama has such a tenacious hold on human psyches. Author Easton has, in each of her stories I've read, given me a safe catharsis, a world built to experience and survive the strong negative emotions parts of her tale evokes.

He’d seen stillbirths before, and they were unsettling. It simply seemed wrong that nature could put so much effort into forming a creature from nothing, and yet fail to breathe in the last important component: life.

It takes skill to do this well. It requires convincing your readers that this *is* a world, this space is in fact telling truths to your emotional core. That takes talent and courage, which Author Easton has and uses for our benefit.

And here I was looking for a light, fun read. Haw. Instead I got a deep and thorough dose of spiritual salts. And, mirabile dictu, was made to enjoy it.

Congratulations, Eli Easton, and to you readers not squicked out by gay men making love to each other, this is a fine and satisfying read. And only two instances of the loathsome w-verb. (Both gratuitous and unnecessary, of course.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TENDER MERCIES
ELI EASTON (Men of Lancatser County #2)
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Eddie Graber’s dream of a sanctuary for rescued farm animals was about to come true when his partner backed out at the last minute. Now Eddie risks losing the twenty-five acre property in Lancaster County—and all the hopes he held for it—before the project even gets off the ground. He needs help, he needs money, but most importantly, he needs to rediscover the belief in a higher purpose that brought him here in the first place.

Samuel Miller worked hard to fit into his Amish community despite his club foot. But when his father learns Samuel is gay, he is whipped and shunned. With just a few hundred dollars to his name, Samuel responds to an ad for a farmhand and finds himself employed by a city guy who has strange ideas about animals, no clue how to run his small farm, and a gentle heart.

Samuel isn’t the only lost soul to serendipitously find his way to Meadow Lake Farm. There’s Fred and Ginger, two cows who’d been living in a garage, a gang of sheep, and a little black pig named Benedict who might be the key to life, love, money—and even a happily ever after for two castoffs.

NOTE: This title is set in the same region as book #1 but features a new couple. It can be read as a stand-alone.

My Review: It isn't up to the standard set by A Second Harvest, but it's a good, solid, enjoyable novel of the harrowing, horrible things religion makes people do to each other. Any accidental good the religious might do will never erase the hateful and damaging effects the institution of religion has had on billions and billions of people yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Men who, like Eddie, don't deserve a single second of the hatred and the disgust flung at them:

Eddie made up a small bowl with some pieces of bread with peanut butter and a cut-up apple. Not for the first time, Eddie was aware of the preparation and offering of food as a service and an obligation. When you gave an animal food, you weren’t just saying, You look hungry, and I have pity for you at this moment. You were saying, I see you. I acknowledge that you exist, that you are not invisible to me.

So why read it? Because men like Samuel escape from the horrible, vicious, vile torturers that victimize them in fiction, and even receive healing after they get themselves away from the poison that is gawd. It doesn't happen near often enough in real life. Look at the devastating statistics on teenaged suicide if you doubt me; look at the trans and lesbian and gay people whose lives are ended or who end their own lives out of despair; in each and every case, religion bears the blame and the religious, one and all, irrespective of personal involvement, are eternally stained with the blood of the innocents they passively allowed or actively wished (aloud, silently, in prayer, whatever) to suffer.

Sometimes Samuel wished he could be like the animals, expecting nothing from life except food and sunshine and another day. They didn’t have the ache of knowing what they could never have.

No one deserves a life spent in such self-loathing. If I've been unclear, I oppose your right to be religious on the same grounds that I oppose someone's right to be racist or Republican: Only bad things happen when y'all get to express those hateful ideas. Stop it.