Come by the Rainbow Book Fair at John Jay in NYC tomorrow (Saturday) to check out all the LGBTQ books (including mine)! I’ll be there 12-6 at the Interlude Press table, and will be giving a sneak peek of OLYMPIA KNIFE (coming in November 2017) at a reading at 1 PM!
There will also be swag.
Swag plus sneak peek plus… me. What more could anyone want?
You guys, I’ll be at Rainbow Book Fair in NYC all day on Saturday (well, 12-6), and somewhere in there I’ll be giving a sneak-peek reading from my upcoming novel (details to come here soon). Come find me at the Interlude Press table and say hello!
(Rainbow Book Fair is the largest “LGBT book event” in the U.S. So there!)
Beneath the Stars by Lynn Charles (February 16, 2017); 300 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
Beneath the Stars by Lynn Charles tells the romance of Sid, a clothing designer and C-DRT volunteer (those are the folks who support the firefighters and other rescue workers on the scene of a disaster) and Eddie, a firefighter (who is also the fire chief). Playing large parts in this romance are the struggles each character faces with family and loss: Sid’s mother died when he was younger, and his father is in the throes of dementia when the novel begins; Eddie had a baby with his friend Maggie, who died of cancer not many years after, leaving Eddie to raise their now-5-year-old child, Adrian. The two men meet on the scene of a fire and strike up a relationship, but they must figure out how to accommodate their responsibilities to take care of other people and things (Eddie, the fire victims and his son Adrian; Sid, aside from his work as firefighter support, has his suffering father and his fledgling clothing-design business, Bastra).
There is neat symmetry here: though the characters are dealing with very different forms of loss and caretaking, they both do. Negotiating their new relationship together is, in part, about negotiating the difficulties of those pulls in other directions (other people, other cities). Along the way, each becomes imbricated in the other’s concerns (Sid, for instance, becomes attached to Adrian; Eddie… well, I don’t want to give away the ending of the book, but Eddie gets attached, too).
This is a mature romance, in other words. Or, it’s a romance about mature people with mature-people problems: kids, illness, jobs, attachments, and very fully-realized lives outside each other. This is the kind of love story that’s hard to find: one in which the world doesn’t stop and end at the romance. I remember when I was young and fell in love—everything else fell away and was secondary; my life (my desires, my time, my location, everything) fit around my love. When I got older, though, falling in love meant having to figure out how to fit my love around my life instead. When two fully-realized lives come together, there’s fitting to be done, compromising and rethinking, falling in love with (or at least learning to tolerate) everything your lover cares for (family, friends, houses, etc.), figuring out how to share with someone else what’s always been yours alone. Very often, younger love gets to be more selfish; mature love has to learn to compromise.
(Don’t misunderstand: these guys are still pretty young, by my standards, but they’re established in their lives. They’re not Romeo-and-Juliet-aged teens. They’ve got roots and responsibilities. Maturity is about that, not the number of candles you put on your cake.
As a result of all the different kinds of attachment, this is a story of different kinds of love. I may be Greek, but I’ve done my best to forget everything I had to learn in Greek School as a kid (yes, non-Greeks, that’s a thing), so I don’t remember the different kinds of love the Greeks named, but I’m pretty sure they’re all here. There’s romantic love, of course, on center stage, but there’s also the love of children, fathers and mothers, friends… and beyond that, there’s the love that is passion for hobbies or work. All those kinds of love figure prominently here.
The title comes from the story’s theme of stars and constellations, a passion that Sid’s father Lou shares with his son. This connection to something more permanent and bigger-than-people fits, for me, with the story’s concern for maturity: love isn’t fleeting, and it’s not limited to your tiny sphere of concern, burning bright and hot, but igniting and burning out fast (like I remember it did when I was 16); mature love is something larger that shifts the world and gives gravity to all bodies, a force by which to guide ships (was that Aphrodite?), to mark the seasons and the hours, and one that will outlast any single tiny life.
REVIEW: Storm Season by Pene Henson (February 2. 2017); 226 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
OK, so first off I want to state that if I could have figured out how to print this review upside down, I would have done it, since the narrative in Storm Season takes place in Australia, and I am just that corny.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can get on with the real business of telling you about this book. Storm Season tells the story of a woman (Lien) who lives in Sidney but goes camping in the relative wilds with her small cadre of friends, gets distracted while taking photographs, and falls down a hole. Or ravine. Chasm. Some nature-y pit. That’s not the point, and neither is my absolute ignorance of outdoorsy stuff. In this way, actually, I am very like Lien—she’s a city girl to her core, and part of the reason she falls is her insistence on wearing inappropriate-but-fashionable shoes. (She’s a journalist who covers fashion and music. In this way, I am nothing like Lien, because nobody should ever read what I have to say about what to wear. It would be wrong.)
The point is she bangs her ankle bad enough that she can’t get out of the pit or move around much, and she’s rescued by a park ranger (Claudie), who—due to flooding—can’t get her back to her campsite and takes her, instead, to stay with her at her own cabin until the roads and driveable again.
So the two women are forced by circumstance to spend a handful of days together, alone with each other, in a cabin in the wilderness, while kookaburras…make whatever noise they usually do… outside the windows. A few things happen here: first, Lien discovers that Claudie is that Claudie, an ex-indie rock darling, and she’s fascinated. (Why did Claudie quit the band and stop performing to hide in a cabin and be a park ranger? Lien’s Spidey—no, Clark Kent—senses are tingling for the story.) Second, Lien discovers that Claudie, while her polar opposite in most ways (Claudie’s fashion sense seems to be about the practical and bush-ready), is fascinating. And attractive. And, well, stuff happens, and it’s everything you’d hope from a trapped-in-a-cabin-with-a-love-interest narrative.
Eventually, as all storms seem to do, the storm passes, the roads clear, and Claudie can take Lien back to her campsite and her friends. But since Claudie lives in the bush and Lien lives in Sidney, taking her back means letting her go, and paradise is, indeed, Mr. Milton, apparently lost. Of course, that can’t be how it ends, can it? (Hint: it can’t.)
Storm Season is a romance and, like a good real romance, it’s part mystery and part adventure, but with a good soundtrack (if you could hear Claudie’s music, at least). It’s got the inward spiraling focus of strangers-to-friends-to-lovers intensity, without ever feeling claustrophobic. Both characters have connections outside their world together, and there are narratives outside their love story which come to matter (intrigue among Lien’s friends, the story of why Claudie quit making music).
It strikes me that this is a novel about trying to get away but then trying to find your way back. Lien absconds to the bush for a vacay, but hurts herself and can’t get home again. Claudie leaves music, leaves hope, leaves love, but Lien shows her she must figure out a way back into those things. I don’t want to give away more of the novel, but much of its plot and character development are about this going-away-and-returning.
In fact, this kind of form—a run away from the norm, and then a return, slightly different, but still familiar—has a long history in art. In music, it might be the fugue (a form whose name translates as “flight”). In psychology, too, it’s a “fugue state.” In nature, it’s the echo. In literature, I can’t help but think of Boccaccio’s Decameron (great for those who want dirty short stories), in which the unifying tale is one of a handful of friends who escape to the country to avoid the ravages of the Plague, and pass the time telling stories. It’s also the history of the topsy-turvey festival (most notably nowadays, Carnavale in Rio or Mardi Gras in New Orleans) in which revelers turn every societal norm on its head (traditionally paupers dress like kings, men dress as women, fish fly, etc., but nowadays it translates into breaking from “good” behavior and getting drunk and running around half-naked while you’re having sex and cussing a lot, I imagine), but for only a limited amount of time to let off the pressure of being normal, like a steam valve that lets the pot go on cooking.
Storm Season is in this tradition, albeit with a lot less naked running around and more intelligence and feeling. What’s interesting is that it not only revels in the topsey-turvey love-affair-in-a-remote-cabin narrative, but also explores the flip side, what happens when Carnavale is over and somebody has to sweep the streets, when Lien must go back to Sydney and Claudie must stay in her remote cabin and paradise goes slipping away, or falls, maybe, into one of those chasms.
The King and Criminal by Charlotte Ashe (December 8. 2016); 325 pages. Available from Interlude Press here.
The King and the Criminal is the second book in the Heart of All Worlds series by Charlotte Ashe, and features much the same cast of characters as appeared in the first book, The Sidhe, with some focus shifts. Central are still Sehrys, who is a Sidhe of royal birth, and his betrothed, Brieden, who is a human. Along with them are royal humans Brissa Keshell and her sister Cliope; the Sidhe Tash, a former Sidhe slave trader-turned-good guy; and Firae, another Sidhe royal and the one to whom Sehrys had once been engaged. There’s a breach of the protective border around the lands of Khryslee (which could only have been brought about deliberately, probably by a Sidhe), a war-mongering rival kingdom and several folks to be rescued from their clutches. I’m making it sound much more complicated than it really is: a cast of humans and Sidhe must band together despite their differences (some royal, some not, some actual convicted criminals) to stop the evil attempts of an evil opposing government. Unfortunately, for an American, this is starting to sound all too real.
There is, to be sure, some political intrigue here, and there’s some fantasy-magic mythology of which one must keep track (there’s a helpful summary of past politics, map and glossary of terms that makes this easier), but this is not the focus of the book. This is, I think, part picaresque and part western.
A picaresque is a serial adventure focusing (by some accounts) on an unlikely hero (usually a rogue or a criminal) or (by other accounts) on a young hero who matures through the adventure. This is true of different characters in this novel—the first describes Tash, the criminal-turned-ally, and the second describes either Brissa (the young human queen learning to be a queen) or Brieden (the human fumbling his way into love and adulthood) or even Sehrys (the young-ish Sidhe learning how to balance his personal and political responsibilities and allegiances). A western, lots of people will tell you, is set in the American west, but having taught film genres, I’d disagree. (Many people, for instance, consider Star Wars a “space western.”) By my lights, and very basically speaking, a western is a kind of romance in which good guys oppose bad guys against a backdrop of nearly boundless territory in contest. So The Heart of All Worlds series might be a fantasy western picaresque.
All that is to say (in far too fancy a way) that there is adventure, political conflict and romance centering around territory and white hat-black hat rivalries.
As with the first novel in this series, the plot is woven so well and the characters so nicely drawn that readers will be sucked in quickly and held until the end, then wait impatiently for the next book in the series to resolve what this one leaves in the air. Also as with the first novel, The King/Criminal is set in very unfamiliar worlds and thus contains a large new mythology of beings, territory, politics, religion and powers, but requires little of the reader to understand it and be swallowed by it. I think that’s the mark of really well-written sci-fi and fantasy: one gets so pulled in, and is so seduced by the world created there, that what often seems like bells and whistles in lesser books just seems a natural, real part of the world of the novel. The point is, I think, whether or not the details of the world are in service of the plot and characters, or are superfluous embroidery upon their surface. In a good fantasy or sci-fi novel like this one, the details aren’t the point, they just help you see the point.
Alysia Constantine 