Review: The Station

The Station by Keira Andrews

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Sweet, really sweet. Colin Lancaster, son of a wealthy English family fell in love with his father's horse groom when he was only a kid, but it takes him witnessing Patrick's trysting with another man to realize the true nature of his feelings. Shocked and horrified, he tries to deny what he feels, because it is against everything his 19th centuries morales teach, but to no avail. When Patrick is found out, Colin puts out for him and reveals his desires in front of his entire family. Both men are shipped off to the colonies, Australia in their case. During the long passage on the convict's ship, Patrick and Colin grow closer, but only when fate in the form of a frightened, widowed woman extends its hand, they get to truely know each other and finally find out whether this strange, dangerous land may hold a futuree for them together.

There was much to like about this story. Colin, coming to terms with his true nature and telling about it with his own voice, is sometimes as naive as one would expect a sheltered schoolboy of his times to be; it's hard to remember he's actually supposed to be twenty years old. He welcomes the sudden and thorough changes in his life with open arms, determined to see a good in every bad thing that happens to him. He was truely likeable in his unshakeable optimism. Patrick, on the other hand, gloomy and forbidding, is very well drawn too, a proud man so busy being at odds with his fate that he can't see beyond his destroyed dreams.

The story is mostly narrative, though; there's precariously little showing with all the telling. Yet, some of the lengthy narrative describes early Australia beautifully, the action scenes, when they happen, are great, and the sex scenes are beautifully done and hardly ever superfluous. The author went about the task of showing the coming-out of a nineteenth century youth with a loving, skillfull hand and in a truely entertaining way. Positively recommended.



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