An entertaining, sometimes lurid tale of creativity and corruption hampered by an unconvincing love story.
A young musician finds interracial, gender-bending love and gangland trouble in the Windy City in this Jazz Age gay romance.
This second installment of Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues Trilogy takes piano player Jimmy Harper and his band, the Diggs Munro Jazz Orchestra, away from sedate Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, the epicenter of jazz in 1923. There, Jimmy plunges into a throbbing demimonde of illicit sex, illegal booze, and disreputable music. He visits a whorehouse and, after a liaison with a woman to prove his manhood to his band mates, observes a kinky threesome involving two male sex workers and Danny Felton, a louche but menacing bootlegger who takes a shine to him. Jimmy gravitates to Pluto’s Lair, Danny’s speak-easy, where he beholds Erica DeChez, a mesmerizing drag chanteuse who cleans up to become handsome Black jazz pianist Eric Halsey. Eric teaches Jimmy how to play jazz right; shows him Chicago’s South Side clubs and blues parties; and switches between male and female personas to introduce him to both sides of anal sex. They fall rapturously in love and dream of running off to Paris together. Alas, Chicago turns dark for them. Jimmy quits the band when Diggs refuses to play the edgy, hot jazz the pianist loves, which is too Black for well-paying White venues. Danny offers Jimmy a job playing at Pluto’s, but at a price: an assaultive sexual tryst that leaves him bleeding and woozy from a heroin injection the bootlegger forced him to take at gunpoint. Finally, Jimmy learns that Eric is involved in a plot to oust Danny from Pluto’s and take it over with the help of Irish gangsters, a scheme that threatens to end in a tommy-guns-blazing showdown.
Following up on Acquaintance (2017), Stookey presents another panorama of gay life in the ’20s, full of vivid details and lively prose. He’s proficient at piquant feminine voices, whether hard-bitten (“ ‘It’s okay,’ she laughed her peculiar hollow laugh. ‘If you can’t trust a whore, who can you trust?’ ”), vengeful (“Where is that no good, two-timin’, yellow-bellied dog?”), or catty (“Sister Erica, have you been sucking on this sweet youngster?” “Now, talk nice, Anabella, or I’ll scratch your eyes out”). Through Jimmy’s ears, the author ably conveys the thrilling, haunting sound of Chicago’s jazz efflorescence, from jaunty swing—“Everything was feeling and intuition and pulsating, rhythmic drive…a looseness that allowed growing and slackening tempos, improvisations, creative surprise and freshness”—to searing blues. (“It seemed that all hell had broken loose—a petrifying terror, a desolate loneliness…with all his rough-hewn style, with all the gravel and whiskey in his voice, Grandy’s tenor fell on Jimmy’s ear with a melodious rightness, and his facility with the guitar, slurring the notes to match the human voice, all fit together.”) There are vibrant characters here and a creepily charismatic villain in Danny, but, as in Acquaintance, the romantic protagonists are kind of dull. Jimmy is a naïf—“Why must there be this animosity between the races?”—and Eric is a paragon of sexual enlightenment. Their glossy couplings (“Soon the surging reached its climax and the rising tide of their passion washed up pearls of sea foam”) feel off-key in a cynical city.
An entertaining, sometimes lurid tale of creativity and corruption hampered by an unconvincing love story.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73260-361-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A bumpkin duke and a young woman belatedly acquiring a gentlewoman’s education make for an entertaining love story.
When a Regency duke would rather feed blancmange to his prize pig than pay court to prospective brides, it’s fortunate that the girl next door also likes pigs.
Anthony Farr, Duke of Radcliffe survived an unhappy first marriage and is deathly afraid of marrying again. He would rather spend his days pottering about on his farm and skipping stones on the lake with his 8-year-old son, Wakefield. But when a poor relation of the Penhallow family arrives in the neighborhood, she quickly becomes friends with both Anthony and Wakefield. Where Anthony is simple and even childlike, Jane Kent is just uneducated and still suffering from the traumas of spending her early life in poverty. In their first encounter, afternoon tea in the company of Jane’s relatives turns into a fierce competition. Jane and Anthony are both determined to devour more food than the other—all while maintaining a polite facade. It’s the first of many deftly funny scenes in the novel, although some of the jokes become a little repetitive, such as Wakefield’s frequent mispronunciations of long words. The dialogue, too, is both funny and a little tiresome, with long conversations that don’t significantly advance the plot. But the book has other strengths that set it apart from typical Regency romances. It’s body-positive. There are several scenes where Jane, Anthony, and Wakefield demolish decadent food. There’s also a little light sadomasochism, which feels surprising since the main characters are otherwise so childlike. And it's a nice portrait of what courtship is like for a dedicated single parent. The child and his needs are central to the love story.
A bumpkin duke and a young woman belatedly acquiring a gentlewoman’s education make for an entertaining love story.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-285237-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fast-paced Victorian romance packed with as much criminality as chemistry.
Sparks fly at Scotland Yard.
Once again, Miss Allie Prince has been left behind. Her adventurous siblings are off on a quest, leaving her to run their antiquities shop, Princes of London. Just as she accepts that she’s in for a few boring and lonely weeks, however, life takes an exciting turn when she pops across the street to the coffeehouse and overhears what sounds like a plot to steal the Crown Jewels. She’s so convinced that something is wrong that she heads to Scotland Yard, where she’s met by DI Benedict Drake, who is “distractingly appealing” and seems to take her somewhat seriously, which is a welcome change. Unbeknownst to her, Drake is in the midst of a chilling cat-and-mouse game with a dangerous criminal, and he dismisses her without agreeing to look into the matter further. Despite his heavy workload, though, he finds he can’t stop thinking about either Allie or the potential criminal conspiracy she’s reported. It’s not long before he heads to the coffeehouse in question to set up some minor surveillance, just in case, and they meet again. Despite Drake’s attempts to keep her from getting involved, Allie’s instincts keep leading her into the middle of the fray, and as the case gets more intense, so does their connection. Historical romance fans who like a healthy amount of suspense with their stories will enjoy the first volume in Carlyle’s new Princes of London series, especially because, despite the title, this is an outside-the-ton story with no need for society drama to liven it up. Both Allie and Drake are well-drawn characters, and though they fall for each other perhaps too quickly, their mutual respect is beautifully portrayed. The conclusion of the mystery isn’t terribly satisfying, but the happy ending more than makes up for it.
A fast-paced Victorian romance packed with as much criminality as chemistry.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063347342
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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