About the Book
-
Author:
- Erin Cotter
- Genres:
- Boy-Boy Romance
- Historical Fiction
Cover Story: Wilde Boys
Drinking Buddy: Whine
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexuality, violence)
Talky Talk: Even The Bard Had to Edit
Bonus Factors: Elizabethan Era
Bromance Status: Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
Cover Story: Wilde Boys
This is the kind of lovey dovey cover that made me set this book face down when I was in public. And James looks like that famous picture of Oscar Wilde.
The Deal:
It’s the late 1500s. Will Hughes is working as an actor in Christopher Marlowe’s theater, specializing in playing girls. But puberty is rapidly making that impossible, and in a plot liberally borrowed from Shakespeare in Love, the plague keeps shutting down the theaters. Will is desperately trying to save enough money to go back home to his family on the coast, running scams with his roommates.
But when Marlowe is murdered and Will and his roommates are evicted, he’s in desperate straights. Fortunately, handsome Lord James Bloomsbury needs someone to manage his theater, and Will fits the bill. But it’s not long before Will and James are hired by another patron…Elizabeth the First. She tasks the boys with finding Marlowe’s murderer…or else.
Drinking Buddy: Whine
Will had it rough. His parents sent him on his way as a child with people who didn’t have his best interest at heart. He’s an actor, so he never makes any money. He just wants to leave London.
But he also hides money and then expects his roommates to cover the rent. He complains about his lot in life constantly. His investigations cause about a dozen innocent people to die. A lowe fcore on ye rotten love applef.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sexuality, violence)
So it’s becomes very obvious that both guys practice the love that dare not speak its name. But it was all flat and weird.
Will: My roommate has been arrested, my other roommate has been horribly injured, and I’m broke and homeless.
James: Well, I’ll call a doctor and a lawyer and hire you to manage my theater.
Will: No deal.
Also, like a lot of recent historical fiction, we get a lot of boy on boy romance in a time period when sodomy was a capital offense. They mention how much trouble they could get into, before going off on another romantic Tête-à-tête.
Talky Talk: Even The Bard Had to Edit
Okay. If you’re going to have an Irish pirate queen, she has to be more than a secondary character. This book was 450 pages long, but there was no cohesive plot, just a bunch of stuff going on:
*The pirate queen
*Someone trying to kill the real queen
*Will’s parents being rebels against the queen
*Will’s family kind of selling him off to slavers when he was a boy
*Will working as an actor
*James’s sister as an aspiring playwright
*James, teaching himself to be a doctor
*James’s engagement to a rich woman
*James’s father’s sinister past
*Will’s roommates’ romance
All of these would have made great, story-driving plots, but they all just kind of petered out with no resolution.
Bonus Factor: Elizabethan Era
So it’s 1593. The theater is thriving in London, with playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare leading the charge. Pre-fame Shakespeare, in fact, shows up a few times in the story, but it’s a heavy-handed attempt to set the scene. In fact, Will only refers to him as Shakespeare, rather than William, just to remind us who he is.
Anyway, Elizabeth I is on the throne. In most historical dramas, she’s played as a colossus, one of the great leaders of England, a woman in a man’s position who puts previous kings to shame.
In this book, she is absolutely the villain. She’s the one who brutally drove William’s family from their homes when they protested the confiscation of their land. She lives in gross luxury while the populace starves. When Will suspects a nerdy noble of conspiracy, she orders Will to break his hands (and he does). She absolutely buys into the divine right thing, and refers to herself in the first person plural.
And Will, whose family horribly suffered at her hands, is forced to do her bidding. Or she’ll hurt his family. Again. Interesting take on the woman who is often a heroine in these stories.
Bromance Status: Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
Even Shakespeare had plays no one remembers. I’ll see what else this writer comes up with.
Literary Matchmaking
Well, there’s always the source material…
Where I End and You Begin, by Preston Norton, is a take on the boys playing girls in Shakespeare’s plays.
Terry Pratchet’s Dodger features a much more likeable main character serving a much more likeable English Queen.
FCC Full Disclosure: I received a free book from the publisher, but no money nor ale.
