Review: Writers of historicals who know what they're doing...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 24, 2013
Mmes. Devon and Dee do know their way around a historical romance.  I realize that the most ardent fans of this genre are less nitpicky than I am.  It's not just because I'm a man, but because of my longtime love of 19th-century English novels.  Read enough Trollope and Dickens and Thackeray - even George Eliot - and you develop a sense of what the right tone is; the right sense of time and place and character and language. Summer Devon and Bonnie Dee manage to pull it off, repeatedly, and for a fusspot such as I, it is a pleasure of no inconsiderable consequence.Everett Gerard has shut himself off from the world of emotions. Not just because he's English, mind you. He hates the very memory of the old country house in which he grew up; he has never loved anyone, although he has never quite fallen into despair.Miles Kenway has built rather a nice wall around his own emotions as well.  Past unhappiness has left him restless, moving about the world, trying unsuccessfully to find someplace to quell his need to move on.  Oddly enough, caring for the neglected English estate of the absent Gerard family seems to make him happy.  Maybe he just enjoys resenting people who have so much and neglect it so completely.And then Ipsial arrives at the abbey; nine years old, orphaned, totally uncivilized, and clearly a Gerard. Somehow.The narrative that brings Everett Gerard back to face his childhood fears, and forces Miles to admit that people can change for the better, is deftly handled, with sweetness and an elegant authenticity that mostly rings true. Devon and Dee focus on the classic British concept of a cross-class connection - making me think of the most famous of these in gay lit, E.M. Forsters's "Maurice" (and of my own novel in this genre, "Desmond"). There is none of the artificial "see how accurate I am" bravado here that one sees with some historical novelists; it is low-key, emotionally strong, and every bit as satisfying as a good British novel should be.I know the market for m/m romance, historical or otherwise, demands sex; but there is so much fine writing to this story NOT about sex, that the sex scenes, however nicely wrought, sometimes feel like too much rich icing on a cake that was good enough in the first place.  I suspect I'll never buck this trope in my beloved genre, but it is worth mentioning.