THE STARS WE SHARE

A classic love story set against the back drop of WWII and the emerging cold war as a couple struggles over a 40 year period to weather the trauma of war, the trials and rewards of parenthood, marriage, and the shifting tides of history. EVENSONG is a love story and a story about gender expectations wrapped in a WWII novel.

Alec and June meet in a small English town in 1927, when they are children. Alec has lost his parents in India to cholera; he's a dreamy, thoughtful child who maps the stars and makes up stories. June is more mathematical-minded, memorizing train time tables and studying equations. Their love feels inevitable, their lives a series of carefully-placed cairns, until the war separates them. Alec becomes a pilot; June, a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, which means signing the Official Secrets Act and keeping the important work she does a secret from Alec forever. Their roles send them around the globe, and they keep in touch through letters and a shared, never-ending tale about a princess and a bear, a metaphor for their lives.

But June finds more than a job in codebreaking; she finds something that makes her feel necessary. She doesn't want to stifle her intelligence and follow the expected path to homemaking and motherhood, after the war ends. Alec is more steadfast in his commitment, but a disabling accident and years in a concentration camp challenge his hold on the future.

When they are reunited again, Alec is unsure how to resume the domestic life they'd envisioned; after her important and dramatic career, June isn't sure their vision is shared. Each must decide how much of themselves to reveal to the one they love; which dreams can be sacrificed; and which secrets are too big to bear.

Evensong is a beautiful, movie-ready book about a love tested again and again by war, distance, dreams, feminism, and the time period. The prose is rich, and precise with an incredible capacity to capture depths of emotions in single scenes, and to present the time period and the far-flung settings with the awe and wonder, unease and excitement the characters would experience themselves. It is hard to read this book and not cry, to not think deeply about the decisions and deceptions - small and large that make a life and a love worth having.

Rafe Posey's short story collection, The Book of Broken Hymns, was a 2012 Lambda finalist for Transgender Fiction. His other short fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in BuzzFeed, Urbanite, The Light Ekphrastic, Welter, Empty Sink, Wilde Magazine, Poydras Review, and more. He writes and teaches writing in Baltimore; he piloted UB's involvement in the federal "Second Chance" Pell Grant program, teaching composition to incarcerated men at a medium-security prison.