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This is a first novel and is a truly remarkable work for anyone, and one that showcases a top tier author with a bright future ahead of her. I have no difficulty calling it a beautifully written book which neatly ties together several interests of the author. She is, by her own admission, a World War One adherent as well as a person that enjoys exploring history for its own sake and a romantic soul.
Lt. Robert Lovett is an officer serving England during the First World War in the trenches of France and Belgium. He is strongly vested in doing his duty by supplying the soldiers serving under him with skilled and patriotic leadership. He is wounded in 1916 and develops hysterical blindness with no physical reason for doing so. He is sent to Coldbrook Hall military convalescent hospital in Sussex, England to recuperate from his wounds.
A century after Lovett is hospitalized, Louisa Casson, who experienced the sudden loss of her grandmother, the only person she had that had taken care of her as well as suffering a severe fall is confined to Coldbrook Hall. In the century between Lt. Lovett’s hospitalization and today, Coldbrook has been converted into a psychiatric hospital.
Louisa earns herself a status as a patient that can be trusted gets herself into a position that allows her to be let outside the walls of Coldbrook hospital in order to wander around outside. One day while exploring the area she wanders into a section that is old but quite intact. Entering into a room in that area she stumbles on Robert Lovette. Beginning a conversation with him and returning as often as she can, Louisa realizes two things. The first that she is in love with him, and second, that she has somehow slipped back in time to 1916 and the man that she has met is the wounded officer we already saw that was sent to Coldbrook in 1916.
Taylor shows her knowledge of WWI in describing the battles and areas that Lt. Lovett has been involved with. She describes the horrors of being in a trench just a few hundred yards from the enemy with both sides constantly shooting at each other, the dirt, filth, mud, and dead bodies – the horror of knowing that death is all around and could come in the blink of an eye. Her descriptions of possible conversations between the men are very much to the point, and Taylor gives her readers a realistic set of ideas and values in the midst of a world that no human being should be immersed in.
A well-done fantasy that treats a love across time and a period of great horror as factors in describing the levels that the human spirit can rise to.
10/19 Paul Lane
BEYOND THE MOON by Catherine Taylor. The Cameo Press Ltd (June 26, 2019). ISBN 978-1916093218. 494p.
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