19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bloody, cruel, utterly dissatisfying, February 15, 2010
This review is from: Transgressions: An M/M Romance (Paperback)
To call this book a M/M ROMANCE is a blatant lie. It starts fair enough with Jon and David, but after a few pages it deteriorates and keeps getting worse: both are separated early in the story and what starts as one story are in reality two different storylines cobbled together in one book. David gets caught up in civil war in England: The author revels in gruesome an bloody details. David is victim of an unspeakably pervert who thinks he does god's work by killing witches. He tortures Davids body and mind horribly. Both are reunited on the last three pages (of a 400-pages book!), but they are broken men. If you are looking for a book you can look forward to after a hard day at work stay well clear of this one. It pulls you down, all you will feel for David an Jon is pity. I've hundreds of books on my bookshelves, but seldom did I encounter one so utterly dissatisfying. I enjoy books with characters, that stay with you a long time after you've read the last line. In this sorry case I can not forget this whole mess quick enough. I recommend W. A. Hoffmann / Lynn Flewelling for more rewarding stories.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Erastes does it again: this is a terrific book!, April 25, 2009
I discovered Erastes as an author about a year ago and she has earned a place on my list of favorites. Why? She writes beautifully, tells a great story, pays remarkable attention to historical details (I'm a stickler for that), and is realistic in her depiction of human emotions and relationships. As an author, she delivers the complete package. As a reader, that's what I want and to date, Erastes hasn't disappointed me.
Trangressions is Erates' second novel and is a worthy successor to her first, Standish. It tells the story of David Caverly and Jonathan Graie, set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. Over the course of the novel, they travel from heaven to hell (literally) and end up back on earth with the rest of us mere mortals. There is a sliver of hope that they may see heaven again--not to live there but to at least find a little bit of happiness in a world that seems largely devoid of it.
The story opens in 1642. David is a beautiful, golden boy, on the verge of becoming a man. He is dreamy, idealistic, self-centered, impetuous and restless. He is impatient with his life, living and working with his father Jacob, the blacksmith, confined by the size of their farm and small village. He is eager to get away from Kineton and find out what world holds for him--down the road, across the river, in the city. England is at war with herself but David, as so many boys before or since, sees this as a big exciting game and wants nothing more than to be part of the adventure.
Jonathan arrives at the farm to serve as an apprentice blacksmith to Jacob. He is everything David is not: tall, broad shouldered, dark-haired; a devout Puritan who prays on his knees and turns his eyes away from David's nakedness in their shared bedroom. They have nothing in common but their age. But David becomes the ying to Jonathan's yang and they bridge their differences, becoming friends, then lovers, pledging themselves to each other with a blood oath, vowing to be together for all time.
This would seem to be the foundation for a traditional romance but wait...maybe not. David had been initiated into the `ways of the flesh' by another man. On my first reading, it seemed this might have been a convenient way for David to learn "the ropes." But as I thought about it, maybe this was a subtle way to tell us that Jonathan is not David's "one true love."
Not his one true love? Wait a minute, isn't that sacrilege? In certain corners of the romance writing world, maybe it is. But what Erastes does, and skillfully, is turn the myth on its head that 'soulmate and true love' have to be the same person. Clearly Jonathan is David's soulmate. But is he David's true love? David is a very sensual--and sexual--man. He needs a man--a lover--at his side to survive and it is in the early part of the book that he realizes this. How this plays out, throughout the story, is interesting indeed. The fact that he figures it out--he needs a man, but doesn't love all of them--is even more interesting.
This is a book that can be read on many levels. As a war story/adventure with romance thrown in, it works. As a comment on the tragedy and morality of war, it works. Myself, I found myself reading this (and thinking about it afterwards) on a very symbolic level. Pay attention to scars, knives, rapiers, swords; metal in all its forms and the fact that the David, Jonathan and others are created against the background of a fire, forge and all that entails. (Sort of spoiler: read the book and then go back and re-read David's sexual initiation and where it occurs. See if you don't look at it differently after reading the whole book. I did.)
No doubt about it, this is David's story and as the book went on, I found myself wanting to read his parts and the other stuff--not so much. There is a subplot with Jonathan that was grim and could have been shortened. It went on just a little too long and in the big scheme of things, I'm not sure the level of excruciating detail that was given was needed. Readers who identify more with Jonathan might disagree with me, however.
This is the first of four books in a new male/male romance line being published by Running Press. I was thrilled that they released a Kindle version on the same day as the print version. On my Kindle, the book was nicely formatted and had the bonus of being able to navigate from chapter to chapter using the 5-way controller (I have a Kindle 2). That's a cool feature and came in handy as I wrote this review, allowing me to move quickly through the book to review certain sections--and re-read favorite passages.
For Running Press, this is terrific book to initiate their new series. As I said at the beginning, Transgressions has it all: great story, great writing, great characters. And for those of us who like our romance hot, but tasteful: Erastes hits the ball out of the park. Read this book. You won't be disappointed.
Five stars. Highly recommended.
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gorgeous book to really get your teeth into, April 3, 2009
This review is from: Transgressions: An M/M Romance (Paperback)
Was it C.S Lewis who said `you can never get a cup of tea too big or a book too long for me'? That's quite applicable to me too, so I was delighted when I got the ARC of Transgressions in the post to find that it's a really big book. There's meat on its bones, and it gave me the wonderful luxurious feeling of knowing that I'd be spending the whole weekend or longer savouring it and chewing it over. It's not one of those flimsy things that you read in an hour and wonder where the rest of it is.
Partly because of that, I think, it reads like a book that has world enough and time. Time to set the scene in the opening chapters with wonderful sensual description of the forge and the fields and the sky and our two young heroes when they were unscarred, naive and feckless.
There's world enough and time for plot! Two plots, in fact, because David's fatal flaw - his inability to speak the truth - leads both young men to be flung out of the idyll of their early days together. David learns a soldier's trade, on the King's side in the interminable and soul destroying battles of the English Civil War. Without any heavy-handedness, the reader can see him hardening, growing wiser, being on the other side of that slippery silver-tongued avoidance of the truth and learning from it. Through his relationships with the trooper Tobias and Hal, the scout, we rejoice and suffer and grow up with him.
Jonathan, in the mean time, stinging from David's lies, is drawn into a company of people who seem to embody the truth - who hunt the truth out, no matter how awful it is. He joins Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-Finder General in his crusade to rid the country of witches and servants of the Devil. I have to admit that this is my favourite thread in the plot, not just for the agonised and abusive and kinky relationship between Jonathan and his mentor in witch-finding, the over-zealous, sadistic and slightly unhinged Michael. But also because I loved the fact that Erastes treats the subject completely believably from Jonathan's POV.
I've noticed a tendency in some historicals for the sympathetic characters to have terribly modern attitudes - for them to be instantly anti-slavery, pro-the rights of women, pro-class equality and universal suffrage, etc, and in the hands of a lesser author I would have expected the hero to be instantly on the side of the poor defenseless old women. But it wouldn't have been very authentic if he had. I loved that Jonathan took the threat of witchcraft seriously, and that it was part of his goodness as a good man to want to protect society from the ultimate evil, even if it cost him his autonomy and dignity.
Naturally he's wrong about the good he's trying to do, but that makes it all the more tragic and poignant when he starts to work it out.
If David is hardened and made responsible by his journey through the book, Jonathan is taken apart, and there's something gloriously right about the fact that it's David - the one who began his disintegration - who is the one to rescue him at the end and begin the process of healing him.
But Jonathan is now an important man in Cromwell's government, and David is under arrest as a known soldier of the King. How on earth are they going to get out of that? Is Jonathan his own man enough not to condemn the one he loves, or is the happy ending only going to last for a single night? I wish I could say. All I can say is that this is absolutely gagging for a sequel! And I for one would also love to read about Jonathan's career as a spy for Cromwell.
I think I might even like this book better than Standish; it's more realistic, but it's also more lyrical. The slower pace meant that I had time to get to know the characters more and the twists when they came were more startling.
It's a book that transcends the bounds of romance and can be just as easily read as a piece of literature. Or it's a piece of literature which is as easily and enjoyably read as a romance. It's haunting and unforgettable. It's very very good! It goes on my `I wish there were more like this' shelf, or at least it will do once I've finished reading it again :)
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