From the back cover:
Early in the nineteenth century, in a puritanical New England town, two women did something unspeakable, something unheard of—they fell in love with each other. With nothing and no one to guide or support them, Patience and Sarah tried to follow their hearts.
And when family pressures separated them, the two women dreamed of leaving their homes, of being together. Defying society and history, they bought a farm and discovered they could live together, away from a world that had put limits on them and their love.
Review:
Patience White has been provided for. Her father’s will made certain that there would always be a place for her in her devout brother’s Connecticut home, but that isn’t enough to make Patience happy. She doesn’t want the things that a woman of her age (late twenties) should want, and though she helps out around the house, Edward’s wife, Martha, makes her feel guilty for desiring privacy to work on her paintings. When she meets Sarah Dowling, conscripted to serve as “Pa’s boy†in the absence of any male siblings and entirely unaware that her manners shock more proper folk, she is immediately intrigued.
Kisses soon ensue, followed by Sarah’s inability to realize that some things should be kept secret, a journey in boy’s clothes, vague yet plentiful sex scenes, manipulation by Patience to get Sarah to agree to come away with her, familial discovery, further journeying, and finally settling into farm life in New York. The narrative alternates between perspectives with occasionally amusing results (I enjoyed their differing accounts of their final parting with Edward) but with much repetition, since each woman experiences periods of insecurity as well as triumph in the knowledge that she can leave the other wanting her. One strange side effect was that although I disliked Sarah at the beginning of the novel, due to her remarkable lack of common sense, by the end I thought she was by far the better (and more genuine) of the two, since Patience could be deceitful in her quest to get her way.
I had expected, owing largely to the rhapsodies experienced by the leads in Annie on My Mind as they read and reread this book, that Patience & Sarah would be at least a little romantic, but really, it is not. Instead, I’d describe it as carnal. When I say that “kisses soon ensue,†I mean really soon, and with little preamble as to why these women are drawn to each other. Suddenly, it’s just instant passion. There are some parts of the novel that I liked—slice-of-life passages about chopping wood and sewing curtains, card games they play with Sarah’s mother, or the stray dog that promptly adopts them when they get to their new home—but I couldn’t care much about the characters or their relationship. Plus, all the parts that I liked are sullied by the ending, in which Patience declares that now that they have their own place they will “make the bed gallop,†which makes it seem that everything they’ve done has been with coital goals in mind.
Another thing I noticed is that nearly everyone else in the novel is made to desire the protagonists. Sarah’s sister offers to do for her whatever Patience does (eww), it’s suspected that Edward likes to imagine the two of them together, Sarah’s traveling companion tries to put the moves on her (granted, he thinks she’s a boy at the time), and one of Martha’s main objections to the relationship is that Patience is fooling around with someone “outside of the family.†I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly. With Edward and Martha it could be a case of pointing out their hypocrisy, but what of the others?
In the end, Patience & Sarah was not what I’d expected it to be. If this had been a straight romance, I might not even have finished it.
What annoyed me the most was the contrived-ness of it. I mean, okay, I get that living on your own and living as yourselves is important. And that lesbians are passionate and want sexytimes too.
But it just seemed that they way in which they went about everything was so much more complicated than it needed to be.
As a fairly well-off unmarried woman, it hardly seems like it would have been shocking or unheard of for her to engage a companion, someone to help around the house and provide her with company. There are scores of books with just such an arrangement! So there, having another chick live with her = normal. And the fact is that sharing beds is not shocking either. We even see it, Sarah shares with Rachel (admittedly they’re sisters), but friends would share for practical reasons: not enough beds, not enough room, and um, NO INSULATION. Connecticut is FREAKING COLD in the wintertime.
I guess she wanted to have Sarah with her as an equal and not a servant or something? And yet, she seems to find it endearing that Sarah is unequal in some respects, so who knows? I have no good defense. :)
Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe if the relationship had been better developed. As it is, I have no real idea why this was not a viable option for them, just that Patience didn’t even seem to consider it at all.
Perhaps it would’ve diluted the message that they shouldn’t have had to hide or live in fear of discovery.
Which, I grant, is the very definition of contrived. :)
Is the cover that you posted on SiB the cover that your book had? I might not have instantly hated the book so much if it hadn’t had a cover that just really annoyed me.
Yes, that really is the cover I had. While I was trying to find a good image of it, I saw some other ones.
I wonder which cartoony cover you had. Was is this one?
That’s the picture, but it took up the whole of the cover instead of just being small in the corner.
Ugh! I can see why that would annoy you.
It’s interesting you mentioned ‘vague but plentiful sex scenes’, when I had trouble even figuring out if any sex was going on! As far as I could tell, they were groping at best. Did they even get undressed at any point? It’s been awhile now since I read it.
I think perhaps some of the convolutedness, etc, was that in a lot of ways, they were teenagers. Yea, they should’ve been more mature to go with their age, but they’d never been in a relationship before, or made independent choices, etc. So they were blundering along like lovesick teenagers. Particularly dull ones, I grant.
It’s very confusing whether they had sex or not. There’s one scene where Patience is making some undergarment that will touch Sarah in places she has not, but later they’re all going on about… well, terms that suggest there’s some full nudity going on. In the end, I think they did, for lack of a better term, “do it.”
Yeah, it was quite obvious that at least by the time they were in that NY boarding house, they were all the way there. What I wasn’t clear on was how far they had gone before that.
And it’s rather important information! There’s being coy and subtle about saying what they’ve done and how far they’ve gone, and then there’s just being vague and unhelpful.