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India Press Store - Standish
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List Price: $16.99
Our Price: $10.48
Your Save: $ 6.51 ( 38% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: P.D. Publishing, Inc.
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781933720098
ISBN: 1933720093
Label: P.D. Publishing, Inc.
Manufacturer: P.D. Publishing, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2006-11-06
Publisher: P.D. Publishing, Inc.
Studio: P.D. Publishing, Inc.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: History Rewritten?
Comment: Through the work of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, we see what it must have been like to be a homosexual in England during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In Erastes's Standish, we get a fascinating glimpse into gay life in the earlier Regency period. Unlike the more modern Forster, who had the good sense to keep quiet as to his homosexual "proclivities," Ambrose Standish, like Wilde, finds himself in the clink for crimes of gross indecency. While at times the plot moves too quickly and the sex is needlessly excessive, the key elements of the story seemed quite plausible, making this work of gay, historical fiction a fresh, unique and remarkable read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Breathless
Comment: This book.
Is one of the best books I have ever read. I started it and didn't put it down till I had read the last page.
What a story. What a love. I am blown away.
This book left me breathless.
Erastes is an exquisite writer. I am beyond impressed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Lush Romance
Comment: Beautiful, lush and romantic. I couldn't put the book down. I knew I was in trouble around 2:30 a.m. I was still reading. It was everything a romance novel should be. Romantic, well written, characters you love and care about, Exotic and lush locations. I wish this book would around when I was 16. Buy it and enjoy!
Customer Rating:
Summary: 1820s Gay Male Romance
Comment: Standish is not "stand-out-ish," but it's a pretty good story, though often black and dark beyond redemption. The characters, especially Rafe, Ambrose and Fleury, are well-drawn, unique and interesting. The settings are diverse (England, Paris, Venice and a horrible British prison), and probably are accurate and mostly believable. Erastes' take on history seems passable. Isn't it interesting that our basic view of these overwhelmingly important eras in history are almost always exclusively brought to us from the perspective of the rich and privileged? Really, it's only during the prison scenes in this sotry where we gain a truer picture of real life in the 1820 in Europe.
This is a gay story with lots of gay male sex, gay male talk, gay male musings, and gay male dilemmas. For the most part, the author gets the sexual episodes nearly right, if a bit overdone. This soft male porn isn't always a realistic rendition of what sex really looks/sounds/smells/feels like. But the love, the intimacy, the closeness and the need for physical attention and affection are indeed well-portrayed. The sex really does spice up the story.
The story itself is less believable, frankly, than the sex, but it is an engaging tale. Too bad so may people are so badly damaged and so badly damage each other throughout. Sometimes, in reading stories like this, I yearn for the normal people who actually populate my life. They are every bit as interesting as these fictional ones and never quite so tragic. This story follows one disastrous episode after another in the lives of these sometimes pitiful but interesting characters.
Make no mistake. This is not literature. It is a soft porn romantic tale, a snapshot into the lives of some seriously flawed homosexual men trying to live "normally" in a hateful, repressive time in Europe.
My one complaint is this: For the life of me, I could not, and cannot figure out the ending. As a voracious reader of all kinds of novels, I detest the cute "style" employed here by Erastes of demanding that you conclude for yourself what happened at the end -- not a satisfying conclusion at all!! I thought I deserved better after wading through the whole book.
If you don't want to read graphic, detailed, several-pages-long episodes of erotic sexual encounters between men (some midly brutal, I might add), then don't read this story. If that's all you want, don't read it either. But if you want a mix of an 1820's man-to-man romance with gay sex and a good view of the life of the privileged class at the time, then by all means read it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb Storytelling
Comment: One of the characters in Standish does nothing--doesn't move, doesn't speak, doesn't think. And yet this character controls emotions and actions and passions just by existing. It is a house called Standish. Like the Rochester mansion in "Jane Eyre" or the cliffs in "Wuthering Heights" Standish is a place so important to the story that it almost takes on life.
Standish is the vanished patrimony of Ambrose Standish, impoverished grandson of the man who lost the place to Gordian Goshawk in a gambling game and lost his life in a duel soon after. Ambrose is studious, intelligent, and bitter at a fate which has him toiling as a tutor to support himself and his two spinster sisters. The house, Standish, is his obsession, his dream, his torment.
When Rafe Goshawk, who inherited Standish from his father, returns from many years abroad to take up residence there his life is set on a collision course with Ambrose. The Goshawk family's reputation is that of "venal, predatory raptors" and Rafe himself is a cold-eyed man, as bitter as Ambrose but for a different reason. He was born in Paris, raised as an aristocrat, and was a young boy when the Terror sent his mother to the guillotine, destroyed his world, and sent him and his father fleeing to England.
Ambrose hates the Goshawks without ever having seen one of the infamous breed who ruined his family. And then through circumstances or fate, he finds himself hired as tutor for Rafe's son; for the first time he sees the house he has obsessed about, up close. It is everything he dreamed it would be. It's a given that Rafe and Ambrose will end up in each other's arms but if you expect roses and violins and a predictable ending...surprise!
I won't go further with the story because it has so many twists and turns and I don't want to write a spoiler. The writing--descriptions, dialogue, everything about it--feels real and authentic. Erastes is an author who must research and research and research. And yet the research never overwhelms the story. It never intrudes. The author handles violence and sex with equal ease and knows the fine line at which to stop.
It's superb, well-crafted storytelling at its best.
...Ruth Sims, author of The Phoenix
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Editorial Reviews:
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A great house. A family dispossessed. A sensitive young man. A powerful landowner. An epic love that springs up between two men. Set in the post-Napoleonic years of the 1820's, Standish is a tale of two men - one man discovering his sexuality and the other struggling to overcome his traumatic past. Ambrose Standish, a studious and fragile young man, has dreams of regaining the great house his grandfather lost in a card game. When Rafe Goshawk returns from the continent to claim the estate, their meeting sets them on a path of desire and betrayal which threatens to tear both of their worlds apart. Painting a picture of homosexuality in Georgian England, Standish is a love story of how the decisions of two men affect their journey through Europe and through life.
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