Other Authors Weigh In…

Patricia Nell Warren, author (The Front Runner, Harlan’s Race, Billy’s Boy, Fancy Dancer, The Beauty Queen, One is the Sun, The Wild Man and others)

Ruth Sims joins the list of women who write about gay men, and do it well. This contribution to the list, The Phoenix, is a novel that is unabashedly Victorian. The 19th century specialized in relationships that were slow-paced and richly detailed. Couples in illicit love wended their way through many years of agonized "will they or won't they," like Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska in Age of Innocence. This was especially true of gay relationships, where social disapproval could crush any hapless lovers who happened to get outed. With careful historical research, Sims follows her two young Englishmen -- actor Kit St. Denys and physician Nick Stuart – through emigration to America, disasters, heterosexual marriage, even a bout with traumatic amnesia -- and into middle age. A 21st-century reader who has been there, done that with today's hyper and oversexed fiction will enjoy this chronicle of a bygone time.




William Maltese, author (Thai Dyed, A Slip to Die For, and many others)

All of that persistent droning you hear, getting louder ever louder, is all “the buzz” (so far one-hundred percent favorable), resulting from publication of Ruth Sims’s twenty-years-in-the-writing Victorian novel, THE PHOENIX, a marvelously compelling piece of fiction. Take it from this writer, who has unfortunately become somewhat jaded as regards gay reading material, there’s something about this unique tale of the love between two men that’ll keep you turning the pages until you reach page 344 — the end. For those who have read Laura Argiri’s GOD IN FLIGHT, and hoped for more, or wanted more, Ms. Sims provides “the more” in wondrous abundance. She holds the reader’s attention through each and every plot twist and follows a sterling cast of characters (heroes, heroines, and miscreants) through two decades of fascinating living and dying on two continents. The research, in general, including peeks into the British and English theater scene, at the time, has been impeccably done. In succinct summation: “What we have here is a masterful piece of writing that if ever adapted for television would feel right at home on ‘Masterpiece Theater.’”


Richard Stevenson, Author: (Don Strachey PI series, including Shock to the System, Ice Blues)
"What a big, gorgeous, tender, turbulent gay love story! … done with such élan and conviction that the reader just has to sit back and enjoy the wild ride"