The Year Without Summer by G.S. Wiley

I spent yesterday reading and reviewing this for Speak Its Name and then discovered (DOH) that it had already been reviewed in April.

However, I enjoyed it so much I wanted to put my own review out there, so here goes.

Lieutenant Robert Pierce of the Royal Navy was raised in the shadow of his father, a great admiral, and has spent his life on the high seas fighting the ships of Napoleon Bonaparte. When he loses a leg in battle and is confined to land, Robert is devastated. Taken in by his sister Maria, Robert faces the infamously cold, wet summer of 1816 trying to adjust to his new life. It's made all the gloomier by his worry for his best friend and lover, Lieutenant John Burgess, who is still at sea... until a visitor brings a bright ray of sunshine into Robert's overcast life.

The blurb caught my imagination immediately. There's not enough stories about the wounded after the Napoleonic wars, and I'd been dying to read one that dealt with it, in a way that wasn't amputee kink (not that I think there are any that are, thank goodness!) I warmed very much to poor Robert, whose life has pretty much come to an end, as far as he's concerned, and that's exactly how he would have felt.

After the introduction to Robert and his sister we have a lengthy flashback regarding his affair with John Burgess, the Lt he fell in love with and I have to say I loved this section; although being entirely circumspect in the face of their shipmates, as they would need to be,

Burgess is shown to have an impish sense of humour and there's a couple of things he does to entirely discombobulate Robert that I laughed out loud.

( Read more... )

Let me think!

Dad's is a noisy place today! Despite the fact that he lives about half a mile from the high street, and two streets from busy roads, the buildings muffle the sound a good deal, which often makes his house quieter than mine (which is in open fields and you can hear one car coming and going for about five miles radius) but today there's bin men rushing around with a constant beeping of the lorries and airplanes going over head really low. Also they must be resurfacing the road because there's a constant metallic churning coming from somewhere, and now there are police sirens roaring up and down like it's New York, not a market Norfolk town! Gah! Let a person think!  However, it's SUNNY – caused by the stiff breeze and it might be blooming cold but after literally weeks of thick cloud, it's lovely to see the sun. ETA: sun gone by lunchtime. weep.

Dad has a temperature, and OMG do you think I can get him to go to bed and rest? He's worse than a 2 year old, which i suppose he is, in a way. Now the paracetamol have kicked in and the temperature has gone down, of course he doesn't even believe there's anything wrong with him. I have a headache. I hope it's not flu—because I'll be pretty annoyed if it is, as he's never had flu in his life, and this year he had a flu jab for the first time.

I noticed today that an agent was putting out a call for "Adult Fiction" – this made me raise my eyebrows in surprise, because it's pretty rare an agent asks for erotica, but then I saw that she normally represents Young Adult Fiction, and so she was just meaning "Fiction" and not porn. :D 

Muffled Drum has to be in tomorrow without fail, so here I go, rolling my sleeves up and Getting On With It. You can tell, can't you?

Eta: Two scenes down, one to go.  When I get home I'll do some research regarding street names and Absinthe being available in Berlin at the time- and I need the name of another Prussian liquor. It's so boring to use schnaps and brandy all the time – they must have had something else!!

Now at home, sent dad to bed, finally – will ring him later and see how he is. *worries *