Review: Variations on the theme of love
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 16, 2014
British novelist Emma Calin is, in addition to being a novelist, a philosopher, blogger, poet and would be master chef. She is a woman eternally pedaling between Peckham and Pigalle, in search of passion and enduring romance. According to Emma Calin's statements, `I live between the UK and rural France with my sexy partner and lover Oscar Sparrow. Between my partner and I we have seven wonderful children with ages ranging from 44 through to 15. They are spread between the USA, the UK, France and Azerbaijan. My writing is far too sexy to come from a grandmother - but I am! It will be a while before they read most of my books...I have never woken up to a day when I didn't want to write, even when I have been working in hotel kitchens, stuffing feathers in a mattress factory, operating a bakery and all manner of temporary office work.' She has a take on Romance novels that places her in a sphere all her own - her heroines are strong women yet despite the apparent strength of her characters she manages to involve them in passionate encounters that leave you wondering who is the dominant and who the submissive. Reading about the author gives a solid hint of what to expect.LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE is a boxed set of five novellas and short stories. Her individual novellas are brave little works, well written, with a nice tangy after burn: it is rewarding to see women taking chances with a subject like this, but then Virginia Woolf, E.L. James, Colette, Mary Renault, Annie Proulx and others took the chances and they are famous for it. The consistently fine works included in this set are `Sub-Prime' (a rather gruesome turkey killing factory where a man and a woman find a strange bond),' Escape To Love' (a mother, a missing child and a prison break by a rapist murderer and a strangely intriguing banker escapee who begins a new love story for the mother and rescued daughter), `The Chosen' (a deeply touching bizarre tale of a man, his commitment to a Thai girl, his need to make money with the assistance of a comrade who hears the dreams, watches him die and visits his kept girl to assist in the mourning process),  `Angela' (a limo driver picks up a woman who has the ability to predict  the limo driver's incipient child - show will be called Angela) and Love in a Hopeless Place (A richly nuanced story about an unsatisfied married woman who falls in perfect love with another woman at the workplace).Calin has found the right boundaries to graphically describe physical moments without going overboard: she writes sensually and erotically but not pornographically. She understands that human condition - that powerful magnet love has in driving the way we traverse the territory of our lives, attempting to survive in a chaotic world not always amenable to fulfilling relationships. This is a collection of deeply impressive tales. Grady Harp, June 14