Genre: Historical, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
It takes a brave man to climb a mountain, but it takes a braver lad to show him the way.
Following the death of his lover, mountaineer John Hamilton lives an isolated existence high on wild Fellborough, a fell in the Yorkshire Dales. When he rescues 19-year-old Gary Taylor from the mountain, John can’t accept that the boy may be the answer to his heartache. Gary is seventeen years his junior, confused, and being pursued by criminals. As Gary helps John through his grief, the older man mentors the lad through his coming out.
Both paths could lead to love, but are they both heading for the same destination?
The Mentor of Barrenmoor Ridge is the first of ‘The Barrenmoor Series’ of mountaineering-themed romances. ‘The Students of Barrenmoor Ridge’, the second in the series.
The Review
John Hamilton has just turned down an offer to return to Mount Everest when he spots a strikingly beautiful young man across the Pot Hole bar in Inglestone, Yorkshire – the center of mountain climbing in England. Still deeply shaken by the death of his younger lover, Serge Petrov, during at attempt to make the summit at Everest, John has retreated to his hometown. At thirty-six, John is a world-famous mountaineer photographer. His grief at Serge’s death has turned him into the image of a near-hermit, his hair and beard forming a kind of mask to keep the world out.
A classic romantic set-up, Jackson Marsh’s early novel ratchets up the tension against the backdrop of a mountain during a epochal blizzard. Marsh uses the fictional name Fellborough, but there are three such great peaks in Yorkshire.
A young man has been injured and left behind on Fellborough just as the bad weather is setting in. John, whose isolated home, known as Barrenmoor Cottage, is closest to the place where the man was last reported, has no choice but to brave the weather and make the rescue. As expected, Marsh is superb at his depiction of the harrowing experience.
The injured climber turns out to be the young man John spotted across the pub; Gary Taylor, 19, a local boy and known troublemaker. He has no idea who John is, while John knows only the rumors and gossip that surround him. Neither man trusts the other, and both share a deep-seated pain that they have never shared. Gary and John are forced to get to know each other, trapped in Barrenmoor Cottage as the storm rages over several days.
As I always say, romance plots are like landscapes: they’re all generally alike, but it is in the details painted by the author that they become special, drawing in the reader with character, emotion, and vivid detail. This is an exceptional landscape, made even more interesting with the younger man’s backstory as it is gradually revealed.
I have never wanted to climb a mountain, and this book surely didn’t change my mind; but it does beautifully express the passion of the committed mountaineer. John Hamilton becomes something of a superhero out on the side of Fellborough, and not a reckless adrenaline junky. The author’s respect for the mountain and the people who climb them goes a long way to making this a memorable novel and a moving love story.
5 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.
