Love Finds You in Silver City, Idaho by Janelle Mowery

Dreamspinner Press deals in “Gay Romance Novels and Short Stories.” Among its professed “best-sellers” is a volume entitled More Than Everything by one “Cardeno C.” (I, too, would have hidden behind an anonym.) One thought at first-or better say one hoped-that this would take the form of a rejoinder to Slavoj Žižek. Had I but taken, before proceeding, a cursory glance at her publisher’s back-catalogue, I might have been more tolerant. Burning Ashes does nothing, in other words, to elevate my grim opinion of cricket-themed novels. And I can contrive no more damning verdict than that. She may know more about cricket, but he is the better writer. In A Sky-Blue Life, we read of a yorker-length delivery “liable to bounce up under chin and knock him cold.” Ms Lewis-Foster may refer to Test Matches, appallingly, as “test matches,” but she can tell a googly from a golliwog, and she does not say this, for example, of a long-hop: “It seemed a loose one, but that was possibly deceptive the way Goodger could make them turn or hang.” As John Arlott observed, rather generously, in his Wisden review, “When Mr Moiseiwitsch’s characters are talking of life or rivalry, sex or ambition, they are convincing as cricketers they live in an incredible world.”

Lewis-Foster’s debut novel, represents a clear improvement over Mr Moiseiwitsch’s is that she knows whereof she writes, or at any rate only rarely betrays her ignorance. I see now that it was resuscitated in 2006 by the misguided people at Coldspring. When last I saw that penny dreadful, it was windmilling out of my bedroom window. The short stories are fair to middling, and Conan Doyle, Wodehouse and Ian Peebles have all contributed memorably, but my only previous novel-length experience, before the one under review, was of Maurice Moiseiwitsch’s A Sky-Blue Life (1953). I do not, however, repose much faith in its fiction. I have not-I confess it freely-been the most prolific contributor to this website’s impressive book review, but I love our summer game and its letters as much as the next man, and certainly no less than my colleagues.

Love Finds You in Silver City, Idaho by Janelle Mowery