As with car rentals, so with books. Sometimes you pick up a book, flip through a few pages, read the reviews, and decide it's for you, only to find a few chapters in that it's about as much fun as a healthy shot of ghost pepper Tabasco in a strawberry milkshake. The writing may be decent enough and the story intriguing, but there's something so unexpected, so shocking, so just plain nasty that you're about as likely to finish as you are to survive a swan dive into the near-boiling waters of a Yellowstone geyser.
Such it is with the two books I bring you tonight. Both of these allegedly romantic books came with good reviews and positive feedback from readers - and both turned out to be as heartfelt and sentimental as the burnt ashes of old love letters used to sand one's driveway during a snowstorm. One, an examination of how a man in possession of a large fortune is in want of a wife AND a husband, may well have started out as fanfiction, and not necessarily a good example thereof. The other, which was actually nominated for several awards and won one, manages to combine evangelical Christianity, anti-Semitism, and profound ignorance of the historical record in new and horrifying ways:
Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, by Ann Herendeen - there are very few books I regret purchasing.
Part of this is because I buy a lot of books secondhand, whether via used bookstores, tag sales, thrift shops, or the bargain racks at Barnes & Noble. Most of these cost me only a few dollars (if that - I could have scored a copy of Going Rogue for fifty cents one time, and boy that would have made dandy gun cotton on the 4th of July) and seriously, it's tough to regret spending that little money even if the resulting book turns out to be lousy.
But sometimes...sometimes the book is such a crashing disappointment that even I, so familiar with the wilds of Badbookistan, wish very much that I could get that hard-earned coin back in my wallet.
Initially Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander seemed like a keeper. The ad copy and the reviews promised a fluffy, frothy romp that answered the question of what happens when a Regency rake in possession of a large fortune and a taste for his own sex must marry to secure the said fortune, then finds himself in love with both his saucy, sassy lady and a handsome young buck with the equipment that his lady lacks. This is a situation that is not only plausible but almost certainly happened - homosexuality is not a recent invention, as much as homophobes might wish to believe otherwise - and the book sounded intriguing enough that I was willing to put aside my usual dislike of romance novels to give it a chance.
The premise is not bad: Andrew Carrington, heir to an earldom, is simultaneously in search of a nice, intelligent, fertile wife so that he can secure his inheritance and beget lots of potential little earls, and a "sodomite" with a long, firm history of very close personal relationships with members of his own sex. He chooses a young woman named Phyllida, marries her, and then falls for the richly endowed Matthew Thornby, who in turn falls for him. Complications ensue, but by the end of the story Andrew, Phyllida, and Matthew have settled into a comfy little threesome as cupids fling glitter and rose petals and hearts and flowers and - that's as secure as it can be in a time and place where homosexuals were subject to arrest, prosecution, and execution.
Not that this really seems to matter to Andrew, Phyllida, Matthew, or any of their friends, relatives, or fellow members of the the Brotherhood of Philander, the club of not particularly circumspect sodomites that includes pretty much everyone in the book. They're all rich, handsome, and well born, so the said laws against homosexuality are mentioned but not really menacing. Their female relatives are all very, very understanding, and before you can say "what is this, Castro Street?" pretty much all the main cast has settled into committed couplehood/polyamory/something similar that probably would have gotten them all killed or forced into exile in a remote area of Graustark and/or Sokovia.
Now. A skilled writer could have made this plausible, at least for Andrew, Phyllida, and Matthew - there have been numerous examples of gay men or lesbians marrying a member of the opposite sex while still having a beloved of the same gender, especially among Bohemian circles, and there is no reason at all that someone couldn't construct a good romance novel around this. I'd love to see one about William Moulston Marston, Sadie Holloway, and Olive Byrne, for instance, or Virginia Woolf, her husband Leonard, her lover Vita Sackville-West, and Sackville-West's husband Harold Nicolson.
Alas, Ann Herendeen isn't that writer. There are some good passages in this book, and some nice characterization (especially of Phyllida herself). She also clearly did a great deal of research into Regency life and culture, even if one sometimes gets the impression that a fair bit of this was via close analysis of Georgette Heyer novels. But that's not enough to overcome the following:
- Sex scenes that are dignified by the terms "coarse" and "nasty."
- A completely gratuitous espionage plot that adds nothing except the suspicion that the author had read either The Scarlet Pimpernel or The Pink Carnation a few too many times.
- An odd little subplot where Andrew suspects that Phyllida is actually Jane Austen (spoiler: she isn't).
- Phyllida's instant acceptance of her husband's preference for men, which is explained away by a) her mother's less than perfect reputation and b) her own sub rosa career writing Gothic novels that make Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis look like Vladimir Nabokov.
- The strange openness of the Brotherhood, whose preferences really aren't all that well concealed despite the alleged founding of the club as a safe space for sodomites.
- An ending that one reviewer compared to a miniseries that "goes on three episodes too long."
The author, most of whose other works are self-published, includes an afterword where she makes it clear that yes, she was aware of the social stigma and legal penalties faced by actual early 19th century sodomites, and her conscious decision to wave some of this aside in the interests of telling her story. She claimed that the book was, at least on some level, a fantasy, not true historical fiction, and that's certainly her privilege...but it would have been helpful if she'd made that clearer from the beginning, not after one has laid one's money down.
For Such a Time, by Kate Breslin - it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the lesser known categories of romance novels is the "inspirational romance." This term, which seemingly encompasses everything from Amish maidens falling for brawny-thewed but otherwise virginal farm boys to Bible-reading girls whose purity causes their secular boyfriends to repent and take a virginity pledge, is used to describe books where the characters either are Christians, become Christians, or use their Christian faith in some way to resolve whatever conflict keeps them apart.
That such books exist shouldn't surprise anyone; wholesome love stories, many with a strong religious component, have existed for decades. They're particularly popular in the evangelical subculture here in the United States, but some types - especially the "bonnet rippers" set in Amish or Mennonite communities - are bought by less devout readers in search of a peep into another culture.
The same can be said about love stories set during the Nazi years, particularly during World War II itself. There's plenty of grist for a rousing, heartfelt tale of lovers separated by prejudice, war, combat, espionage, etc., and writers from Herman Wouk (The Winds of War, War and Remembrance) to Janet Dailey (Silver Wings, Santiago Blue) have taken full advantage of those perilous years in their books.
Combining these sub-genres is not as common as one might think - seriously, why hasn't someone written a romance based on the work of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, the Unitarians who risked their lives to save Jewish refugees during the early years of the war? - but it certainly has possibilities. Plenty of Jews were hidden by Gentile neighbors or managed to pass as non-Jews in occupied Europe, while not a few Gentiles opposed fascism at least in part due to their religious convictions. The question isn't whether an inspirational romance can be set during the war years, but why there aren't more.
This is why this book, at least at first, seems to have so much promise.
It's the story of Hadassah Benjamin, a stunning blue-eyed, half-Jewish blonde who assumes the identity of "Stella Muller" to survive when she's hauled off to the camps, and Aric von Schmidt, the handsome, brooding, surprisingly compassionate Nazi she works for and comes to love. Throw in a profound misunderstanding on Aric's part, Hadassah's uncle Morty being forced to choose which inmates are sent to Auschwitz, the danger Hadassah finds herself in at pretty much every waking moment, and Breslin's considerable skill as a writer, and one can see why this novel was nominated for several awards by the Romance Writers of America last year, and actually was honored as the best debut novel of the year by the American Christian Fiction Writers.
So far, so good. Except that Aric is not only a Nazi, he's a member of the SS. And not just a member, oh no. He's the commandant of Theresienstadt.
Yes.
Really.
That anyone, anywhere, at any time, would think that a love story between a secret Jew and the head of a concentration camp was a good thing, is beyond my comprehension. Mind, Theriesenstadt was not as bad as some - it was the "show camp" where the inmates had an orchestra, jazz band, lectures, etc. - but that's like saying that falling off a cliff to be dashed to pieces on the foaming rocks below is worse than falling off the Empire State Building to become one with a crosstown bus largely because the view is so much better on the way down. Tens of thousands of inmates, mostly Jews but also some Allied POW's, either died there or were deported to the death factories in the East, and the fact that a few got to play the violin or give a lecture or two doesn't change this.
Worse, Breslin, for all her research into the camps and the Nazi movement, seems to have missed the whole point of the SS. These men were the best of the best, the cream of the Nazi system, the product of years of training and indoctrination into Nazi "racial science," military history, and German culture. Some certainly were of higher character than others, but positing an SS officer as the brooding romantic hero of a romance novels makes attempted bigamist Edward Rochester look like a real catch indeed.
What truly makes this book So Bad It's An Insult To An Entire Religion, though, isn't the setting, or the premise, or even the male lead. It's that For Such a Time is, at its core, a rewrite of the Biblical book of Esther, only with Nazis, a happy ending, and the heroine drawing strength not from her namesake but from repeated reading of the story of Jesus in the New Testament. By the end it's clear that Hadassah is, at the very least, considering converting to Christianity, which makes absolutely no sense for a Jew in 1945 but plenty of sense in a romance written by a Christian, published by a Christian publisher, and marketed primarily to evangelical Christians.
Needless to say, this did not go over all that well.
Oh, not at first - For Such a Time got glowing reviews from the Christian press and several excellent notices on Goodreads. That some of the said excellent notices on Goodreads involved fangirls expressing their admiration for Aric von Schmidt (not to mention wondering whether the "Nazis were really that bad," and no, I am not making this up) only meant that the book had an audience outside the Christian romance community.
It wasn't until blogger Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books fame read the book and starting writing/tweeting her horror to the world that word got out that For Such a Time was, perhaps, not quite what it appeared to be. Soon the Christian romance community (largely white, largely middle-aged, and largely clueless) was embroiled in some richly deserved soul-searching, professional bigot Vox Day (yes, the same guy who tried to hijack the Hugos) got involved and went after Sarah Wendell, Wendell's followers on Tumblr fought back, and the controversy briefly went viral.
Author Kate Breslin didn't help matters by professing her "compassion for the Jewish people...for whom [she has] the greatest love and respect" despite blithely co-opting one of the greatest tales of Jewish courage and survival against all odds for a novel where a Jewish woman is inspired not by Esther but by Jesus. This is uncomfortably close to the concept of the "completed Jew," an evangelical term for a convert who continues to identify as a Jew despite accepting baptism and professing belief in Jesus as the Messiah.
Can we "problematic," good gentles all? Can we say "tasteless and offensive"? Or should we simply let Sarah Wendell, who brought this entire less to light, have the last word?
"I wish that someone had the judgment to say before it was published [that] redeeming Nazis through the power of Christian salvation sounds like a bad idea."
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Have you read either of these books? Wanted to read them? Wanted to fling them off the Empire State Building, or possibly off a cliff onto sharp rocks? Do you agree that a Nazi romance is a very, very, very bad idea? The floor is yours, so speak....
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