BAND SINISTER, another QUILTBAG delight from K.J. Charles

BAND SINISTER
K.J. CHARLES
KJC Books
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Sir Philip Rookwood is the disgrace of the county. He’s a rake and an atheist, and the rumours about his hellfire club, the Murder, can only be spoken in whispers. (Orgies. It’s orgies.)

Guy Frisby and his sister Amanda live in rural seclusion after a family scandal. But when Amanda breaks her leg in a riding accident, she’s forced to recuperate at Rookwood Hall, where Sir Philip is hosting the Murder.

Guy rushes to protect her, but the Murder aren’t what he expects. They’re educated, fascinating people, and the notorious Sir Philip turns out to be charming, kind—and dangerously attractive.

In this private space where anything goes, the longings Guy has stifled all his life are impossible to resist...and so is Philip. But all too soon the rural rumour mill threatens both Guy and Amanda. The innocent country gentleman has lost his heart to the bastard baronet—but does he dare lose his reputation too?

My Review: I read this delightful fluff in a sitting. (A lying, to be more precise.) I'm pretty sure I was expecting the chuckles I got, but not the lesson in how to make explicit consent offered by the debauchee to the debaucher so well-integrated and even steamy. I've always contended that the largest sex organ is the brain, so really all it took was a bit of imaginative effort to make consent part of seduction and foreplay. Author Charles did this deftly, erotically, and satisfyingly.

I liked Guy, our virginal debauchee, more and more as time went by. He annoyed me to no end at first. I think he was expected to. His deep devotion to his younger sister was disarmingly sweet, so he wasn't one of those characters one wants to smack in the occiput with a niblick, but he did try my not-legendary (lack of) patience to its uttermost extent.

He looked different, he was sure. He looked as though he’d eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and everyone would be able to tell it on sight.

Rookwood is, not to put too fine a point on it, too good to be true. Beautiful, rich, thoughtful...*sigh*repine* (Speaking of rePineing, have y'all piped Chris Pine's lovely genitalia in Outlaw King on Netflix? If not, get thee hence! I suppose he had lines and stuff, but ya couldn't prove it by me.) So, Rookwood. Yes. Lovely man, his past is very deftly integrated into his present-day actions, as is Guy's; this being a KJ Charles book, that is unsurprising. She just does that. Part of the service. So why mention it? Because it's both satisfying and anachronistic for men to reveal their hurts and scars to...anyone, really...and Rookwood is an aristocrat, so his upbringing is simply not going to include emotional honesty. How Author Charles side-steps that issue is one of my great pleasures taken from this story.

Lord Corvin and John Raven, well, window dressing has never looked so good. Heh. Read the Society of Gentlemen books, y'all. Read KJ Charles. This is escapism done well.

“Country folk fuck,” Corvin said. “Well, they must; it’s not as if other entertainments present themselves. Plant things, dig things, knit things, fuck things. Make cheese.”

I laughed hard enough to forget (almost) the two (2) w-bombs Author Charles dropped on me.

SWIMMING IN THE DARK, a lovely first-love tragedy where no one dies

SWIMMING IN THE DARK
TOMASZ JEDROWSKI
William Morrow Paperback Originals
$16.99 trade paper, available now


Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in early 1980s Poland against the violent decline of communism, a tender and passionate story of first love between two young men who eventually find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide—a stunningly poetic and heartrending literary debut for fans of Andre Aciman, Garth Greenwell, and Alan Hollinghurst.

When university student Ludwik meets Janusz at a summer agricultural camp, he is fascinated yet wary of this handsome, carefree stranger. But a chance meeting by the river soon becomes an intense, exhilarating, and all-consuming affair. After their camp duties are fulfilled, the pair spend a dreamlike few weeks camping in the countryside, bonding over an illicit copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Inhabiting a beautiful natural world removed from society and its constraints, Ludwik and Janusz fall deeply in love. But in their repressive communist and Catholic society, the passion they share is utterly unthinkable.

Once they return to Warsaw, the charismatic Janusz quickly rises in the political ranks of the party and is rewarded with a highly-coveted position in the ministry. Ludwik is drawn toward impulsive acts of protest, unable to ignore rising food prices and the stark economic disparity around them. Their secret love and personal and political differences slowly begin to tear them apart as both men struggle to survive in a regime on the brink of collapse.

Shifting from the intoxication of first love to the quiet melancholy of growing up and growing apart, Swimming in the Dark is a potent blend of romance, post-war politics, intrigue, and history. Lyrical and sensual, immersive and intense, Tomasz Jedrowski has crafted an indelible and thought-provoking literary debut that explores freedom and love in all its incarnations.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS! THEY NEED US.

My Review: Happy Pride Month, US QUILTBAGgers! Let's celebrate what our fellows in Poland can't: A safe, sane Pride Month of more freedoms than were even conceivable even in my own youth of this lifetime.

Ludwik is a normal child: he knows he knows nothing, is interested in the things the people around him tell him to ignore, and most of all is just discovering, like all kids, that he's Weird. Trouble is his weird isn't going to be so easy to live with in Communist Poland: he's fallen in love, at nine years old, with Beniek. A boy. But also a Jewish boy. In the 1960s, World War II was very much alive and deeply scarringly real to Poles. Somehow the Jews, despite their vanishing into German ovens, are to blame for everything...and here's little faggot Ludwik falling for a Jewboy. Oh boy.

Then one day, Ludwik stops seeing Beniek around the way he always has been. Nothing...absence...awful heartbreak to a child whose loves are so fierce because they are so new. There is nothing like a disaster to make one aware of the freight we bring from our pasts, all the way out to our death.

I was transported into a vision of my life that made me so dizzy my head began to spin. Shame, heavy and alive, had materialized, built from buried fears and desires.

He's fallen; the only one who could catch him is now in Israel. (The Six-Day War happened, the Jews were expelled from Poland yet again.) Poor little guy, dropped into an ugly reality that connects to nothing, not any thing, in his loving heart. What the world will do to him....

Among the first things it does to him is grow him up: mother and grandmother lock themselves into her bedroom, doing something deeply mysterious together. He pesters and nags, and finally Granny tells his mother it's time to come clean: they bring their Ludzio into her bedroom and listen to Radio Free Europe. For the first time, they allow him to be One of Them. Sadly.

I thought of Mother, of her pointless life, her passivity. Of the years she’d spent listening to the radio, explaining her truths to me, and all of it for what? She’d died a submissive employee at the Electricity Office and had never dared to speak up or live out any of her ideas.

The sadness of a dead parent, a father whose entire life was spent far away from them by his choice, never spoken of still less to, results in an unmoored adolescent. Luckily for him, he is at least aware that he is gay...that he can not be like the boys he tres to emulate for mother and for grandmother to see, walking with a girl hand in hand along their street. One post-loss night, an older man in a park where THEY go takes his innocence. (As a side note, if not for one of those same older men I'd've never experienced a positive sexual encounter possibly at all, so no tutting about ephebeophiles or the like.) It is, from that moment on, a necessity that his bitter angry self, unable to fake an identity he despises the same way he despises the lying system he's entrapped by, leave Wroclaw and get to university in Warsaw.
Yay. That happens, there he is in his glory, but all courses end. At the end of his schooling, he is required to spend a summer harvesting beets, and there...

...my eyes fell on you. I had never seen you before—not consciously, anyway. Yet my mind felt strangely relieved, as if it had recognized someone.
–and–
“Pleased to meet you,” you said. “I’m Janusz.”

Janusz. Two syllables that rise and fall and follow each other logically, almost inevitably, and whose sound together is so familiar, so natural, that the meaning of its parts remained hidden to me until years later: Ja, meaning “I” in our language, and nusz, sounding just like our word for “knife.”
–and–
You smiled, dissolving the tension, your teeth flashing in the light of the fire. We sat there for a while, in our private silence, worlds shifting in me.

The dawning of first love! "Worlds shifting in me"...how utterly perfect and how very poignant to one so far from it as I am.

It seems bizarre to me, that I'm the same age as Ludwik. I look into this mirror, lightly distorted, and think...yes, that was it, these thoughts are familiar though I was doing this before Ludzio in age. But yes. I'm right there, I'm fully immersed, this is the way it felt, that's almost exactly what I thought.

It's unsurprising, then, that the rest of the course of first love is pretty particularly followed. Fear of rejection, fear of acceptance! Fear of the future. Wild, surging riptides of Jealousy! Swimming fearless and free in a moonlit pool, filling the darkness with your love for him, his for you, while every beat of the world's heart pushes pushes pushes...before you know its direction.

I don’t know how many days we stayed at the lake, because each one was like a whole world, every moment new and unrepeatable.
–and–
You listened, really listened, gentle eyes taking me in without judgment, making me feel more heard than I knew I could be.

So universal, the course of that first true love. There are minor variations, specific things to a time or a place. The course, however, is steady and unvarying: delight, disillusionment, dénouement. Then, if one is amazingly lucky, a new relationship grows into place over the old one.

The time of Solidarność, "Solidarity" in English, was the beginning of the end of Soviet Communism. Ludzio feels it in his bones, it causes him to rear back and resist and to refuse the whole idea of collaboration that his Janusz is making into a future...sadly we know how that will turn out for him.

The queues for the shops swelled like bloody lips—deliveries had become so few and far between that the only way to get anything was to wait. The lines had started to occupy whole streets.

And now Ludzio's frustrations are personal, his belovèd landlady/substitute grandmother, is very very ill and the system simply...doesn't care.

“There must be something else you can do.” I felt the moment slipping through my fingers. “Please, can’t you make an exception?”

She raised her eyes toward me again, this time without a trace of empathy. “I told you what to do. Now stop blocking the line for your fellow citizens.”

Why I did not give this book its seemingly merited perfect score is simple: Threads are raised but not snipped or woven, merely left dangling. The doctorate Ludzio spends so much time and effort on doesn't go anywhere...there is simply no mention of it ever again. Similarly the absolutely divine Pani Kolecka, his Warsaw grandma-quivalent and landlady...from dying to recovering to vanished. Um...not really acceptable. How he gets to New York instead of Chicago, where he applied for a passport to go, is never discussed. What does he do in New York, in Midtown no less? What business would need him? Has he gone to work for the UN as a translator? The Polish Government would have some stern words to say about that.... Yes, it's a book told in second person (blech) addressing a man the narrator's left behind forever and will never see again, but some sense of how that came to be *possible* was missing and missed.

In the end, though: It is exquisite pain to let go, to release the weight of the truth into a pool—deep, dark, and desalinated of all hints, innuendos, just lies—and save yourself, your future, your actual physical body without harming anyone else's life at all.

“I adored this book more than you knew,” it read there in your stocky, right-leaning script. “I wanted to keep it . . . but it’s yours. Bring it back one day if you can. I’ll be here. J.”

Fuck honesty. The price is too high, the interest Life charges is usurious, the carnage of Being Truthful lasts generations. Bravo Ludzio.

THE FIRST SNOW OF WINTER and THE LABOURS OF LORD PERRY CAVENDISH, third and fourth Winterbournverse books

THE FIRST SNOW OF WINTER
JOANNA CHAMBERS (Winterbourne #3)
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 1814: Captain Sam Alderton returns to England from the continent with his life in tatters. Maimed and directionless, the last thing he wants to do is spend Christmas with his family and their close friends, the Huxleys—especially Jasper Huxley, who he almost kissed five years before. Sam plans to avoid the festivities, but when the first snow of winter arrives, and he and Jasper are trapped alone together at Alderton Hall, they find themselves revisiting old traditions and painful memories together—and discovering that things may not have been quite as either of them thought five years earlier.

My Review: Except for three foul, putrid w-bombs, this first-time friends to lovers tale gets full marks. The childhood love of the young men is well-played for the explanation of their chemistry as men. Adding in the war wound and its effect on each of them is what tips this short piece into a good read on its own and not a mere add-on to the series.

There are a few small details that niggled at my pleasure...like Jasper's freshly-washed hair. The act of washing one's heair was not trivial in the Regency. It took planning and was rather more complicated than standing under a shower and scrubbing in a surfactant. Jasper wouldn't have done all this on Christmas Eve, and most certainly wouldn't have done so in conjunction with a bath at someone else's home, even the home of childhood friends.

I found Sam's mother a revolting, manipulative old party, with her ginned-up tears and her revulsion for Sam's war wound. I get it, about the wound at least; but it didn't make her a sympathetic character in my eyes. And Jasper's female connections are described so humorously by Sam...Augusta, Jasper's mother, was bringing her own mother to Christmas and Sam thinks: "Bertha was the least grandmotherly person imaginable. Unless one was thinking of Lucretia Borgia’s grandmother, perhaps. Or Caligula’s." Which is pretty much priceless! And accurate.

One important point is that we're not made privy to the source of these two characters' prequel-ness...so while this is a series I strongly advises you to read in order, be a bit patient with this Napoleonic-Wars excursion from our accustomed George IV-era trip. The order of battle is quite important to follow in this series to extract maximum pleasure from it.

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

THE LABOURS OF LORD PERRY CAVENDISH
JOANNA CHAMBERS (Winterbourn #4)
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Lord Perry Cavendish knows that he's seen as a not-too-bright, amiable, sporting sort of chap. The type who can hold his own in the boxing ring, drink most men under the table, and offer a useful opinion on a piece of horseflesh—but not much else.

When Perry visits his friend, Lysander Winterbourne, he is introduced to the Honourable Jonny Mainwaring, a free-thinking artist who is everything Perry is not: unconventional, emotional…and very talkative.

At first, Perry is overwhelmed by the vibrant, witty Jonny Mainwairing, but when he agrees to sit for him, he discovers the real man beneath the dramatic flourishes, and the undeniable physical attraction he feels for Jonny begins to develop into something more.

But Jonny is not to be easily won over. While he has a longstanding weakness for brawny men like Perry, he’s still smarting from his latest heartbreak and determined to change his habit of throwing himself into each new affair without pausing to recover from the last.

Can Perry convince Jonny that he is more than just an empty-headed young buck, and that they could have a real future together?

My Review: The w-bombs come thick and fast here. Two—two!—within the first chapter alone! The onslaught of cheesy, unpleasant eye-infection behaviors continued until there were six...count 'em six...infringements of the Readers' Rights Agreement. Humph.

Perry is a Chelsea-bun hero all right, plain on the outside but fruity and spicy all the way through. (That's the period-appropriate term for a Cinnamon Roll hero, don't you know...since Chelsea buns were first made in the eighteenth century, unlike cinnamon rolls.) He's ooey-gooey sweet, with that large, lumbering man charm that seems to center on not fitting the furniture:

He was sitting in a spindly little chair, at a spindly little desk in the morning room. It was probably a lady’s desk and part of the effects of the house Adam had purchased when he’d bought the estate. Had the previous occupants been elves, Perry wondered? Most of the chairs in the house seemed to be too small for him.

Been there, Brother Man, been there and hated the view. Dinky little people need to understand that they are not the proper measure of the world! But a deeper hurt has been done to Perry, beyond merely being made to feel that he's Too Much...

“You need to go slower,” Perry repeated, his face heating with mortification. “I’m not one of those clever fellows like you who can write quickly.” He forced a chuckle. “I was a bit of a dunce at school.”

He's not eloquent or even terribly articulate in his speech, and not a very intellectually inclined sort, but not (as Lysander knows of old) slow-witted or dumb. In his classes, however, he was rather thought less of and certainly belittled by his harridan of a mother. He bears terrible emotional scars because of this, and is very sure that someone like the garrulous swan-like Jonny Mainwaring, fey and dandyish and a riot of color and sound, would sooner be dead than than spend time with him.

Jonny is suffering from the fey, dandyish man's usual problem with other men: What appeals to them at the start makes them absolutely mad as hornets by the end. Jonny's an artiste, you see, on top of being less than a manly man. He's accustomed to that being a Very Bad Thing...and here's this large, lovable lummox of a Perry practically blushing himself into a stroke every time Jonny so much as smiles at him! And seems unable to utter a sound...except in extremis, as the two decide it's time to get it on.

When Jonny’s tongue slid against his own, Perry’s cock jerked. It felt hard enough to hammer nails into a board...
–and–
No. No, {Jonny} would not be going down that road again. Before he bound himself to anyone else, he had to sort himself out. He was a grown man who should be capable of standing on his own two feet. And if it turned out that he could not get his own wild feelings under control, well, perhaps he was better off alone.

Ahh, there it is...the Fuckening! How to screw stuff up without really trying. Okay, they're both young, one does need to forgive them for the collywobbles. And, of course, neither one can be honest with the other because they can barely be honest with themselves! These are the pains of loving before you're experienced in it, and it was a lot harder to gain experience in that time. So, well, the dance does go on...and all because some thoughtless clod hurt Jonny, who then failed to fail to pass it on to the sensitive studmuffin that is Perry.

A trip away from their base to visit Jonny's friends Sam and Jasper (see review above) has the two spending an idyllic and blissful day driving (Perry loves to drive his curricle, Jonny is amazed that he enjoys riding in the curricle with Perry when he has always hated riding in carriages) and eating together and then having a lovely visit with Sam and Jasper. The two of them are leaving for Italy soon, and they've asked Jonny to join them...a lovely offer, a place Jonny would love to visit, but he says no and offers his usual "I'm a bad traveler" excuses. This leads Perry, in his cups, to offer quite simply, sincerely, and beautifully to be Jonny's help and comfort through the horrors (to Jonny, not to Perry) of the journey.

The very most horrible thing then occurs. Jonny says a dismissive and cutting "no, thank you, I couldn't possibly impose on your kindness" rejection. "I know...KNOW...this is not going to end the way it is heading," thinks I. But just in case, I started sharpening my kitana and digging around for those ninja stars I got for that one Yule. "I might need to travel to England soon, on an unrelated topic. Do not be alarmed if I am gone some time," I posted, making plans to cause much, much trouble for A Badly Behaved Author.

Oh me of little faith. No, Author Chambers did not break the remaining parts of the Readers' Rights Agreement (Romance subhead). What a relief. And yes, the ending while happy was not without flaw...I felt it was rushed, and presumed that Perry would be much more forgiving on a much shorter time-frame than I found entirely believable...but it delivered the goods: These two delightfully different men are Together and will stay that way.

So, it was labourious wading through the w-bombs, but the conclusion lived up to my desires. You need to be in the mood for fears and doubts to get the full effect from the read. I think it's very worthwhile to take the trip.

REBEL and KING'S MAN, a story and a novel in a new MM romance series

REBEL: An Outlawed Story
SALLY MALCOLM
Self-published Non-affiliate Amazon link
99¢ ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Falling in love is just the beginning...

Samuel Hutchinson has lived his whole life in Rosemont, Rhode Island. And as far as he’s concerned, his future is fixed: complete his legal training, marry a respectable woman, and settle down to raise a family.

But Sam never counted on meeting Nathaniel Tanner.

Clever, urbane, and dazzling, Nate has been banished to Rosemont by a father determined to remove him from the rising political tension in Boston. The last thing Nate expects to find in the sleepy Rhode Island town is a man who’s not only interested in Nate’s radical ideas, but who interests Nate in return.

In every conceivable way.

Over books and conversation, their friendship deepens. But when Nate dares to confess his true feelings, Sam faces a stark choice—reject his friend and continue to live a lie, or rebel against everything he’s been taught and embrace his heart’s desire…

This short story is approximately 12,000 words and comes with a HFN guaranteed.

I SUBSCRIBE TO THE AUTHOR'S NEWSLETTER. THIS WAS A FREEBIE FOR SUBSCRIBERS. NYAH!

My Review: What mattered to me most, in this precursor tale to what I expect will be a very interesting and exciting series, was that the men who fell in love with each other weren't just...okay with it. Right before the Revolutionary War in a provincial backwater Rhode Island town? Yeah, right, I was prepared to think.

Instead I was treated to a genuine coming out. Nate Tanner, Harvard educated Boston sophisticate, was exiled to this little burg to keep him from the fleshpots of a sinful city (Boston! sinful! a city!! *snort*). Apparently his father, the exiler, didn't know the whole of it or the exile would've been a lot more severe. Nate is all his father isn't: a nascent revolutionary, a free-thinker where gawd is concerned, and an avid shirt-lifter. He reads novels, and Richard Barnfield's The Affectionate Sheppard and Rousseau and Plato and...thinks about them. Ponders what he's read. I think he's my ancestor.

Sam Hutchinson is one of life's submissives. He believes what he's told; he doesn't question, does internalize the guilt and nastiness of his preacher father's revolting religion, feels he's Bad and Wrong and Must Be Punished. For all that, he's powerfully horny, and that speaks louder than gawd's blatherings when the near occasion of sin is seducing you with words and ideas and the promise of loosening that horrible knotted rope around your mind.

It's the first of a romantic-novel series. There was no mystery that the two were going to get their freak on. It was in an adorably eighteenth-century-virgin way, and it wasn't yee-haw-the-organs-go-mad. I still do not recommend the read to the squeamishly heterosexual. But it's 99¢ so if the idea of two men learning to love each other fully clothed and then learning to pleasure each other doesn't make your gorge rise, spend the buck.

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

KING'S MAN
SALLY MALCOLM
Self-published Non-affiliate Amazon link
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Two weeks on the road together. Two weeks trapped in a carriage. Two weeks to win him back, or part with him forever…

Had there been no war, Sam Hutchinson and Nate Tanner would have lived their lives together, as friends and secret lovers. But when the revolution convulsed America, it threw them down on opposite sides of history....

Five years later, Sam is a Loyalist refugee in London, penniless, bitter, and scrambling to survive amid the city’s shadowy underworld. It’s a far cry from his respectable life as a Rhode Island lawyer, and the last person he wants to witness his ruin is Nate Tanner— the man he once loved, the man who betrayed him. The man he can’t forgive.

Now an agent of the Continental Congress, Nate is in London on the trail of a traitor threatening America’s hard-won freedom. But the secret mission of his heart is very different. Nate longs to find Sam Hutchinson—the man he still loves, the man he lost in the war. The man he can’t forget.

When their lives unexpectedly collide, Sam and Nate are thrown together on a dangerous mission. Still nursing his resentment, reconciliation is the last thing on Sam’s mind, but every day he spends on the road with Nate weakens his resolve. And despite everything that divides them, old passions begin to reignite....

Can they seize this second chance at love, or is the past too painful to forgive?

This novel is approximately 76,000 words and comes with a HEA guaranteed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR. DOUBLE NYAH!!

My Review: What you need to know is that I loathe Sally Malcolm inexpressibly. You see that "HEA guaranteed" half-truth purveyed above? Shyeah, like she means that. Burgling and being arrested on a hanging offense and all while guilty of being a sodomite in a London that loved killing its citizens as much as Texas does now? Being subjected to period-accurate violence and imprisonment and all while numbed-yet-hypersensitized by your very most belovèd's horrible silent betrayal?! I mean! (Oh and ABSOLUTELY read Rebel before even thinking of reading this book. Ab so lute ly imperative that you do.)

Does any of that sound like it's leading to "happily" at all, still less "ever" and there's nothing but after when you're so broken, so violated in your core, that the notion of living is gone and the drudgery of existing feels too burdensome most days.

And you know what? The cotton-candy version of "HEA" is not only NOT guaranteed, it's risible even to moot it. So what's left? How the hell does a romance novel come from this set-up?

I'm elderly by world standards. Old enough by American ones. But in these sixty*cough* years and counting, I've learned that breaking up with the past is the worst, least successful break-up you'll ever attempt. In fact, I've never seen it succeed. Nate and Sam don't have a future together after the events of a horrible night in 1778. They are never, ever going to get back together, not least because they're prideful men but also because it's the eighteenth century and getting unfindably lost is so very easy at the best of times, but during wartime it's damned difficult not to even when unplanned. And Nate's going to go around the world pining for the unfindable, unfixable Love of His Life. Who, oh y'know how ya do, he totally and utterly failed when failure could've been lethal. So he figures why not go the rest of the way down the weasel-hole, becomes a spy, and ends up in London searching for a certain special kind of traitor to the newly born United States. Like his much-mourned belovèd.

Sam, that belovèd, isn't an easy man. (I suspect he's a Taurus born in 1757, the Year of the Ox. He's damned near the perfect match for the profile!) He's quite stubborn, he's pig-headedly unwilling to compromise when it's A Matter of Principle, he's sunny and sweet and deeply devoted...until betrayed. His country, this colony America, the town of Rosemont in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, has lost its fucking mind and is going to war with the *winners* of the planet's first World War (comme d'habitude, started by the Germans)! Yes, the British Parliament needs to welcome Americans if the laws they pass are going to apply to them and no, the taxes that pay for the colonies' protection from the French aren't wrong and besides who the hell likes tea anyway?

(I might've made that last bit up.)

These are men whose very essence is called into question by the other. And yet that is an attraction that's utterly unkillable, Opposites Attract, and its power is awe-inspiring. So they meet in the last place either really wants to be: London! A million people...just think of how *staggeringly*huge* that is to men who think Boston is a city!...and Fate *glowers at La Malcolm* in her blind ill will smashes the two into each other in a completely unavoidable, unignorable, and intimacy-demanding way.

What happens then is really quite fun, although it involves a lot less sex than I was expecting. The mud-wrestling (of a carriage!) doesn't count; the skinny-dipping (a perfectly astounding amount of the smexytimes in this series appears to be al fresco) isn't like that, and, when they Get It On at last, they're only slightly more ready to roll than is the reader. A vile person in the form of a barely-ennobled Baron does vile things to keep them apart. It works. There are misunderstandings, and missed opportunities to speak plainly (which, for once!, do not feel contrived to me), and machinations of people whose agendas have little to do with the spirits of two badly wounded, barely coping men who should be beside the Pawtuxet River fishing for their Sunday dinner. The entire time I was making my way around England with them, I felt so sad and bereft that they could never go back to Eden.

And really, that's what I mean about the obligatory HEA here...the two men who lost their demi-Paradise did not find it again in England's green and pleasant land. They found each other's bodies. But they had to work, and work hard, to find the way to be back in relationship. Like any long-term love, there are dark bits and things we don't say out loud and long, long silences. For many people, there isn't anything to cause them to seek ways to fix the broken bits. For Sam there isn't any way to forgive Nate's betrayal; for Nate there isn't any way to batter down Sam's walls.

It takes Death to do that job. And do it She does. That's your HEA for you, snatched from the actual jaws of Death Herself is the clarity and the love and the means to live with the awful hurts that never, ever go away, that leave scars. Tattoo a rose around the scar...make a feature out of a bug...love anyway, harder than ever.


Oh, and Author Malcolm...about that hit I had to place on you...tell your husband I am ever so sorry, but the w-bomb you dropped at 51% is simply not to be tolerated and Standards must be maintained.

THE BIBLE BOYS, charming gay coming (!) of age novella

THE BIBLE BOYS
DAN SKINNER
Cerberus Inc.
$2.99 Kindle original, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Sin. An Abomination. Teenagers Caleb and Matthew had been told by the radical fundamentalist church that dominated their families' lives that a love like theirs—between two boys—was unnatural and forbidden. That it would damn them forever. The religion controlled their families like puppets, watched their every move, made keeping a secret almost impossible. They had only one chance to be together...and it would be a daring one right under the noses of the very people who would condemn them...

My Review: How charming this was! How wonderful the breaking-free fantasy is for all of us who don't have Golden Boy stamped on our lives the instant we're born. (Which is to say "all of us.")

But really. "I wanted to know what it felt like to be joined to you!" Spoken by a 20-year-old in the throes of passionate virginal lovemaking with his 18-year-old lover? Hell, ANYone experiencing passionate lovemaking even NOT for the first time who can be that articulate? Please. If you can focus long enough to emit a sentence like that, someone's doing something wrong.

So there's that. And then there's the religion thing, which anyone who's ever read anything I've ever posted since I got a personal ISP account in 1993 can tell you is right up my alley. Yes, religious people are unkind to those who are different, and young religious people are very unkind to everyone like all other young people. But these pantomime villains! The creepy youth pastor wantin' to nosh on some chicken! Wee bit overstated.

So it sounds like I'm going to make this a bad 3-and-a-half star review. But that's not my purpose. Mr. Skinner sets a beautiful scene with his descriptions of the Clare farm, the over-barn apartment, the flowers and the corn and the stock tank. The horse Perseus. The fireflies and the shooting stars. Just lovely, all of it.

But the stars are all for this, an essential and a true and a beautiful expression of an eternal reality we grope blindly for then so often drop and shatter when we find:

Love does not make cowards. It creates heroes.

Yes.