A vivid period tale of improbably edifying debauchery.
Gay men in Victorian Britain fight homophobia by becoming sex workers in this historical novel.
In 1881, with gay sexual acts illegal in Britain, 24-year-old Jack Branson is exiled from his Irish village when his mother catches him in a gay “Incident”; he washes up in London. There, he works as a low-paid telegram courier, languishing in a nasty room and sending letters and money to his parents but never receiving a reply. His fortunes improve when he becomes a sex worker, visiting clients under cover of delivering fake telegrams. The money’s great, and the gay sex makes him “feel complete” in his “own skin.” He finds true love with Oliver Hawkett, a young thief with a vision of opening gay brothels as a way of normalizing gay sexuality “until the world gets so used to us that they toss those wicked laws and let us live as equals.” When police arrest Jack at a 30-man orgy, he flees to Ireland to spend two years as a footman until he’s outed and returns to London. He then joins Oliver’s newly opened brothel, arranges for protection payments to a Scotland Yard superintendent who is his client, and stars in group-sex sessions with aristocrats. Feeling as if he has found his true home, Jack writes about his adventures and the varieties of gay sexual experiences among his fellow sex workers, including a man who lost his leg in childhood when his mother tied him to a railroad track after learning he was gay. The resulting anonymously published novel, The Sins of an Irishman in London, sells well but precipitates a libel suit by a closeted Tory politician. Jack’s unapologetic testimony at trial—“I shag men for money”—sounds a clarion call for gay liberation.
Schulze’s yarn is a sentimentalized takeoff on the doings of real-life sex worker Jack Saul, who inspired a similar piece of Victorian erotica titled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain and testified in a libel case. Schulze’s depiction of the Victorian era is atmospheric and intense in conveying the persecution gay people faced. But it is studded with anachronisms both linguistic—“Gossip’s as viral as a blight,” Jack says several years before viruses were discovered—and monetary. (Jack sends his mother five pounds sterling every day for years, which in modern money is the equivalent of about $870 per day, while living in a slum.) The author’s prose is workmanlike, with explicit, fairly rote pornographic scenes—“ ‘Harder!’ Andy yelled at the blond. ‘Harder!’ ”—and some passages that are more evocative and lyrical. (“Have you ever been the only sober man in a pub of drunks? It’s exciting, like an opera. There’s music in their movements, their camaraderie, their sad stories.”) Unfortunately, Jack’s relationship with his sexuality doesn’t always ring true. He’s an emotionally volatile man, always agonizing over his relationship with Oliver and frequently breaking down in tears, but at the same time he’s a happy sex worker in a brothel so noble that he compares it to King Arthur’s Round Table. (François: “Don’t you want to save the brothel?” Jack: “I want to save it, François. I just don’t think I can.”) Readers may find this portrait of Victorian sex workers too blithely romantic to be convincing.
A vivid period tale of improbably edifying debauchery.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73703-782-8
Page Count: 426
Publisher: David Schulze Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
