Stevie‘s review of The Real World (Stancester, Book 2) by Kathleen Jowitt
Contemporary LGBT+ Fiction published by Kathleen Jowitt 16 Sep 20
I’ve waited a long time for a sequel to Speak Its Name and I finally got my wish this year when the author contacted me with the offer of a review copy. Picking up the story around four years later, Lydia and Colette have now graduated from university but are still living in Stancester, while Colette completes her PhD. Lydia, meanwhile, is working for the council in an administrative role, supplementing her girlfriend’s research funding and figuring out what she wants to do with her life. It was really good to see a story centred around a young established couple with most of the conflict coming from external events, and their own inner – admitted – insecurities, rather than from any contrived relationship issues.
Lydia’s issues stem from her two conflicting desires: to serve her God and her community by being ordained into the clergy, and to marry Colette. The Church of England expressly forbids same sex marriage amongst its ordinands, although it takes a more lenient attitude towards celibate civil partnerships, and Lydia wants everything or nothing. The story is set during a period when the Church’s views on the matter were up for debate, which gives Lydia some hope of a resolution, though that is ultimately quashed. At the same time, Colette is struggling to come up with meaningful results from her PhD research, not helped by the fact that her supervisor has made a media career off the back of his one significant discovery and is rarely in the lab to help either Colette or her colleagues – all of whom are equally disillusioned – in between book promotions and television appearances: a situation I could sympathise with, even if my own PhD supervisor was lovely and not at all the reason I ultimately dropped out.
The pair are well supported by friends within their respective faith and LGBT+ communities, some of whom we met in the previous book and some who are new this time around. I particularly liked the introduction of various trans* people of faith, especially Rowan, a non-binary undergraduate. It was also heartening to see them being accepted as a couple by the congregations of the churches each attended in Stancester – and interesting to see each woman’s reaction to the differences in how her partner’s denomination professed their faith – as well as in other towns when they visited family and friends.
As with the previous book, I was able to follow the differences between various factions within the overall umbrella of Christianity, without a lot of prior (current) knowledge, and found plenty of similarities between those debates and ones held within other disparate communities, like various forms of fandom. Colette’s depression and Lydia’s responses to it were also very well handled, and I liked that ultimately there was no final resolution to that plot thread, beyond an acknowledgement that she needed to seek support from the university as well as from the individuals already helping her.
A most excellent sequel, although I would dearly love to see more of these characters at some point, and need to go read the author’s other works before that.
Grade: A
Summary:
Colette is trying to finish her PhD and trying not to think about what happens next. Her girlfriend wants to get married – but she also wants to become a vicar, and she can’t do both. Her ex-girlfriend never wanted to get married, but apparently she does now. Her supervisor is more interested in his TV career than in what she’s up to, and, of the two people she could talk to about any of this, one’s two hundred miles away, and the other one’s dead. Welcome to… The Real World.
Read an excerpt.
Other books in this series:
