I picked up very little anachronism-I don’t know enough about the use of massage and physical therapy in the medicine of the day to know if that was accurately presented, so that didn’t bounce me out of the suspension of my disbelief. And as far as Margaret, Michael’s beloved sister, is concerned…!Ĭhevalier also has a deft hand with the historical elements here never too heavy-handed, s/he sketches the time and setting in such a way that the behavior and reactions of the characters flesh out both.

Millie, the bathhouse owner, has her own story that I’d love to sit and hear, though I know it would make me cry. I wanted to yell at Thomas Abbott, John’s servant, for mule-headedness hug Sarah, the granddaughter, who has had so much tragedy in her young life, and stab Uncle Padraig repeatedly. Or, sometimes, slap them.Īnd not just the main characters, either.

There are moments when you’re so in sync with the emotions of the characters that you wish you could reach through time and space and comfort them. It only makes their relationship more realistic.

John and Michael, despite being thrown together first through the machinations of the little granddaughter of John’s servants, and later, through Michael’s role as John’s physical therapist, honestly can’t stand each other at the beginning, and even through the end of the book sometimes have difficulty understanding or trusting each other. The men-and the side characters as well, John’s other servants, Michael’s family and the transvestite bathhouse owner that rescued him as a young boy-are real people, with faults and foibles sometimes they’re admirable, and sometimes they’re irritating. But as time goes on, Michael realizes the extent of John’s injuries, and John realizes that Michael might hold the key to his survival.īonds of Earth is the kind of book that sucks you into a time far removed from the present, and makes you feel as if you’re living there, right beside the characters. John is too wrapped up in his own crippling pain and misery to even acknowledge Michael, while the young gardener only sees that John’s selfishness makes his servants’ lives difficult. When Michael is blackmailed into taking a job as a gardener on the estate, their paths cross. Once a promising young medical student, Michael now does massages-and more-in a Bowery bathhouse, while John lives the life of a recluse in his family’s country mansion. Scion of Hudson Valley aristocrats John Seward and the son of poor Irish immigrants Michael McCready have only one thing in common-they have both been broken by the First World War, John in body, Michael in spirit.

Bonds of earth by gn chevalier