The Phoenix

by Ruth Sims

Editorial Reviews

ForeWord Magazine, September 2004
"Those who enjoy historical fiction will be enthralled..."

Blue Iris Journal, September 2004
"A tale of love and hate, of passion and pain, The Phoenix is a book no one should miss."

Queer Factors, September 2004
"The rich descriptions ... makes every page a delight. I guarantee the last few chapters will take you for a ride."

Prairie Flame, September 2004
A novel that involves the struggle… and yearnings of the human heart, as this does, is for everyone.

Independent Gay Writer September 2004
The main characters and supporting cast are fully developed and ones readers will believe.

Metrosource Short List - September 2004
"A nice change on a bookshelf filled with WeHo boy toys and Sex and the City knock-offs."

From the Publisher

Like Tess of the d'Urbervilles or Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, this Victorian novel is replete with plot twists, years-long detours, providential meetings, villainy, and a great deal of drama. It differs from most other Victorian novels in that the main characters who meet and fall in love are both men, one an adopted son with a dark secret and Dickensian background who has taken on a new identity, and the other an uptight doctor with a strong religious background.
Kit St. Denys, who began life as Jack Rourke, is an up-and-coming actor in London. He has gone from poverty and abuse at fourteen when he fatally stabs his abusive father, to riches when he is adopted by a man who introduces him to the world of the wealthy and the theatre.

Nick Stuart is a troubled man who becomes estranged from his strict, unforgiving father when he goes off to medical school. Although his father is also a doctor, he is unwilling to allow his son to step beyond the small village and turns his back on Nick when he leaves home.

Kit and Nick meet after one of Kit's critically acclaimed performances and, from there, they begin a troubled but madly-in-love relationship that takes many years to resolve. Nick's religious beliefs cause him the deepest pain in loving Kit: "He loved Kit in the way God meant him to love a woman. It was as simple and as soul-damning as that."

While this problem should have been enough to doom their relationship, Kit has demons of his own, never able to shake the nightmares of his father's abuse, nor of the night he left him for dead. And yet Kit and Nick persevere through numerous reversals of fortune, years of estrangement, entanglements, and madness in a snake pit even Joan Crawford would find disheartening.

The author fulfills the implied promise to bring all the subplots together in a logical and satisfying resolution at the end of the novel. The main characters and supporting cast are fully developed and believable, and like any good Victorian novel, the villain is one who can be booed and hissed off stage, without being melodramatic. This is Sims's debut novel, but her imagination and delight in creative wordplay will take her satisfied readers everywhere they want to go.

About the Author

Ruth Sims is a cookie-baking Midwestern grandma who whips up meals from scratch and uses a flower pot as a chicken roaster -- and who has hardly ever ventured beyond beyond the borders of rural Illinois.

She's also the author of The Phoenix, a deeply moving gay love story in the best traditions of Victorian Literature.

Though there are no degrees after her name, self-education began with the first book she ever picked up and hasn't stopped since or even slowed down a tad.

Synopsis

At fourteen, Kit St. Denys brought down his abusive father with a knife. At twenty-one his theatrical genius brought down the house. At thirty, his past — and his forbidden love — nearly brought down the curtain for good.

A compelling Victorian saga of two men whose love for each other transcends time and distance — and the society that considers it an abomination. Set in the last twenty years of the 19th century, The Phoenix is a multi-layered historical novel that illuminates poverty and child abuse, theatre history in America and England, betrayal, a crisis of conscience, violence and vengeance, and the treatment of insanity at a time when such treatment was in its infant stage. Most of all it is a tale of love on many levels, from carnal to devoted friendship to sacrifice.

• Elizabeth K. Burton, The Blue Iris Journal: The Phoenix “rich and compelling” and “a book no one should miss.”
• Alastair Rosie: “A remarkable book. The elements of drama, passion, betrayal and tenderness transcend the boundaries between hetero and homosexuality. The Phoenix is literature.”
• The Romance Studio: A thoroughly enjoyable tale with more twists than a pretzel factory. Sometimes brutal—physically and emotionally—this is a gripping story.
• $15,000 budgeted for print and broadcast campaign. Galleys and sell sheets to reviewers nationwide and Canadian.