Best Hearth-and-Home Novel
Cottonwood - R.Lee Smith (A Red Hot Romance Novel)
The Last Hour of Gann might have garnered all the attention
last year, but Smith’s companion tale of a concentration camp romance between
an alien stranded on Earth and the idealistic “social worker” assigned to him
resonated more with me. Smith explains in her own afterword that she conceived
of the two books at the same time. In the first, “we go there”. In the second, “they come here”, the signal
aspect of most “hearth-and-home” novels.
In this case, much like my favorite
H&H story, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, the heroine must protect the
aliens from her fellow humans, who seek to exploit them and their technology in
every way possible. In the beginning, Sarah is naïve and easily manipulated by
her employer, the owner of the worldwide network of camps confining the “bugs”
who have crash-landed on Earth. But like generations of development workers
before her, once she is over her culture shock, her innate sense of justice and
compassion give her courage.
Then there is Sanford. And his son. Yes,
it is a joke, played by some insensitive official whose job it was to give the
aliens pronounceable human names. Sanford was a soldier; now he scrounges for
reparable electronics in the Heaps (a garbage dump) to keep his little family
alive.
These two unlikely characters make a
connection in the squalor of the Cottonwood camp in Kansas. And once Sarah’s
eyes are open, she can never go back to sleep again.
If you like your SFR long and deep
enough to sink your teeth into, your ET’s truly alien and your romance built on
something more than just sexual attraction, this is the one for you. (And, as a
former PeaceCorps Volunteer, I have to say I LOVED this one!)
