Genre: Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Gareth and Lorre have settled into their magical work: healing, traveling, caring for the kingdoms. Despite all the ballads about the Hero Prince and the former Grand Sorcerer, they’re happy going unnoticed, not drawing attention.
They might even drop into a new library or a museum, being ordinary visitors for an afternoon. After all, Gareth likes stories and history, and Lorre’s always curious about the world.
But this museum holds painful artifacts of Lorre’s past … and the ancient life he’s tried to forget.
The Review
A winsome, atmospheric short story, this draws on characters from a series of books by the author, and thus the context is opaque to a reader who doesn’t know the stories.
What I found so engaging is that the action takes place in a museum. The two characters, Gareth and Lorre, have come to see an exhibition promising to tell 500 years of history by means of portraits. For a retired museum curator like myself, this is instantly appealing (authors rarely put museums in their books, and then often get them wrong).
The surprise is that these two men, who don’t appear old, are in fact old enough to have experienced 500 years of history—so the exhibition presents a different sort of interest for them. Then they discover a miniature portrait set in gold that changes the conversation, and leads to a discussion and reminiscences with these two magical humans.
Someone not familiar with Noone’s books won’t learn quite enough to totally understand the conversation; but the general idea of the meaning of portraits, and what they document, fascinated me. It is not something often discussed in the books I read, and I loved the idea of history coming alive through the stories portraits tell.
Believe it or not I haven’t spoiled anything, and this story is well worth the read just to experience this tantalizing little snippet of a fantasy world. Of course, I’ve bought Noone’s novel “Magician” for my Kindle. I want to know more.
4 stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
