“I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours forever.” ― Robert Browning
Title: Love Rising
Author: Piper Vaughn
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Pages/Word Count: 42
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Blurb: An Isla Sagrario Story
In the 1700s on the island of Sagrario, men who love other men find safe haven. For Francis Holland, an escaped indentured servant, Sagrario offers nothing but loneliness. His life begins to change when he finds Wick, a merman, washed ashore.
When Wick awakens under Francis’s care, Francis returns him to the sea at his request. Soon after, they begin to meet in secret, and gradually, Francis blossoms under this new companionship. However, a merman is a difficult creature to entrust one’s heart to. With one trapped on land and the other at sea, the differences in their species threaten to keep them apart forever. It may not be long before Wick is gone, taking Francis’s reason to smile with him.
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Review: Piper Vaughn first introduced Isla Sagrario years ago in Black John, the short story she contributed to the Dreamspinner Press pirate anthology Cross Bones, and is now revisiting the 18th century island she (and M.J. O’Shea) created then, a place where men can live and love openly, in Love Rising.
This is a sweeping fairy tale of a story filled with both heartache and moments so romantic as to leave the reader breathless from the sighs that can only belong to the truest of love stories, where the impossible becomes real through the magic of want and need and the longing to belong to someone in spite of the odds against it happening.
Piper has written a story that first engages the imagination, and then introduces two characters in the lonely Francis Holland and his merman love, Wick, who quickly found their place in my heart and hopes that they would somehow find a way to be together.
The merfolk have long been a staple of seafaring legend and the stuff of which Hans Christian Andersen showed us the power of love and hope and sacrifice. Piper’s done the same, but in a happily-ever-after sort of way that I gladly recommend to all you romantics at heart.
You can buy Love Rising here:
