Book Review: Backwards to Oregon, by Jae

Content warning for domestic violence & abuse

Before we start, I feel we should disclaim something very important : You should never, ever bind your breasts (which is wrap them in order to hide them) with bandages. For the purpose of the story, Luke has been binding her chest since twelve, but this is a story, and improper binding (which is anything without a binder, aka a piece of clothing specifically designed for binding) can and will cause problems such as: stunted organ growth, spine damage or warped ribs (concave ribs instead of barrel-like). Never ever bind your chest with an ace wrap. Especially if you're not fully grown yet. Buy a decent binder.

Okay, back to the story!

Our two cinnamon rolls of the day are Nora Macauley and Luke Hamilton. Luke Hamilton is a soldier who hides a terrible secret: he was actually born Lucinda, a woman. When he decides to leave the army for good and find a new life in Oregon, he realizes that a woman at his arm would kill any doubt about his gender. When Tess, a madam of a brothel,  his best friend and only confident, presents him with Nora, one of her workers who longs to leave this life for good, he jumps at the chance and asks her to marry him.

But Nora is disillusioned about love. When a playing man left her with child, she was kicked from home by her wealthy family and knows that she'll never find happiness and love as an unwed woman with a daughter. The marriage to Luke would only be a business transaction, and soon she finds herself on a six month trip to Oregon, with dangers ahead which forces her to learn some unexpected truths about herself.

I admit it, the Oregon series were the last books from Jae I had yet to read. I was scared of Luke, of how he'd be written. But I was blown away, to say the least. Our understanding of gender has evolved with time, and while we now know that people we could qualify as trans or genderqueer have existed since forever all around the world, words people have used have changed with time. Luke never really puts words on what he is, and while I wouldn't assign him an identity so pretentiously, his feelings often match closely that of a person who would define themselves genderqueer today. While the narration uses she/her pronouns for him throughout the book, Backwards to Oregon and its sequel show numerous times that he's comfortable with both, and that his identity as Luke Hamilton is the one which feels more comfortable to him. Hence my personal choice to use he/him/cinnamon roll pronouns.

But Nora isn't uninteresting either, and I loved her as a desperate woman who's had a tough life, but who won't surrender her chance at happiness. She doesn't trust Luke, and it's hard to judge her for that since Luke wasn't exactly forthcoming about his motivations, and he never truly thought about what Nora and her daughter Amy would become in Oregon after bringing them there. With work, time and hardships, both protagonists will learn to trust and care for each other. Luke in particular, who's lived most of his life on his own, learns to let people close again, especially through Amy, Nora's wonderful daughter.

This is historical fiction, so the same reserves I had in Shaken to the Core remain: this is 1851 society, and some of the most infuriating gender norms that stubbornly survive today were fully alive back then. And while our beloved characters are thankfully as progressive as they get, this is not a teeth-gritting-free read, something I found myself caring less about the more I read because frankly, after a while I was too entranced to care. Still, it remains a world where love between women is "unnatural," sex workers "sell their body," and where a woman is "property".

Anyone who's watched spaghetti westerns knows how popular stories of the Far West are in Europe, and in France, I grew up with comics like Lucky Luke or Blueberry. The research work poured into bringing back the time of the Oregon Trail is obvious and never did I feel anywhere else but on the path with Luke and Nora. The alternating viewpoints give us perspectives into the mind of the colonizers of the time: part desperation, part hope for a better future. I checked some details myself to know more about them, particularly regarding Native Americans our protagonists meet, and found them to be accurate.

As always, Jae provides wonderful writing, tight, well paced and beautifully written. I never really tire of reading her work. She writes characters so well they never feel out of place or shallow, and this book's secondary cast is just as amazing as the leads. An excellent book that ties adventure, historical fiction and romance just right.

Backwards to Oregon is published by Ylva Publishing and can be ordered on the author's website.

Rachel Vigo is a would-be critical geographer from Paris (the one in France, not the one in Texas). She is an avid devourer of books and plays video-games far too much.

Interview with Jae, author of Shaken to the Core

Today we're interviewing Jae, who's just published Shaken to the Core, a new historical adventure and romance set in San Francisco, during the massive earthquake of 1906. She's a well established author in the F/F community, and her exquisitely slow romances and great plots make her a reference for the genre.

Rachel: How would you describe Shaken to the Core?

Jae: Shaken to the Core is a lesbian historical romance. The novel is set in 1906, during the Great Earthquake and Fires in San Francisco. It’s the story of Giuliana, a working-class immigrant from Sicily, and Kate, the daughter of a rich family. They are both struggling to find their place in the world—Giuliana so she can make a living as a single woman without a family in America and Kate because she wants to be a newspaper photographer, not just a socialite who entertains rich suitors and is supposed to marry and reproduce.

Despite their different backgrounds, they become friends when Giuliana starts working for Kate’s family as a maid. But then the earthquake hits, and they find themselves fighting for their lives.

Rachel: On your website, you detail the (significant!) amount of hours spent on the different processes that make a book a reality. Do you prefer to do historical research or contemporary research?

Jae: I don’t actually have a preference. I love research—any kind of research. I call myself an “information junkie” because I love learning new things. And I learn something new with every book I write. For example, my romance novel Just Physical features a character with multiple sclerosis and another character who is a stuntwoman, so I did a lot of research on the stunt business and on life with MS.

But, of course, historical fiction requires a lot more research than a contemporary romance. I spent hours finding out one little detail that later took up only half a sentence in the book. Finding out more about the way people lived in past centuries is fascinating, so I often have to force myself to stop doing research and start writing.

Rachel: What was your research process for this book? Did it differ from other works?

Jae: I’m working on novel number fourteen right now, so my research process is well established and doesn’t change much from book to book. For historical novels, I start by doing general research into how people lived and how they thought in the era I’m writing about. What kind of food would they eat? What kind of medicine was available back then? What did they do for entertainment? How did the usage of language differ from ours? What new technology was invented during that time?

That general knowledge about the time helps me establish my characters’ personalities and backgrounds, and it also helps me to plot my books. Once I know what kind of scenes I will have in the book, I start doing more specialized research. For Shaken to the Core, I put together a timeline of events. When did the earthquake hit, and when did the aftershocks happen? What course did the fires take? How bad was the destruction in different parts of the city?

I only start writing once I’ve gathered all the information I know I will need.

Rachel: You write Kate braving the interdiction to take pictures to let the truth out— did the army really try to censor what was happening?

Jae: Pretty much every detail I mentioned in Shaken to the Core is based on facts. City officials wanted to portray San Francisco as a safe place to live and invest in, so they reported a death toll of under 500. Nowadays, the death toll is estimated at 3,000, possibly even 5,000 to 10,000 victims.

Officials also didn’t like anyone taking pictures of the destruction, especially not of the earthquake damage. Earthquakes are more unpredictable and uncontrollable compared to fires, and they were afraid that reporting the truth would scare away investors, so they downplayed the magnitude of the disaster and encouraged newspapers to report just the fire, not the earthquake.

Rachel: How did you decide you wanted to write about the San Francisco earthquake? Has it been a project long in the making, especially so long after Backward to Oregon? I remember you teased it in the Hollywood series, was it already in the plans then?

Jae: I don’t exactly remember when I first came across the Great Earthquake of 1906, but I have been interested in that era and in writing a novel about a natural disaster for a long time. I started doing research at the beginning of 2013, almost three years before I started writing the first draft of the novel.

When I wrote Damage Control, in which one of the main characters, Lauren, writes a screenplay set during the Great Earthquake and Fires, I already knew that I would write a novel about the same event and I also knew a lot of the scenes already. If you read Just Physical, the novel in which Lauren’s script is filmed, you will recognize several scenes from Shaken to the Core.

When I first envisioned Shaken to the Core and its characters, I didn’t plan on connecting it to my Oregon series, but once I had created Dr. Lucy Hamilton Sharpe, who’s much more comfortable with her sexual orientation than other lesbians of her time, I realized that I had to give her a background that would explain why she considers it perfectly normal to fall in love with women, not men. That’s when I decided to make her the granddaughter of the characters from Backwards to Oregon.

Rachel: What are your projects for historical fiction? Will we see more of the characters from Shaken to the Core?

Jae: I definitely plan to give Lucy her own novel. The book will focus on the Chinese community in San Francisco and the discrimination they faced, before and after the earthquake. I knew that someone like Lucy will need a strong partner who can be her equal, so she will become involved with a woman who fights to save young Chinese girls from slavery and prostitution.

Rachel: Do you have other projects in the work?

Jae: At the moment, I’m wrapping up revisions on Heart Trouble, a contemporary lesbian romance with an unexpected twist.

After that, I will write the story of one of Heart Trouble’s supporting characters. That seems to be a trend with me: I often become fascinated with the minor characters I created and will then give them a book of their own.

I’m also planning a follow-up novel to my popular romantic suspense series that started with Conflict of Interest and Next of Kin.

Rachel: You’ve shown skill with a lot of different genres: historical fiction, urban fantasy, contemporary fiction, procedural fiction… Do you plan to explore new territories? Science Fiction? Maybe gothic horror?

Jae: I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as a writer, so I love to explore new genres. I could definitely see myself writing science fiction or fantasy, since I devoured novels of those genres as a child and a teenager. There’s also a paranormal mystery on my books-to-write-one-day list.

Horror is pretty much the only genre that I never truly became interested in, so I’ll probably skip that one.

Rachel: I like how you’ve shown great diverse and complex characters in your bibliography. I know this is me preaching for my chapel, but do you plan to create a trans character one day? Maybe a lead?

Jae: I’ve learned to never say never. A diverse cast of characters is important to me. By the way, a lot of my readers read Luke from my historical novel Backwards to Oregon as transgender. While I didn’t set out to create a trans character in Luke, I understand how she could be viewed that way. At the very least, she’s what you would call genderqueer today.

Another story on my books-to-write-one-day list is a novel with an asexual main character. I have two asexual friends, and they don’t see themselves represented nearly enough in fiction.

Rachel Vigo is a would-be critical geographer from Paris (the one in France, not the one in Texas). She is an avid devourer of books and plays video-games far too much.

Book Review: Shaken to the Core by Jae: A Slow Building Historical Romance

Genre : Hystorical fiction, Adventure, Romance, F/F Fiction

Wow, have I been waiting for that one! Shaken to the Core actually started as a small tease in Damage Control, the second book in Jae’s Hollywood series. Back then it was a script one of its main characters, Lauren, had written in her free time. Then the third book of that series, Just Physical, starred two characters that were actually filming the movie adaptation of the script. Of course, Shaken to the Core stands entirely on its own, but I did cheer like the total fangirl I am when I recognized a scene from Shaken to the Core that we’d seen the characters from Just Physical shoot.

Shaken to the Core tells the story of two women who were caught in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the subsequent fires that ravaged eighty percent of the city. One is Giuliana Russo, a Sicilian immigrant looking for a job after the death of her brother, her only family in the city. The other is Kate Winthrop, the only child of a rich family. When Giuliana is hired as the Winthrop’s maid, both women quickly become friends despite the rigid ruling of the class and gender norms of the time. Kate’s parents would see her a «proper» woman, married and with a child in each arm, but not only does Kate not care about men, she’s also more interested in becoming a news photographer than in being a stay-at-home wife. So when unprecedented disaster strikes the city, she sees her chance to take her independence.

I don’t usually read historical fiction. I don’t like rampant misogyny and infuriating bourgeois norms, and since I tend to be interested in lesbian fiction… Well, let’s say historical fiction isn’t really the best place for me. So I was kind of gritting my teeth during the first quarter of the book. I cannot judge for historical accuracy, since I know very little about US history, but Jae's rendition of 1906 San Francisco feels vivid and rings true. Jae uses many topographic elements that ground us into the city, and it’s clear she takes accuracy at heart. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been to see your entire city go into flames before your eyes, but Kate and Giuliana’s breathtaking adventure puts us right in the middle of the inferno.

It’s hard not to love both of our main characters and together they make a fantastic pair, though Dr. Lucy Sharpe sometimes steals the show with her top-notch badassery. Both Katie and Giuliana are visibly changed by their experiences and their growth of character between the beginning and the end cannot be doubted— I can only hope that we’ll get to see more of them in the future. Theirs is a slow romance, and since neither of them has any experience with attraction, we get to see them struggle for a good while about their feelings. However, I must admit that it personally feels a little sad to see Jae go back to the more classic form of denial of one’s romantic feelings, especially after the poignant Just Physical. While it’s true that we’re less likely to see women secure in their affection for other women in 1906 San Francisco, their romance feels a little too safe in its way to stay on the beaten path, especially for such a well-established writer as Jae.

Another thing I regret is that Jae didn't take the time to tackle other subjects like racial inequality. 1906 San Francisco had a thriving Chinese community of about 20,000 souls and a lot of heated debates took place on the subject of rebuilding the Chinese district after the disaster. At some point, Kate muses on the fact that the fire made rich and poor people equal in pain, and I felt that was a very naive and privileged idea. While dirt and soot may have temporarily blurred class differences a bit (and even then, her rich parents bounced back immediately after the disaster), one cannot say the same about race and I would have liked to see what happened to the many people of color of San Francisco. The subject wouldn't have stood out of place either, as Giuliana's identity as a Sicilian woman would have made her a target for her contemporaries' bigotry towards poor European immigrants... A bigotry often rooted in racism.

Still, Shaken to the Core definitely holds more adrenaline than her previous books, and her efficient and tight way of writing definitely proves up to the challenge it poses. It was a pleasant read that kept me up far too late than I should have let it— a great page turner indeed.

Rachel Vigo is a would-be critical geographer from Paris (the one in France, not the one in Texas). She is an avid devourer of books and plays video-games far too much.