"Love Me Timeless" by Melissa Crosby

Carly Matthews is 32, the youngest of three sisters, and still living with her parents in Willow Oaks, Oregon. She’s facing the possibility of a recurrence of breast cancer, and she’s preparing for a double mastectomy. Her hopes for love and having her own family appear increasingly remote, except for a recent online development. Through an app that allows neither photos nor real names to be used, she’s been corresponding with a man she’s falling in love with. 

Mick Myers is a native of Willow Oaks, but long before he left to avoid the disapproval and condemnation of his father. He’s a successful property developer in New York City, but now he’s coming home to meet the person with whom he’s been maintaining an online romance. Mick is 50, and he barely remembers the girl who’s christening he attended when he was 18. Whoever this unknown is, he knows he’s seriously in love.

 

Arriving at the coffee shop meeting place, Mick realizes what has happened, and he’s able to cover his appearance in town with a supposed business opportunity. Carly thinks she’s been stood up, but she enjoys talking with Mick. A romance looks like it might be beginning, but two hurdles exist – the age gap and Carly’s decision not to tell Mick about her upcoming surgery and underlying medical problem. 

 

Melissa Crosby

Love Me Timeless by Melissa Crosby is unusual in romance novels; you usually don’t find an age gap of 18 years between the hero and the heroine. But Crosby pulls it off, using Mick’s maturity to withstand what might have been overwhelming to a younger man.

 

Crosby writes small-town romance novels. Love Me Timeless is the fifth in the Willow Oaks series, and she also has two novels in the Mulberry Lane series. She lives with her family in Wellington, New Zealand. 

 

It’s an intriguing story, about overcoming obstacles and doubt, and how two people find each other and who they really are despite a difference in ages.

The Character of Michael in the Dancing Priest Novels

After Dancing Priest was published in late 2011, I received an email from a reader in Seattle. He liked the book. He liked the book so much that he said it should be required reading for young men under the age of 20.  

He said this, he said, because the character of Michael was all about standing firm and true in the face of adversity. “There’s a nobility in the character of Michael Kent that we should all aspire to.” That character is demonstrated in large things, like an Olympic tragedy, and in smaller things, like taking in a motherless eight-year-old boy.

 

By the second Novel, A Light Shining, Michael Kent has become Michael Kent-Hughes, husband of Sarah. He wears his wealth lightly. Finding his family in Italy, instead of doing the legal thing, he does the right thing. And he faces the great personal adversity of any in the five novels, when he nearly dies. In fact, for a significant section of the book, Michael is unconscious, and the focus shifts to Sarah. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Top photograph by Benjamin Rascoe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: A.M. Juster and “Wonder & Wrath”

A.M. Juster is a poet, translator, and essayist. He’s published his own poetry collections, as well of translations of John Milton, Horace, Tibullus, and others. His works also include The Billy Collins Experience and Saint Aldhelm’s Riddles. A poetry collection, The Secret Language of Women, won the Richard Wilbur Award, and he’s received the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award three times, two honorary degrees, and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.  

In other words, he’s a presence in the poetry world. If you follow him on Twitter, you discover something else. Juster is a champion for poetry, constantly promoting the work of other poets. And he’s a kind man, welcoming every new follower individually – and helping to broaden the online poetry community in the process. 

 

His ninth and latest poetry collections, Wonder & Wrath, demonstrates his mastery of a number of formal poetry, including just enough free verse included to provide a contrast.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"The Mystery of Charles Dickens” by A.N. Wilson

We live in a time when we destroy our monuments. Sometimes it’s physical destruction. Other times, we damn with faint praise – or praise with “faint damn.”

 

A.N. Wilson is a novelist, story writer, biographer, popular historian, British newspaper columnist, and critic. He’s written a lot – a lot – of books, including some 23 novels. His biographical subjects include Leo Tolstoy, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, C.S. Lewis, Dante, Jesus, St. Paul, Sir Walter Scott, John Milton, Adolph Hitler, Charles, Darwin, Iris Murdoch, Hilaire Belloc, and John Betjeman. He’s also been a columnist for the Daily Mail, the London Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, New Statesman, and The Observer. 

 

There is the mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings, and ninepence – which is the story of Dickens’s death, where he actually (or might have) died, and the young woman, Ellen Ternan, who was his mistress. The mystery of his childhood concerns Dickens and the blacking factory, unknown until his friend and first biographer, John Forster, disclosed it after the author’s death. This mystery also concerns the relationship between Dickens, his father, and his mother.

 

A.N. Wilson

The mystery of the cruel marriage focuses on Dickens’s shabby treatment of his wife and the mother of his nine children. Then follows the mystery of his various philanthropic endeavors. Wilson turns his attention to the famous public readings, which likely contributed to the author’s final stroke and death. That’s followed by a look at the work in progress when Dickens died, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and how much if it might have been autobiographical. The summary chapter looks at the mystery of the man and author himself, a summary of what’s come before.

 

Wilson relies heavily upon psychological analysis, assuming that a great deal of the man’s works and life can be directly traced to his upbringing and his complicated relationships with his parents, especially his mother. The connections become as bit tenuous at times, and the reader gets the impression that the author is straining here to make his points. Wilson also offers outright speculation, including that Dickens likely suffered the stroke that killed him at Ellen Ternan’s home and not his own at Gad’s Hill in Kent, as everyone else had reported and recorded, including the author’s own children. 

 

The Mystery of Charles Dickens is not all speculation and psychodrama. Wilson does offer solid insights into many aspects of the man’s life and works. But to cite the author’s imagination and achievements while reducing many of them to the psychological impact of alleged betrayals by one’s parents is “praising with faint damn,” indeed. 

What they do after

After Luke 24:28-35

After the bread is taken,

after the bread is blessed

and broken,

after the bread is given,

after the bread forces

the remembrance,

after the vanishing,

after they sit stunned,

they remember the journey.

They remember hearts

burning as they talked

and listened, kindled

by the stranger,

they remember the word

opened as he talked,

and they know,

suddenly, abruptly.

In the darkness they rise

and return, to find

the followers, to tell]

the followers the story

of the road, the story

of the remembering

and the vanishing,

the story of the breaking

of the bread.

Photograph by Raychan via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He was (and remains) famous for his short stories about Yiddish culture in Poland, a culture destroyed by the Nazi Holocaust. I’ve read several of his collections, and they are wonderful. A new one has surfaced, entitled “The Pass,” and it’s been published by Literary Matters. David Stromberg has an afterword.  

It’s called woke capitalism, and it’s about corporations using their enormous power to control both their employees and customers, as in, enforcing Group Think. Banking customers in both the UK and the US have discovered their accounts canceled without warning.  So far, the power to cancel has been aimed at customers on the political right, but it could easily be used against those on the political left. Gavin Haynes at UnHerd has the story.

 

Eighty percent of the citizens of the UK have been born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. In Elizabethans, Andrew Marr says there is much that “early Elizabethans” endured in the 1950s and 1960s that still speak to society today. Kathryn Hughes at Standpoint Magazine reviews the book. Interesting to think that we live in the Elizabethan Age.

 

It’s a debate that has potentially enormous consequences. Are entities like Facebook and Twitter platforms, or are they publishers? Currently, they’re legally classified as platforms – and immune from liability litigation. But they’re behaving more and more like publishers, and a chorus is growing to change their classification. Will Oremus at OneZero argues that Facebook in particular has joined the mainstream media.

 

More Good Reads

 

Art

 

The Frenchman Who Saved Mona Lisa From the Nazis – Kamna Kirti at Medium.

 

The True Story of Rose Dugdale, The Woman Who Stole Vermeer – Anthony Amore at CrimeReads.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Excerpt from Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at The Hudson Review. 

 

In the Footprints of the Hound: Why The Hound of the Baskervilles Still Haunts – James Lovegrove at CrimeReads.

 

The legacy of ‘The Woman in Black’ – Alexander Larman at The Critic.

 

How My Parents Built a Childhood of Books – Eudora Welty at Literary Hub.

 

Poetry

 

Ashes of Soldiers – Walt Whitman via Emerging Civil War.

 

St. Kevin – David Russell Mosley at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Mary Le Cuisinier – Beverly Stock at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Fire: A Sestina for Survivors – Malcolm Guite.

 

Behind the Lines: Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” – Adam Sedia at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Life and Culture

 

Making Time to Make Things – Jonathan Rogers at Story Warren.

 

The Incoherence of Identity Politics – Richard Reinsch at Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

 

Academic Freedom and Cancel Culture – Eric Kaufmann at CityJournal. 

 

Joe Biden Has Vowed to Undo Betsy DeVos's Title IX Reforms. Can He? – Robby Soave at Reason.

 

Faith

 

David George – from Anxious Runaway to Zealous Pastor – Simonetta Carr at Reformation21.

 

Do Virtual Churches Actually Exist? – Jonathan Leeman at 9Marks.

 

We Are Bound by Suffering and Love – Willis Renuart at Front Porch Republic.

 

The Only Way Out is Through – Sandra Jantzi at Word for Word.

 

History

 

Kristallnacht: Nov. 9-10, 1938; The Night the Holocaust Began – Jeff Dunetz at The Lid.

 

Schindler’s List Theme – Performed in the Largest European Synagogue

 Painting: Woman Reading (The Artist’s Wife), oil on canvas (1962) by Aaron Shikler (1922-2015).  

Stranger on the road

After Luke 24:28-35

They meet a stranger

on the road, and they

talk, walk together

to the village 

in the west. They talk

of what had happened,

momentous things,

surprising the stranger

with intensity, conviction,

as they tell their story

incomplete in the fading light

and growing shadows 

of the dying day. He moves

to leave them, but he stays.

They eat, and the stranger,

in a strange communion,

takes the bread,

blesses the bread,

breaks the bread,

gives the bread. 

The bread is an act

of remembrance,

opening their eyes

in time to see

the stranger vanish.