Book Review: Restraint by DarkEmeralds
May. 1st, 2013 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: Restraint
Author: DarkEmeralds
Published: 2010
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 570
Total Page Count: 136,376
Text Number: 399
Read Because: personal enjoyment, available on Archive of Our Own
Review: London, 1818: the up-and-coming artist John Acklebury is commissioned to paint the portrait of Tristan Jarrett, Viscount Penrith—and their meeting sparks an immediate friendship and the beginning of a lifelong love affair which defies Recency society and law. Ostensibly, Restraint is real person fiction based on Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki; ignore this. It makes for distinct casting, but it's also unnecessary, as well as presumptuous and somewhat tasteless; the occasional references to Supernatural largely serve to break immersion. With this caveat aside, Restraint is exceptional. Its prologue makes for a slow start, the headhopping can grow excessive, and it's in most senses "just" a love story, confined to the limits of the relationship. But it's a relationship of remarkable subtlety and sensitivity—a sanctified "true love," thoroughly complicated by flawed characters and the many constraints of a well-researched and -realized Regency-era England, unwilling to subsist on the emotional motivation of angst but instead dedicated to progressing the romance through an entire successful lifetime. It's also a dialog about how individuals experience and express things, like homosexual desire and identity, when society offers limited language to aid them. Restraint has its flaws, but what it does well it does with grace, complexity, and emotion. I'd love to see it edited into a published novel, but still recommend it as is—just ignore the Ackles and Padalecki photoshops.
Author: DarkEmeralds
Published: 2010
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 570
Total Page Count: 136,376
Text Number: 399
Read Because: personal enjoyment, available on Archive of Our Own
Review: London, 1818: the up-and-coming artist John Acklebury is commissioned to paint the portrait of Tristan Jarrett, Viscount Penrith—and their meeting sparks an immediate friendship and the beginning of a lifelong love affair which defies Recency society and law. Ostensibly, Restraint is real person fiction based on Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki; ignore this. It makes for distinct casting, but it's also unnecessary, as well as presumptuous and somewhat tasteless; the occasional references to Supernatural largely serve to break immersion. With this caveat aside, Restraint is exceptional. Its prologue makes for a slow start, the headhopping can grow excessive, and it's in most senses "just" a love story, confined to the limits of the relationship. But it's a relationship of remarkable subtlety and sensitivity—a sanctified "true love," thoroughly complicated by flawed characters and the many constraints of a well-researched and -realized Regency-era England, unwilling to subsist on the emotional motivation of angst but instead dedicated to progressing the romance through an entire successful lifetime. It's also a dialog about how individuals experience and express things, like homosexual desire and identity, when society offers limited language to aid them. Restraint has its flaws, but what it does well it does with grace, complexity, and emotion. I'd love to see it edited into a published novel, but still recommend it as is—just ignore the Ackles and Padalecki photoshops.
