Without Sanction

The Phoenix easily gives Romeo and Juliet a run for it's money! I am a huge fan of Shakespeare, as is the author if her (Kit's!) enthusiasm within the story is any indication. Yet, Sims' forbidden love between two men is more poignant. It resonates through our society, where such love is attacked as strongly now as it was when this story was set. I will not rehash the plot, as other reviewers have already done so. But,... Read Full Review

I have to admit, I wasn't prepared to love this book as much as I did. Rarely does a book make me cry, but this one did. It's difficult to believe this is a first novel, because Ruth Sim's highly competent and polished storytelling seems to be honed from years of hard-won experience. Her decades- and continents-spanning story of two people in love (and no, it doesn't really matter that they are the same gender; love is love... Read Full Review

Jack Rourke and his twin brother Michael are raised by an unloving prostitute mother and an abusive sailor father in the squalor of the late nineteenth century London slums. When Jack's brother dies at age thirteen, Jack violently escapes his old man's clutches and runs away. Nick Stuart grows up on a farm with a religious fundamentalist father and helpless mother. Raised to follow in his father's footsteps and become the... Read Full Review

Like Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, this Victorian novel is replete with plot twists, years-long detours, providential meetings, villainy, and a great deal of drama. And yet like Laura Argiri's The God in Flight , it differs from most other Victorian novels in that the two main characters who meet and fall in love are both men. One is an adopted son with a dark secret and a Dickensian background... Read Full Review