Review: Breathtakingly Beautiful
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 1, 2013
'The Tin Box' was recommended to me by a friend and the description lured me in. I'm always fascinated by psychology so I was very interested before even opening the story. I'll be the first to admit that the beginning, when William is being given a tour of the abandoned insane asylum he is going to be the caretaker for as he finishes his dissertation, had me thinking of "RedRum". Jack Nicholson was creeping through my head and his visage saying "I'm back" kept running across my mind. This is my first experience with a Kim Fielding book, but based on its appeal, it won't be the last.William struck me immediately as being really uptight. Not in a snobby way, at all, just wound too tight as if he'd never really relaxed and taken the time to figure out who he really is. He is a psychologist, but as such, he didn't seem to understand his own strengths and weaknesses very well. William has been hired to be the full-time caretaker at the Jelley's Valley State Insane Asylum which was shut down in eighty-two but the building is on the national historic register and, thus, must be protected from vandals. William (not Will, not Bill and definitely not Willy) is going through a divorce and since he and Lisa never really had very much, he left basically everything with her at the apartment when he moved out. So, now he's got a very quiet and peaceful place to stay and finish his dissertation. Then William finds the tin box hidden in the wall of what must have been a patient room. It comes as a shock to William when he opens the tin box to realize it contains letters from an inmate named Bill, to his lover, Johnny, and they began in 1938. Bill was institutionalized for loving a man.Colby I adored from the moment he leaped onto the pages. Out and proud, Colby is Jelley's Valley resident queer and as he says "So hey I figured I'm gonna be the most authentic f*%#ing me I can be!" Colby is comfortable in his skin, knows who he is, and, even better, he accepts who he is. Something William envies quite a lot. Especially since William is fairly certain he, himself, is a construct of who he thinks he should be. It came as no real surprise to discover William grew up in a very religious home and when he began to realize he was attracted to men he begged his parents and his pastor to help him. He prayed and prayed, he even went to aversion therapy camp, but when he was twenty he lost his faith in God and replaced it with science. He tried by marrying Lisa but after a while she realized there was something not quite right and they dissolved their marriage rather peaceably. Except for William's overwhelming guilt at disappointing people again.William and Colby begin an interesting friendship and Colby is exactly what William needs. William is slowly beginning to shed some of his stiffness, i.e. wearing shorts, wearing a T-shirt instead of a button-down Oxford and a sport coat, sleeping in his boxers instead of pajamas. Are you getting the picture of William? When Colby discovers that William has never done anything with a man other than kiss a boy in high school, Colby declares himself William's fairy godfather. This involves showing William gay porn, frank conversations that leave William blushing, and an outing to a fairly sedate gay bar. What William realizes at the bar, though, is he pretty much only has eyes for Colby even though he knows they are just friends. When Colby and William move the teaching to more hands-on, pun intended, it is sweet, intense, and very hot.I greatly enjoyed this book and I can't recommend it enough. The tale of what was done to Bill in the name of psychiatric treatment for sexual deviance was horrific. The fact that these treatments were done to many people, not just homosexuals, is not a pleasant chapter in humanity's drive to understand and treat mental illness. Bill's story and the letters he wrote made me cry and it was so very easy to see why William related to Bill and his story. The love story between Colby and Will was phenomenal, but watching Will figure out who he was and what he wanted from life was extraordinarily moving. Buy this book. Read it. Cherish it.NOTE: This book was provided by Dreamspinner Press for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews