Genre: Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Summoned by an aunt he didn’t know he had, Edison Jones heads to a small Welsh village. He’s met by Gavril, the local blacksmith, and the men quickly become good friends. Gavril takes him to Mam Eira. Their kinship is real; she only asks for his presence and help.
Encouraged to work in the local copper mine, Edison meets Bleddyn, the man of his dreams. However, it isn’t long before he’s drawn into a web of mystery and magic where people are not always what they seem. Bleddyn is The Guardian of the mine, set there to watch over an ancient, and deadly, adversary.
When evil is unleashed, Bleddyn is taken prisoner and Edison must face an age-old evil and rescue the man he loves.
The Review
Clearly, it takes a village.
An endearingly cozy adventure romance, “The Guardian” is set in a steampunk Welsh mining village that barely registers as steampunk but for a few details. A quirky homage to the Arthurian legend is at the foundation of this story of Edison, a Welsh coal miner called to his native village by an aunt he didn’t know he had. The age-old conflict between “old magic” and Christianity comes into play, oddly placed alongside very modern notions of labor versus land-owning management.
Although the author clearly takes a side, she is not absolute in either her praising of workers or condemnation of landed gentry. It is fascinating to see a sort of classic heroic saga played out with working people rather than knights, generously spiced with folk wisdom and wicca-type magic.
The wise old Mam Eira is determined to keep darkness out of her village and the lives of those she loves. But she is equally insistent that everyone under her care drink plenty of tea and eat their meals. I hardly remember a meal in all of the later part of “Lord of the Rings,” but meals seem to be a core value in Edison Jones’s world, rather Hobbit-like. There’s something kind of adorable about that.
I am that tiresome sort of romance reader that tends to skim over all of the intimate physical stuff, unless it feels really integral to the plot and the development of the characters. As far as I’m concerned, in most m/m romances, it does not feel integral, and this book is no exception. The two male couples central to the story are important, but I didn’t need to get into bed with them. Their discovery of love is reward enough.
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.
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