Seven Summer Nights
By: Harper Fox / Narrated By: Chris Clog
Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
A few bouts of Wandering-Mind, but narration really adds to a warm story.
Seven Summer Nights got such rave reviews on the one hand (Gorgeous writing! Strong characters!), boos on the other (Offensive to Christians! An element of the supernatural!), that I’m left scratching my head and coming away with an: Oh well—Here’s my review…
I thought it was good, but lemme tell ya, my mind did so wander as I listened to 16+ hours of this story. It’s about shellshocked Rufus getting terminated from his archaeological excavation after blacking out and attacking the leader. He’s gently guided to go the heck elsewhere and finds himself in a rural English village, looking around the village church as there are ideas that there might be archaeological finds to be had.
On his first day there, the incredibly fatigued Rufus and Pippin (the dog he saved from a bomb crater, the owner having left and/or died) make a look about then crash dead asleep, only to wake up and peep outta their shelter to see the village vicar chasing after a stark naked woman.
Don’t worry—there’s a story to be had. And that’s where I found the most delight in the book—the woman is Drusilla, and there’s, yeh yeh yeh, a touch of a supernatural element in that Drusilla is not the crazy git she appears to be.
But there’s also the developing relationship between Archie, the vicar, and Rufus, as Archie suffers his crisis of faith (He was a chaplain in WWII) and Rufus continues to study the church and to have bouts of amnesia where he lashes out at unsuspecting people. When the two are dealing with the village folks, the secondary characters, all is well, I liked that. The growing attraction between the two men is heartfelt, slow to develop (Well, okay, it all happens in only SEVEN nights, but I love romances so that’s TOTally okay with me), and they have to keep it all under wraps as homosexuality is not only a no-no but is downright illegal—it’s perversion to the nth degree. The townsfolk are all quirky and well-written, some have hearts o’ gold, some are dastardly in their own way. I found the tension between the two types and Archie and Rufus believable and engaging.
However, when we got to the archaeology and some odd goings-on as a hole is discovered and a labyrinth might be in play, I really started to yawn. There’s even one scene, an especially intimate scene where things got a tad graphic, my toes (Naturally) started curling, then Rufus stops it all to think about what all else might be going on in the excavation. It made me laugh! Poor Archie and interruptus in the severest of manners.
Still, the archaeological discoveries soon tie into some interesting pagan mysteries, characters are drawn in, and that saved THAT part of the book for me. Plus, there’s a good long chunk of the story where Rufus, after someone is attacked, leaves to find safe haven at a hospital where he can be treated/cured/neutralized, and we get to see how shellshocked soldiers were treated after WWII. And tell me if you don’t get a tiny tear in your eye when Archie, in all his feckless yet earnest glory, triiiiiiies to rescue Rufus from a nefarious Brigadier Spence and his prescribed nefarious treatments.
A sweet love story that narrator Chris Clog does well (I often wonder how narrators manage the groaning and gasping of intimate love scenes without breaking out into chuckles or sheepishly trailing off at the end of sentences…!). There are a few memorable women characters and Clog in no way turns them into ill-voiced caricatures—some are strong, some are decisive, some are weak—no matter what, he voices them well. And to say I loved both Rufus and (Especially!) Archie? ‘Nuff said; Clog made them great.
So if you can suspend disbelief of a grand (And lasting) passion developing over archaeological finds over seven days, you’re in for a nice romance, especially the way Clog narrates. There’s much drama, there’s wartime angst, wartime memories of horror, good friends, and there’s even a good old pagan whaddaya know (I think the pagan is what killed it for the upset Christians).
>Clunk<
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