Jen Comfort became an autobuy author for me when I read Midnight Duet, her utterly bananas and brilliant gender-flipped retelling of The Phantom of the Opera. Her banter is top notch. Her characters are substantial.
Teddy Ferguson falls in love with Maxine Hart after she steals his lucky donut, takes one bite, corrects his trivia factoid, and then throws the rest of the donut away like a beautiful agent of chaos. I also fell in love with Maxine at that moment. There is, I think, a year and a half between Maxine overturning everything Teddy believes about himself and when he goads her into reengaging with him, thus kicking off their romance.
My housemate has been urging me to read a book her church group is reading, John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth Sacred Soul and when I proved resistant, she narrowed it down to a single chapter, the chapter on the writings of a 20th century paleontologist and Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin titled “Sacred Matter.” For those of you who might want a store of facts in the unlikely event that Teilhard becomes a trivia question, the Catholic Church hierarchy suppressed Teilhard’s writings and they only became available after his death because he signed ownership of them to a friend. Teilhard wrote about the sacredness of matter, of the physical world, including human bodies. De Chardin saw God in a lot of things that the Church viewed as sinful (including women). One passage of Newell’s chapter struck me in particular,
By union, Teilhard means the oneness of interrelatedness. He does not mean uniformity or conformity. One of the guiding principles in both his scientific work and his spiritual teaching is that true union differentiates…The Oneness of the universe keeps producing greater and greater multiplicity, more and more differentiation of life-forms. Similarly, we know this is the most intimate relationships of our lives. The people who truly love us, and are thus most deeply one with us, are the people who have the capacity to most radically set us free to be ourselves. They delight in the uniqueness of our heart and mind , our body and soul; everything in us is cherished by everything in them. True union gives birth to the glory of differentiation.
I went on this very long side-trip because this is the heart and soul of Teddy and Maxine’s romance. Teddy falls in love with Maxine long before he knows her, respects her, and rejoices in her. They each make a lot of assumptions about the other. Their happily ever after isn’t cemented by love, but by knowledge and trust. It’s more than an acceptance, they celebrate their differences. They allow each other to bring the thing they most fear into their life. For Teddy that is unpredictability; for Maxine it is structure and discipline. The one two punch of Maxine’s sky-diving challenge and Teddy’s geography lesson will leave you breathless and probably horny.
CBR exclusive: I also really appreciated this little owl discussion which felt to me like a lifted middle finger to a certain TERF,
Look, there’s even a little owl, to symbolize that all your ancestors are giant nerds too. Which is ironic because did you know owls are actually the himbos of the raptor world? I had a torrid affair with a chick who works the eagle exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. She said owls are apex predators, so they don’t actually need intelligence to survive, which is why you almost never see a trained owl. It’s like trying to train a panda. There’s just not enough gray matter per metric ounce of snuggle.”
I received this as an advance reader copy from Montlake and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.