Bonus Book Reviews: Lily in Bloom, My Lady’s Service & A Sweet Revenge by Marie-Elise Bassett

(Sometimes I like to save up a backlog of reviews to make sure I won't have to scramble for something on Fridays, but I'm getting entirely too many stacked up at the moment.)

This is a group review of three novelettes in a thematic series entitled "Songs of Sappho", from which you may correctly deduce that the theme is lesbian historic romance.

I only stumbled across this author back in February 2015 when her publisher (Musa Publishing) announced a going-out-of-business sale. The e-book prices were so ridiculously (and guilt-inducingly) low that I picked up Bassett’s entire eight-book series “Songs of Sappho” without knowing anything more than that they were lesbian historic romances. And when I wanted to put something fluffy and comforting in my reading queue this week, I figured I’d finally give the first one (Lily in Bloom) a try. As it happens these are very short works, barely into the novelette word count, so I finish both that and the second story (My Lady’s Service) by the end of a 40-minute gym workout, and read the third (A Sweet Revenge) in a single gym session as well.

Bassett writes competent prose with a pleasant and solid voice and a familiarity and comfort with the historic romance genre. The only significant stylistic issue I noted was a tendency toward a formulaic repetition of certain descriptions. These stories were easy and pleasant reads, and if the content had been more closely aligned to my own tastes, I could easily become a big fan of the author.

The historicity of the settings falls within the scope of normal expectations for historic romance, which is to say that the average reader will enjoy the descriptions even though someone with a historic background would find much to critique. Lily in Bloom explicitly gives its date as 1886. Internal evidence suggests that A Sweet Revenge is set around the 1850s. The other story may be intended for a similar era, but the internal details, particularly of clothing, are more contradictory and vague, mixing garment types that suggest anything from the later 18th century through the late 19th. (And due to the nature of the stories, we are provided with a lot of garment descriptions as the items are lovingly removed.) If you are the sort of reader who knows the difference between a bustle and a pannier, or who wonders how a fully-clothed, corset-wearing woman could feel an exquisite touch brushing her nipple, the historic details may be unsatisfactory. The women's life histories and the solutions they find to realizing their desire for each other are solidly grounded in the times and do not dodge around the enormous pressures on 19th century English women to conform to heterosexual social structures, no matter what their emotional preferences.

I’ve called the stories “historic romance” but they really are more accurately categorized as historic erotica. The three that I read adhere to very similar formulas. (I can’t say yet whether the whole series follows a similar formula.) The viewpoint character is a sexually inexperienced or unsatisfied woman of relatively higher class or established standing, either in or about to enter an unhappy marriage, who has an erotic encounter with a more experienced woman of lower class or in a more marginal social position. The two women rapidly discover and develop a stronger and more romantic connection in addition to sexual desire. After a brief time for reflection and anticipation, there follows a longer and more elaborate sexual encounter during which the viewpoint character now takes an active role in giving pleasure to her partner. The stories resolve with the two women identifying a means by which they will continue to share their lives, despite the roadblocks of the times and society that would not recognize their attachment.

The sexual scenes are solidly vanilla, clearly consensual (even within the class differences), and relatively tastefully described using period-appropriate language (though not necessarily language one might expect the naïve protagonist to be familiar with). But the reader should not go into these stories expecting much in the way of plot or character development. The two primary characters are given three-dimensional backstories, but the minor characters are much more cardboard (not surprisingly, given the short length of the works), and the male characters in particular are uniformly presented as crude and unpleasant people. This creates something of a tension between the depiction of the characters’ sexuality (all the protagonists in the stories were clearly presented as exclusively lesbian in orientation) and the strong implication that a preference for women derives from the undesirability of all the surrounding men.

I’m conflicted about how to rate these works. On the one hand, the writing is competent, if not brilliant, the historic setting is neither better nor worse than the usual for historic romance, and the stories succeed well at what they intend to be: brief bits of historic fluff that could be very good company on a lonely evening. On the other hand, I’m not personally interested in stories that have so little in the way of plot and character, and I'm not really interested in stories where sexual descriptions take up more than 50% of the page-count. So I’ll set my star rating based on my own idiosyncratic reading experience and suggest that the potential reader focus more on my description to determine if these stories are for you (assuming you can get ahold of a copy).

Bonus Book Review: Queen’s Hunt by Beth Bernobich

This is the second book in the River of Souls series and is very much a “middle book”. Not in any negative sort of sense. In the same sense that the "set" in volleyball is the middle step in a pass-set-spike sequence. Queen's Hunt takes the plot-ball that has been put in motion in the previous book and positions it ideally for the conclusion.

In a secondary world that evokes but does not mirror certain cultures of Europe’s past, magic and politics drive the plot in a setting where memories and souls—and the relationships they’ve developed in life—can carry over across many lifetimes. The first volume, Passion Play, introduced our two central characters, Ilse and Raul, and plunged the reader into the intricate politics both within and between kingdoms that are spinning the setting toward inevitable war. Magic is the key, and especially a powerful magic that was distilled into a gemstone that gave its wielder a nearly ageless existence. But in ages past the gem was split into three parts which were lost in Anderswar, the liminal space between worlds. Now one of the gems has been reclaimed by the ageless wizard-king and the hunt for the other two will determine the balance of power. Except that the gems themselves have their own goals and desires.

This story is broader in scope than the first volume, adding several new viewpoint characters and a great deal more geography, but in pacing is more…I don’t know, leisurely? That’s not quite right. The events are much more focused on the hunt of the title. The world is already built for us. The characters and their concerns have already been laid out. And the historic stakes of the events are already clear. This leaves Queen’s Hunt the space and time to develop other aspects of the setting, and in particular I came to understand more about how reincarnation works in this world and just what the extent of carryover from previous lives can be.

I love the detailed world-building of this series and the way it’s been enriched by drawing on historical source material, in particular language. The only aspect I had a little trouble with was following the large-scale geographic layout. I kept realizing that I’d gotten certain relative positions and compass directions mixed up in my head and eventually gave up on trying to visualize any sort of map. Another thing I love about the setting is the way that the inherited connections between past lives aren’t played out in a simplistic “one true soul-mate” fashion, but intertwine across genders and relationships to create a complicated and conflicted “spiritual family”.

The resolution of the quest for the gems sets the reader up for a grand final conflict in the third book (Allegiance), where the new alignments and power balances created in Queen’s Hunt will precipitate an entirely different struggle than the one hinted at in the first volume. This is not a stand-alone book, and the way in which it continues the story suggests that the series as a whole is probably best thought of as a single work, not a sequence of independent volumes.

Bonus Theater Review: Or, by Liz Duffy Adams (Anton's Well Theater Company)

A couple references to this play had gone past on my twitter feed, especially from Ellen Kushner, and when one of those references mentioned it was playing in the SF Bay Area this week, I made an impulse buy of a pair of tickets. Alas, my quest to find someone to see it with me failed, but the play itself was well worth the impulse.

Aphra Behn was a mid-17th century English poet, playwright, libertine, and spy. She was of obscure origins, both in the sense of being of working-class birth, and in the sense that she re-invented her history often enough that there is little certainty about the facts. She may have traveled to Surinam as a spy, she may have married a man named Behn, she definitely was an ardent royalist and supporter of King Charles II, and worked as a spy on his behalf in the Netherlands. She may have gone to prison for debt as a consequence of never being paid for her espionage work. She definitely wrote a large number of plays, novels, and poems. And her work has a frequent them of erotic desire between women, though the extent to which she may have acted on such desire is unknown.

Adams' play opens with the (possibly fictional) stint in debtors' prison and revolves around Behn's ambition to establish herself as a playwright, entanglements in royal politics (and with the royal person), and a nuanced and complex imagining of Behn's erotic interests, including a mutual fan-girling with actress Nell Gwyn that evolves into a make-out session. The sexual element in combination with the inevitably comic device of staging a seven-role play with three actors (via quick costume changes and precipitous dashing in and out of hiding from each other) put this performance solidly in the category of "romp".

High points (for me) were the framed-as-spontaneous poetic banter between Behn and King Charles, the Comedic Servant both claiming and transforming her identity as Comedic Servant, the fate of former espionage-entanglement William Scot, and the way that Behn can be distracted from just about any other activity by the need to scribble down some lines for her current Work In Progress. The performances were all solid, though the layout of the performance space in a sort of 3/4-round made some of the lines of sight sub-optimal.

The work was staged by the Anton's Well Theater Company, evidently a very new, very small, local group. I got the impression that most of the audience members (of which there were 15) had some personal connection to the troupe. The performance was in a smallish room in the Berkeley City Club (a gorgeous building a couple blocks from campus and one of Berkeley's several pieces of Julia Morgan architecture) in which a 15-member audience was a reasonable number. The Moorish/Romanesque style of the room provided a charmingly period (if not exactly 18th c. English) setting along with the minimalist set, deployed largely to enable the necessary entrances and exits.

The last performance is tomorrow (Sunday, Dec. 6) so I fear this review isn't likely to bring in any new viewers, but local folk may want to look into future productions by this group.