55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
False Colors....Nothing false about this brilliant book!, March 31, 2009
This review is from: False Colors: An M/M Romance (Paperback)
Whoever was responsible for creating the book cover of this book over at Running Press deserves a bonus. Having never read Alex Beecroft before, I came across False Colors on Amazon.com just through a random search. Now I have to admit...sure, I like to read erotica and M/M romance from time to time but I'm usually TURNED OFF when I see big chested men on the cover shirtless and headless. You know the books I'm talking about...all chest and abs and if they show the person's face, it's only from the nose down. The cover of this book caught and held my attention immediately because it is much more respectable and deserving of the story that lies within the book's pages. It gives a certain quality to the reading and this author does not disappoint. You won't be disappointed either.
False Colors follows John Cavendish who has just taken command of the HMS Meteor and its lackluster crew. John is strong, charismatic, and determined to shine as a leader and succeed at their first mission. But as they sail to Algiers to interfere with slave trade, there's only one thing - one person - that stands in John's way: Lieutenant "Alfie" Donwell.
Donwell seems to be a bit young at sea and certainly not as serious as Cavendish. The chemistry between the two is amazing, and Beecroft has done a superb job of making the reader just as uncomfortable as the two sexually charged men are when they are together on the ship. During battle, Alfie tempts John by making suggestive jokes just to feel him out and to try hard to get under his skin. But John is determined to keep up his guard and not let Alfie see the softer side.
However, it's not the raging waters that will be the ship's demise. Donwell's former captain and lover soon returns to aid in the botched mission. It is only then that we get to see that Alfie is indeed the one with a softer side. As he is torn between the safety and security of his old mate and the tempting sparks between him and Cavendish, the novel heightens to an amazing climax.
I'd like to point out that Beecroft has put a lot of time and effort into the historical aspect of this book and its characters. She does not treat Cavendish and Donwell as playthings, just moving them around on the page between bed sessions. You will have read almost 100 pages before even getting to the first passionate scene. This proves that Beecroft set out to write a novel that would entertain, not just turn you on. She builds up the intensity between the two leading men, ultimately making the reader eager to turn the page for more. She obviously cares about these characters and the story itself and wants the reader to care too. I know I did, long after reading the last page.
Kudos to Running Press for creating a series not flawed by nude bodies on the cover and stories clouded with predictable sex. Kudos to Alex Beecroft for a story of men at sea, piracy, war, betrayal, love, and redemption. There's nothing false about this colorful and historical romance which I'll be suggesting to readers for a long time to come! If you enjoy getting lost at sea with complex and interesting characters in a story that will challenge and excite you, then this book is for you.
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25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
FALSE COLORS, on the Mast and in the Heart, April 27, 2009
This review is from: False Colors: An M/M Romance (Paperback)
I don't generally read m/m romances but the beautiful cover for this book and Alex Beecroft's trailer made me decide to take a chance.
"Stop chasing love. Love is not for men like us. We share a deviancy we must pay for with lives of exemplary duty...You will get yourself hanged if you think otherwise."
This is the advice Charles Farrant, Captain Lord Lisburn, gives Lieutenant Aelfstan Donwell after he seduces him, but the young naval officer doesn't heed his advice. Alfie wants true love, and is willing to risk career, reputation, and life to have it.
False Colors begins in 1762, traveling from Gibraltar to Jamaica to the Arctic Sea, as John Cavendish, a chaste and straight-laced young Quaker, is given the captaincy of the HMS Meteor, and told he is to launch an attack against the pirates of the Barbary Coast. Though the mission appears to be a suicide run, John, who is an aspiring and rising naval officer, has no choice but to obey. Joining him is Lt. Donwell, and the two immediately clash although at this point, it appears more a matter of attitude. Though the mission succeeds, Alfie is captured and it is up to John and his men to rescue him from the slave pens where he is beaten, starved, and wounded.
In a following battle against the French, John is wounded and it is Alfie who takes on the chore of becoming his nurse, settling himself and his wounded commanding officer into a little house in Gibraltar. A friendship grows between the two men, born of their brushes with death as well as their love of music, a friendship that has more importance for one than the other, and only after John has recovered does Alfie dare speak what he's felt since first seeing his captain, only to be immediately rejected. Fearing recriminations, Alfie disappears, signs on the HMS Britannia with Farrant, and comes face-to-face with the only other man he might ever love, the noble for whom he's had a hero's crush since age 13 when he was a cabin boy. Farrant laughed at him then, but now he doesn't and Alfie is swept away into an affair that could cost both him and his lover their lives if anyone speaks the words aloud.
Abandoned by his friend, horrified by that friendship and questioning his own convictions, John learns that the entire mission was a ruse to begin a war with the Turks and he and his crew are the scapegoats. The Admiralty denies everything and John loses his ship and his crew.
In Tobago, Farrant and his crew are ordered to rescue British sailors attacked by pirates. They arrive too late--all but one are dead. The survivor...John Cavendish. By now, John is trying to come to terms with his friendship for Alfie, his silence, and the fact that one word from him could cause the death of the man who saved his life. When Farrant dies of wounds received in the rescue, and Alfie is accused of being his lover and brought up for court martial, it is John who goes behind the scenes to buy off witnesses, and beg the accuser to retract his statement, eventually losing his appointment to his own ship because he helps the man he still continues to call simply a friend. Though Alfie is released, John's absence at his trial makes him feel he's been abandoned, not knowing that John is going through his own religious soul-searching concerning the emotions he is suddenly experiencing. Alfie signs on the HMS Albion, sent to explore the Arctic. When the first officer dies of yellow fever, a new man is assigned and now John and Alfie two find themselves on a frozen ship off Baffin Bay, facing each other and their fears. As at other moments which have arisen, they don't say what needs to be said, and as usual, they continue on still isolated from each other.
I'm totally ignorant of naval or sea-faring terms and don't know a mainsail from a bosun but that didn't stop me from loving the vivid, gruesome descriptions of the sea battles or how the British lived in Jamaica and Gibraltar. The bleak, desolation of the Albion's being stranded in frozen waters after striking an iceberg made me wonder: How did these men manage to survive without computers and other modern equipment on their ships? Surely they had to have an inordinate amount of courage to even attempt such voyages! You have to admire anyone who'd dare choose such a life, much less make a career of it.
The main characters in this story--Alfie, John, and Farrant--are portrayed exactly that way...Alfie, seeking permanent love, Farrant taking medications to help him stave off his vice, and John, questioning in his first tremble of attraction to another man whether both his love of God, his sense of duty, and his chastity are a sham. They are brave men, men with both honor and courage, who hold to duty while flying secretly in the face of public morality, not a limp wrist or a lacy hanky in the lot. More is made of their characters than anything else; the first sexual scene doesn't even occur until a third of the way into the story, and it's very brief, concentrating more on the participants' emotions and thoughts than the physical aspects.
Only two things bothered me. Immediately after violently repulsing Alfie, the young captain starts questioning his own resolve, his religion, everything that has until that moment made up his life. Would a chaste man who'd been raised a Quaker, when faced with another man declaring his love, immediately assume that he, too, was of the same cloth? If Alfie had never come along, would John ever have set foot on the same path as his friend? The other is the ending. "Is it worth death?" Alfie asks. "What we've done so far only earns us the pillory. I could be satisfied with nothing more than that forever, couldn't you? Why run the risk?"
Why indeed?
There's a Happy Ending but it may not be Everafter. I would've opted for both men to cashier out of the navy, retire to a secluded cottage in the English countryside, and live out their days together. Instead, it appears they will remain in their chosen service, living lies, and continually running the risk of death...but at least they'll be together while they do it.
I guess, in the long run, that's all anyone can ask: to be with the one you love through it all.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential read, March 31, 2009
This review is from: False Colors: An M/M Romance (Paperback)
There are certain writers who have the capacity to make me want to smash my keyboard into tiny pieces and not write again. When I finished Alex Beecroft's new book, False Colors, I had that feeling this morning.
There are a very few books on my list of 'essential reads' for anyone interested in Gay Historical Fiction. The Charioteer, At Swim Two Boys, As Meat Loves Salt and now False Colors.
Yes, it's that good. If you are interested in the genre at all, or are planning to write the genre in future I hold up False Colors and say 'this is how it should be done.'
To say that FC isn't a romance would be doing it an injustice because it is-in the modern and the old-fashioned sense of the word. But Beecroft takes that mixes it up with adventure to die for (literally) moral dilemmas popping up like mushrooms, earthy realistic 18th century figures and heart stopping action'and of course romance.
At the core it's about two young men who struggle with their places in life and have to weigh up those places, and their reputations- and ruin thereof-against their duty. Many authors would take a book about gay sailors and have most of it having the protagonists either shagging like bunnies or leaning attractively on the quarter-deck pining for the colour of his love's eyes but Beecroft knows the navy and the men within. She knows despite how much tumescence is going on in the fine linen of a sailor's drawers sailors need to work the ship, take watches, men need to be fed, watered, entertained, repel boarders, fight the enemy. If they tend to forget their lover's fine eyes while they are fighting for their lives, one has to forgive them.' This is after all a historical novel and quite aside from the wonderful story of John and Alfie, it is a a book that reeks of the sea ' and one that would grace any naval enthusiast's shelves.
Ms Beecroft, as anyone who has read Captain's Surrender will know, does not shy from the realism of her chosen era. The bodycount in this book could rival any Hollywood blockbuster and she doesn't spare the reader the details of the horrors that life in His Majesty's navy can bring, not in sight or sound or taste or smell. Scurvy and yellowjack, torture and shipwreck, the details are always crisp, and convincing. This is what raises her work above the heads of her peers and what makes this great gay romantic fiction.
If I have any quibbles with this very fine piece of work-quite the best Ms Beecroft has produced-it's perhaps that the first sixty pages are so crammed with action (making it utterly unputdownable) that it's the tiniest bit jumpy. This doesn't do any detriment to the story though, other than perhaps to take the shine off one of the big fat shiny five stars this book very deservedly gets from me.
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