Transgressions

A skillful writer, Erastes makes you feel you are living two lives: one filled with everyday mundane, and one, when you pick up the book, that makes you the spectator involved in the emotional tale of young lives of a time long ago. It's a book you are reluctant to put down and return to your everyday life. It saddens you and uplifts you, the way a great book should do. Can't wait to read more from this author.

I just finished reading this book.I don't know who the author is but i believe she decieves an oscar award.This book is all in one.It has everything,history,adventure,sabotage,deception,fetish,true love,purity...you name it.It will keep you captivated for days.It's not a silly short story so,take your time.But just have your tissue beside you because there is a part that will break your heart so much that you may be crying for a long time.This book is magnificient.I wish i could give it ten stars.I won't tell you about the book but,all you have to know is that you won't regret it.This author's brilliance's is extreme.Transgressions deserves an oscar.MAGNIFICIENT.

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

Erastes. "Transgressions", Running Press, 2009. England, 1642 Amos Lassen "Transgressions" is the story of David Caverly whose father has brought him home to the puritanical family farm so that he can work the mental forge. War is on the horizon and there will be a need for metal. David, however, finds the whole business to be boring and yearns to escape; perhaps to join the King's army. He is attracted to Jonathan, a worker on the farm after a trooper in the calvary who seduced him and now David want to do the same to Jonathan. However David is forced to leave the farm and he and Jonathan are separated. They, however, do learn about love as they both fight a war and fearing that they may never see each other again. Erastes gives us real characters and we read about the way they feel for each other. Because David has a hard time being truthful, the two men must endure separation--Jonathan takes one position and David yet another. We wonder what will happen between David and Jonathan after they have tasted others. Jonathan rises in Cromwell's army as a spy while David becomes hardened by the war. The two do not stop loving one another and their love is great. This is a book that will hold your interst on every page as we root for David and Jonathan to come together again.

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