At thirty-three, Mary Cate Randolph still believes in fairy tales. She’s been searching for Prince Charming all her life, but after she was date-raped by her last boyfriend, she is understandably cautious. When she meets tennis pro, Nick Hamilton, at her Asheville country club, she thinks she’s found the perfect man. He’s charming and intelligent, but not sexually aggressive. No wonder. It’s 1983 and unbeknownst to Mary Cate, a naïve homophobic, Nick is a closeted homosexual. Thus begins a tangled web of love, deception, and discovery that ultimately leads to Mary Cate’s transformation and realization that true love is far different from the fairy tale version.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Amo, amas, amat…An Unconventional Love Story’: Perfectly Timed for 30th Anniversary of Discovery of HIV-AIDS
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost
Carter Taylor Seaton’s eBook “Amo, amas, amat…An Unconventional Love Story” (Amazon Digital Services $7.99 delivered to your Kindle reader or tablet) appears during the 30th anniversary year of the discovery of HIV-AIDS, and it’s a perfect introduction to the subject of gays and straights and how they can co-exist.
It’s also a page-turner that can and should be enjoyed by everybody, Northerners, Southerners, gays, straights, men, women. I mention the North-South divide because Seaton’s novel is set in Asheville, NC and Atlanta, with side trips (by Nick Hamilton) to Charlotte, NC. There’s a regional difference in the treatment by straights of gay men and lesbian women, with more tolerance north of the Mason-Dixon Line (with the exception of gay friendly Key West, a notably tolerant place which has been jokingly described as a drinking village with a fishing problem) and Seaton deals with this in her coverage of violence against gay men in 1980s Atlanta.
After a prologue set in Atlanta in 1988, the novel opens in 1983 Asheville, where 33-year-old Mary Cate Randolph still believes, against all evidence to the contrary, that a Prince Charming will come her way and rescue her from spinsterhood. Her sister, Bitty, is happily married to an ambitious young lawyer, with two “perfectly formed — but wretchedly behaved” children, and her mother, Abby, and her father, Howard, want a similar outcome to Mary Cate’s life.
The Randolph family is described by Mary Cate as Country Club Baptists — as opposed to less tolerant Country Baptists — but they’re anything but gay and lesbian friendly. That goes double for homophobic Mary Cate, who at age 15 joined classmates in taunting a suspected gay boy in high school named Emmett Hubbard by calling him “Auntie Em” — among other slurs. The boy later committed suicide.
At the Black Mountain Country Club Mary Cate meets Nick Christian Hamilton, who fits the description of Prince Charming to a “Shrek” T. He’s blond, blue-eyed and tanned the way a tennis pro should be. Julia Ann Maxwell, Mary Cate’s best friend, thinks that in the wake of her disastrous relationships — including an affair with a professor at Agnes Scott College, their alma mater — tennis pro Nick Hamilton looks like a winner.
Both women are operating with defective “gaydars” because Nick is deeply in the closet. His favorite hangout is The Blue Boy, a gay bar in Charlotte, where he attended UNC-Charlotte, where he can let it all hang out with his friends Philip Preston and Race Gonzales, from his hometown of Cayce, a suburb of Columbus, SC.
After a dramatic scene at a country club dance, Nick and Mary Cate begin an affair that has life-changing consequences for both of them. I don’t want to give away more of the plot of this gem of a novel, which I recommend to everyone looking for good reading. You may come away with a greater understanding of the qualities that make people with different sexuality good friends, especially when Mary Cate moves to Atlanta into a diverse close-to-downtown gentrifying neighborhood. Suffice it to say that the move transforms Mary Cate Randolph.
At thirty-three, Mary Cate Randolph still believes in fairy tales. She’s been searching for Prince Charming all her life, but after she was date-raped by her last boyfriend, she is understandably cautious. When she meets tennis pro, Nick Hamilton, at her Asheville country club, she thinks she’s found the perfect man. He’s charming and intelligent, but not sexually aggressive. No wonder. It’s 1983 and unbeknownst to Mary Cate, a naïve homophobic, Nick is a closeted homosexual. Thus begins a tangled web of love, deception, and discovery that ultimately leads to Mary Cate’s transformation and realization that true love is far different from the fairy tale version.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Amo, amas, amat…An Unconventional Love Story’: Perfectly Timed for 30th Anniversary of Discovery of HIV-AIDS
Reviewed by David M. Kinchen
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I — / I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost
Carter Taylor Seaton’s eBook “Amo, amas, amat…An Unconventional Love Story” (Amazon Digital Services $7.99 delivered to your Kindle reader or tablet) appears during the 30th anniversary year of the discovery of HIV-AIDS, and it’s a perfect introduction to the subject of gays and straights and how they can co-exist.
It’s also a page-turner that can and should be enjoyed by everybody, Northerners, Southerners, gays, straights, men, women. I mention the North-South divide because Seaton’s novel is set in Asheville, NC and Atlanta, with side trips (by Nick Hamilton) to Charlotte, NC. There’s a regional difference in the treatment by straights of gay men and lesbian women, with more tolerance north of the Mason-Dixon Line (with the exception of gay friendly Key West, a notably tolerant place which has been jokingly described as a drinking village with a fishing problem) and Seaton deals with this in her coverage of violence against gay men in 1980s Atlanta.
After a prologue set in Atlanta in 1988, the novel opens in 1983 Asheville, where 33-year-old Mary Cate Randolph still believes, against all evidence to the contrary, that a Prince Charming will come her way and rescue her from spinsterhood. Her sister, Bitty, is happily married to an ambitious young lawyer, with two “perfectly formed — but wretchedly behaved” children, and her mother, Abby, and her father, Howard, want a similar outcome to Mary Cate’s life.
The Randolph family is described by Mary Cate as Country Club Baptists — as opposed to less tolerant Country Baptists — but they’re anything but gay and lesbian friendly. That goes double for homophobic Mary Cate, who at age 15 joined classmates in taunting a suspected gay boy in high school named Emmett Hubbard by calling him “Auntie Em” — among other slurs. The boy later committed suicide.
At the Black Mountain Country Club Mary Cate meets Nick Christian Hamilton, who fits the description of Prince Charming to a “Shrek” T. He’s blond, blue-eyed and tanned the way a tennis pro should be. Julia Ann Maxwell, Mary Cate’s best friend, thinks that in the wake of her disastrous relationships — including an affair with a professor at Agnes Scott College, their alma mater — tennis pro Nick Hamilton looks like a winner.
Both women are operating with defective “gaydars” because Nick is deeply in the closet. His favorite hangout is The Blue Boy, a gay bar in Charlotte, where he attended UNC-Charlotte, where he can let it all hang out with his friends Philip Preston and Race Gonzales, from his hometown of Cayce, a suburb of Columbus, SC.
After a dramatic scene at a country club dance, Nick and Mary Cate begin an affair that has life-changing consequences for both of them. I don’t want to give away more of the plot of this gem of a novel, which I recommend to everyone looking for good reading. You may come away with a greater understanding of the qualities that make people with different sexuality good friends, especially when Mary Cate moves to Atlanta into a diverse close-to-downtown gentrifying neighborhood. Suffice it to say that the move transforms Mary Cate Randolph.
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