Folks, this is AWESOME.

Okay, basically Walton’s set this alternative history in a world where Britain and Germany work things out, and WWII never happens. Germany’s building concentration camps ALL over the continent, and things suck for Eastern European Jews. Britain’s got its own issues with rising fascism, but, interestingly, Walton examines this rise in the upper classes. So, what we’re looking at are the political machinations leading up to such a consolidation of racial antipathy and political power. We’re also looking at how women’s sexuality and bodies become political fodder in this vast political machine.

On to the plot! Lucy, an aristocratic Englishwoman, falls deeply in love with a Jew, David, who served in the British Army alongside Lucy’s deceased brother. Their love, though intense and beautiful, is just the backdrop — what matters right now is that someone in Lucy’s social set is framing David for a political murder. Lucy and Detective Carmichael, the closeted detective investigating the murder, are in a race against time to find the REAL murderers before David is locked and sentenced to death.

Lucy emerges as an intelligent, caring narrator of sometimes startling cleverness. David, her husband, is also believably idealistic — as the tide of public opinion turns against them, it’s Lucy who begins planning for what they’ll do if they need to flee the country. It’s rare the interracial marriages are treated so well; the reasons behind David’s idealism and his fervent investment in acting more British than the Brits are sympathetically explored through Lucy’s perspective as a member of the class to which he would assimilated, even as she knows that his Jewish identity is so paramount that he will never actually be allowed to assimilate. 

Walton also treats sexuality with a delicate finesse. Carmichael’s lover is never introduced to the reader, but that love is also central to the story’s resolution. The connection between rising anti-Semitism and rising homophobia is closely examined as Carmichael carefully negotiates his dual identities as a policeman and a gay man in a world where sexuality is policed. This theme will, I think, come up again in Walton’s Ha’Penny where Carmichael is also the narrator.

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Man, I was really excited to see HarperCollins Reading Warriors program, an online resource offering a bunch of downloadable tools for kiddies looking to read over the summer and teachers looking to guide that reading. It’s available here: http://www.readingwarriors.com/rwshell.html.

HOWEVER, a quick skim through the titles recommended for further reading suggests that HC didn’t do the legwork to find titles representing a diversity of characters — the majority of the main characters are male, with plucky female sidekicks. The books featuring trios as their main focus again seem to center on male narrators. This is a bit disappointing, since the Warriors is series centering on feline politics (um, awesome much?) and features Bluestar, an older female tabby, as the leader of Thunderclan and a matriarch with a tragic past. What struck me the most about the series is that even embodied gender decisions (IE who nurses whose kittens) get political — I thought this was a way of introducing a sort of empowered body politics for younger readers, but this is totally not reflected in the supplementary reading lists recommmended by HC.

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When I was about 13, I read a book called The Explorer by Francis Parkinson Keyes. It does not appear to be available on Amazon or the librarything (or anywhere else I looked), so unfortunately I can’t link to it, but it was definitely an adult romance, and not at all a romance I would expect to be available at a church library.

The “explorer” is a man who makes a living as an heretical archeologist hunting down ruins and then incongruously selling artifacts to collectors…or maybe it was selling books about his adventures. In any case, he was a hedonist, a dashing, exciting, romantic figure, and gone for most of the book outside of the country, much less the state. The book, abnormally for a romance, opens with the man and his to-be love getting married a week after meeting at a (different) wedding. The beginning chapters are full of dialogue between them - actually, the majority of the book is between the man and woman, with very few exceptions - about his past sexual adventures and his opinions about marriage. He is a sexual libertine, of the opinion that a man and woman who are not otherwise attached have nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying each other sexually; but he wants to get married now so he can have a boy and have a good mother for him.

Cut for rape triggers.

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