REVIEW: 'Vespertine' by Leta Blake and Indra Vaughn
Title: Vespertine
Authors: Leta Blake and Indra Vaughn
Published: September 7, 2015
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Contemporary Romance; Erotic Romance
Length: 396 Pages
Tags: Gay; M/M; Angst: Light; Comfort/Hurt; Family Drama; Forbidden Love; Religion/Faith; Rock Star/Musician; Second Chance; Self-Discovery; HEA; Disorder: Attachment Disorder; CW: Off-Page Self Harm
About Vespertine
Can a priest and a rock star obey love's call?
Seventeen years ago, Jasper Hendricks and Nicholas Blumfeld's childhood friendship turned into a secret, blissful love affair. They spent several idyllic months together until Jasper's calling to the Catholic priesthood became impossible to ignore. Left floundering, Nicky followed his own trajectory into rock stardom, but he never stopped looking back.
Today, Jasper pushes boundaries as an out, gay priest, working hard to help vulnerable LGBTQ youth. He's determined to bring change to the church and the world. Respected, admired, and settled in his skin, Jasper has long ignored his loneliness.
As Nico Blue, guitarist and songwriter for the band Vespertine, Nicky owns the hearts of millions. He and his bandmates have toured the world, lighting their fans on fire with their music. Numbed by drugs and fueled by simmering anger, Nicky feels completely alone. When Vespertine is forced to get sober, Nicky returns home to where it all started.
Jasper and Nicky's careers have ruled their lives since they parted as teens. When they come face to face again, they must choose between the past's lingering ghosts or the promise of a new future.
5 HEART READ
REVIEW:
In Vespertine, Leta Blake and Indra Vaughn use a trope more common to male/female romance. What happens if you fall in love with a priest? This male/male version is transcendent.
Nicky and Jasper were childhood friends until becoming lovers at age 16. Then one summer while being grounded after taking the “fall” for Nicky’s pot smoking, Jasper realized he’d been called to the priesthood.
Nicky, now “Nico Blue,” is a rock star, leader of the band Vespertine. He returns home to recuperate after crashing from drugs provided by the band’s management. He’s as sick of partying as he is of the torch he’s carried for one “Father Jasper,” now priest at their local Catholic Church.
The empty rage and lost connection with his childhood sweetheart has fueled many successful songs, but almost killed him.
“He’d done plenty of numbing out, plenty of blaming and casting recriminations, but he’d never asked himself what, given the chance, he might have done differently,” Blake and Vaughn inform us, to set up the inevitable conflict between, and within, Nicky and Jasper.
Readers may wonder why Nicky remains so childish that he took Jasper’s vocation as rejection. Nicky had an attachment disorder, and Jasper knew he was the only one who broke through. “He’d thought they were kindred spirits, men that knew all about the internal cage. He’d thought they could teach him how to cope with the hurt from all the useless people who couldn’t figure out how to get inside or pull him out. All but Jasper,” Blake and Vaughn indicate.
Father Jasper truly loves his God, and his congregation; and yet, mass and confessionals often feel rote.
His spiritual heart is in Blue Oasis, an LGBTQIA shelter for homeless youth, which the Catholic church has, almost impossibly and quite tenuously funded.
Nicky’s return proves a shock to Jasper’s system. The musician is accusatory, in need of spiritual salvation, and Jasper re-experiences desires he’d thought long dead. “’Should I turn away from him and look for the true path You have laid out for me?’” Jasper prays, “’I can’t abandon him and I don’t want to believe in a God who’d expect me to.’”
The intersection of youth and maturation, jadedness and purity, the profane and the profound, clash together as these friends reunite. Their pasts and memories are interspersed with the present until they question all their beliefs, especially Nicky, an atheist.
“He wasn’t ready to concede to the idea of a God who cared about what they did on a day-to-day basis,” Nicky ruminates, “But maybe there was a power each person carried within. Their bone-deep truth. The reality of who they were.”
As their friendship revitalizes, the youth center is threatened. Simultaneously, Nico is pressured to return to the recording studio in LA, far too early in his recovery from addiction. Where will the spirit move them?
We feel Father Jasper’s anguish as he prays “’Show me the way O Lord, for I have been misguided. I have prayed to help Nicky find his way while it is I who am lost. It is I who needs to find a path true to You and myself.’”
Vespertine respectfully explores Catholicism’s relationship to the LGBTQIA community.
Blake and Vaughn suggest the church’s history and dogma can be misinterpreted with the same earnestness that we each apply when we look back on our own pasts. Who hasn’t realized we saw things skewed as children? And some in the church have also changed their views. Likewise, strong authority’s personalities can warp a spiritual message, much as our parents’ view of events may have warped our experiences of those situations.
Distortions of the past are a special theme. Jasper thinks to himself, “In reality the fort was nothing but a wooden square with a roof on it, a door, and a few windows. But I can still feel the magic. Like their happiness had permeated the sand and the rough grass and the trees, like their love and laughter had been life’s blood, soaked up into the roots of the island, so that coming back here would be a step back in time.”
One striking element is Vespertine’s recurrent biblical themes of blood and light, of sacrifice as a path to forgiveness. Vespertine’s prose is equally alluring. Sensuality is presented with the same reverence as the liturgy. For example, ”He’d learned to see with his hands that night. To drink with his hands and feel with his mouth, and he’d thirsted like he’d been cursed to never be satisfied again,” the authors narrate.
As Vesrpertine tolerates the contradictions within people and religions, it drew me to examine my own internal contradictions, proving to be the best kind of sermon, one that made me think. I sacrificed sleep to finish Vespertine. Is there a higher compliment?
Annie, of Kimmers’ Erotic Book Banter, purchased Vespertine. We offer our fair and honest opinion on behalf of our readers.
Looking for more reads that compel the characters to look at their spirituality? Try Scotty Cade’s Losing Faith.
Amazon/KU
Meet the Authors
Author of the bestselling book Smoky Mountain Dreams and the fan favorite Training Season, Leta Blake's educational and professional background is in psychology and finance, respectively. However, her passion has always been for writing. She enjoys crafting romance stories and exploring the psyches of made up people. At home in the Southern U.S., Leta works hard at achieving balance between her day job, her writing, and her family.
For more from Leta be sure and visit her website!
After living in Michigan, USA for seven wonderful years, Indra Vaughn returned back to her Belgian roots. There she will continue to consume herbal tea, do yoga wherever the mat fits, and devour books while single parenting a little boy and working as a nurse.
The stories of boys and their unrequited love will no doubt keep finding their way onto the page--and hopefully into readers hands--even if it takes a little more time.
And if she gleefully posts pictures of snow-free streets in winter, you'll have to forgive her. Those Michigan blizzards won't be forgotten in a hurry.
