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Till the Stars Fall

By Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Publisher: ePublishing Works

(Originally published by Onyx, 1994)

Release Date: June 2, 2015

Krissa and Danny French are a sister and brother who grow up in a mining community on the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota. Although only a year apart in age, their very different personalities keep Krissa and Danny from being close. Danny is a loner and a rebel, constantly challenging the status quo and dreaming of leaving the narrow world his family inhabits. Krissa, a year younger, is a people pleaser, a nice girl and straight-A student who follows all the rules and tries to pretend her family with her perfectionist mother and angry, abusive father is just like everyone else’s. The relationship between the siblings changes when Danny asks for Krissa’s help in redeeming his academic record so that he has a shot at a scholarship to an Ivy League school. Gradually, Danny’s dream of escape grows to include Krissa too. Danny gets his scholarship and leaves for Princeton. A year later, Krissa enters Bryn Mawr.

At Princeton, Danny meets Quinn Hunter, a child of privilege with no siblings. Although their looks, their temperaments, and their backgrounds are worlds apart, their talent and passion for music makes them friends. Soon they form Dodd Hall, a band named for the freshman dormitory at Princeton, with Quinn writing lyrics and Danny writing music. By the time Krissa comes east for school, Dodd Hall’s fortunes are on the rise. She becomes secretary, bookkeeper, manager, and booking agent for the band as well as their test audience for new songs.

Krissa and Quinn have feelings for one another from their first meeting, and in the first heady days of Dodd Hall’s ascension, they act on those feelings. Quinn writes “Cinnamon Starlight,” the first of what will become a series of songs for Krissa, his cinnamon-haired girl. As Dodd Hall becomes one of America’s premier rock bands, things get crazier. Professionals may have taken over some of Krissa’s roles, but she is no less necessary to the band, increasingly so as a mediator between Quinn and Danny whose closeness does not preclude disagreements and misunderstandings. Krissa feels as if she is losing herself and insists on devoting her final semester to being a student rather than flying in every weekend to wherever the band is performing.

When both Quinn and Danny pressure Krissa with daily phone calls, she returns to Minnesota for her spring break to escape. A chance meeting with Jerry Aarensson, a veteran ten years her senior, reminds her of the life she expected to lead before Danny urged her to leave, before she met Quinn. Jerry’s simplicity and the appeal of the familiar tempt Krissa. The weekend of her graduation, she calls Danny to tell him that she is marrying Jerry. Except for a brief exchange after her father’s death, Krissa and Quinn have no contact with one another for sixteen years. Within a year of her marriage, Dodd Hall breaks up. Their last song is recorded with Quinn and Danny singing with a tape of one another’s voice because they are no longer speaking.

After fifteen years of silence, as Krissa is waiting to hear news of Danny who has been hospitalized after an extended hunger strike as an act of political protest, Krissa receives a phone call from Quinn who shares her fear over the consequences of Danny’s activism. Krissa is now a divorced mother of four and secure in her identity. Quinn is now an orthopedic surgeon and, except for his role in rock history, no longer a public person. The connection between them is as strong as ever. Can they trust themselves and one another and give their love a second chance?

When I first read Till the Stars Fall back in the late 90s, I fell in love with these characters in all their complexity and realness. A reunion story, my favorite trope even then, it is also a triangle of relationships. Danny and Quinn are mirror images of one another in significant ways, down to the shape of their hands, but their brotherhood and their musical partnership is complicated by their differences. Danny is charismatic, but he is also manipulative and distrustful. He is not above using even Krissa for his purposes. Despite his privileged upbringing, Quinn is as much a victim of parental abuse as Danny, only the blows his selfish, elegant parents deliver are emotional rather than physical. Quinn sees in Krissa all he has ever wanted, and, almost from the beginning, imagines the two of them building a life together based on their perfect love. Krissa is very young, and she is a conditioned people pleaser. She loves her brother and wants to please him. She loves Quinn and wants to please him. When she becomes overwhelmed by their demands, she runs back to a life where she knows who she is and where she can meet people’s expectations as Krissa from the Range not as the cinnamon-haired girl.  Even fifteen years later, all the complications among the three have not been resolved, and Krissa and Quinn’s path to an HEA is not a simple one. They must forgive themselves, a task sometimes more difficult than forgiving others.

I don’t like Danny very much, but I understand his charm and his twists. I love Krissa and empathize with her uncertainty, her love of harmony, and even her lack of courage in asserting herself. Quinn quite simply is my all-time favorite contemporary romance hero. When he needs literary inspiration to write lyrics for sensual love songs, he turns to 16^th and 17^th-century English poets, including John Donne. Irresistible for this English major! He is a legendary musician, a short story writer (published in the New Yorker), a successful doctor, and a philanthropist. Intelligent, creative, sensitive, and sexy, he still has flaws enough to keep him from being merely an unrealized fantasy figure. (Deep sigh here.)

Seidel structures the story with shifts between the 1990s and the 1970s, so that the reader is given the past and the present in increments. Both periods are richly detailed. Krissa’s life with her sons is as immediate and captivating as the story of Dodd Hall. Bits from various media—magazines such as Playboy and Rolling Stone, books, popular and academic, and radio—break into the narrative, giving Dodd Hall’s history and musical legacy another dimension of reality and further revealing the three lead characters.

Then there is Seidel’s incomparable prose with a lyrical quality that never moves into the overblown and a lucidity and preciseness that add levels of meaning to simple declarative sentences.

Example of the author’s lyricism:

“At night it was as if their bed were enchanted. Like a brass four-poster in a fairy tale, soaring through the night, it carried the two of them on a drifting, dreaming journey. They'd be kneeling in wonder, having tossed back the patchwork counterpane, looking down at the miniature world below, the lighted church steeples, and the shadowy parks. Together they were floating alone in the magic world of the stars.”

Example of the author’s lucidity and preciseness:

“Krissa and Jerry had not had a stressful marriage. They hadn't fought, they hadn't disagreed, they hadn't gotten on each other's nerves. But they had never sat at the side of the baby pool talking; they didn't have that much to say to each other.

“Jerry had respected her, and she had respected him. But before she had married him, she had been the Girl with Cinnamon Hair. She had moved in a cloud of starry devotion. Respect was not the same.”

I don’t think the perfect book exists, but I have a few romance novels on my keeper shelves that I consider thisclose to perfection. Till the Stars Fall is one of them. Each rereading—and there have been many, the most recent last month—reconfirms all the reasons I love this book. I am delighted that I now have a copy on my Kindle as well. I’m also delighted that when I say I give this book my highest recommendation, you can follow up and find a copy at all the usual eBook sites. (And when you finish this one, there are three other excellent Seidel books newly available in digital format.)

~Janga

Guest Review - - Summer's End

Summer’s End

By Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Publisher: William Morrow

Release Date: May 3, 2011 (Reissue of May 1999 original)

Gwen Wells, a widowed mother of two adult children, and Hal Legend, widowed father of three adult children, meet at a community dinner. Superficially, they have nothing in common. Gwen’s husband was an admiral, and she has spent her life coping when her husband was at sea not only with her family but also with the problems and emergencies of the families of the sailors under her husband’s command. Hal is a music professor, an intellectual with a specialty in folk music. But almost immediately the two feel an affinity for one another, and soon they have fallen in love and plan to marry.

Plans for the families to meet at Gwen and Hal’s wedding fall through, but everyone agrees to spend June at the Legend lakeside camp in northern Minnesota. For the Legends, part of the charm of the place is its remote setting with no cell phone reception, no electricity, and no flush toilet. Their shared summers at the lake are central to how they define themselves as a family. They have established patterns for meals, traditions that control their recreation, and a vocabulary unique to their summer place. From the beginning, the presence of Gwen and her children changes the way things have always been done.

The changes are particularly upsetting to Phoebe, the oldest of the Legend children, who is still grieving for her mother. Phoebe sees her mother, herself, and her teenage daughter Ellie as a continuing line through which the summer traditions are passed, and she struggles with all the alterations that are disrupting the tradition. Ian, the only Legend son has a marriage waiting to unravel and an adopted daughter who has been turned by her indulgent mother into a self-centered brat lacking basic courtesy and human compassion.  Amy, the youngest of Hal’s children, is a figure skater and Olympic gold medalist whose wildly successful career does nothing to make her feel more comfortable with her family. Younger than Phoebe and Ian who were teenagers when she was still a small child and without the intellectual interests shared by the rest of the family, she has always thought of herself as “Amy the Afterthought.” Professionally she is smart and competent, but with her family, she is still the bumbling little sister. Phoebe’s husband and three younger children and Ian’s wife and two younger children round out the Legend family.

Holly, Gwen’s daughter is a successful attorney with a major New York firm who is leery of a place that requires her to function without a hot shower, a hair dryer, and a fax machine. Her brother Jack is a devoted son and brother, a problem solver with great construction skills, and a wonder at establishing new businesses which he grows bored with as soon as they become successful. He is also kind, intuitive, and practical. Accompanying Holly and Jack is Nick, their teenage cousin, troubled by a missing father, an ineffective mother, and a friend who committed suicide.

As the dynamics of the blended family play out with conflicts overt and covert, with misunderstandings and new understanding, with acts of kindness and at least one act of malice, Jack and Amy fall in love. From an almost instinctual understanding of one another to a growing attraction to open admissions of love, their relationship develops. Jack is convinced all along that his and Amy’s relationship will jeopardize the delicate balance between the two families. Amy is reluctant to agree, but when her sister and Jack’s mother are clearly upset by their romance, their reactions support Jack’s view. Amy comes to understand that Jack is right about their love for one another not changing their circumstances. She realizes that it is she who must change, and change she does, maturing, finding her place within the family, and discovering how she can have the life she wants.

Kathleen Gilles Seidel is one of my favorite writers. She creates characters whose behavior is always exactly what it should be in terms of the person she has revealed them to be. The family Gwen and Hal create through their marriage numbers fifteen, sixteen counting Nick who becomes very much a part of the family. Seidel brings them all to life--from Hal, a low key intellectual who believes his adult children are entitled to lives with his support but without his interference, to toddler Thomas, who doesn’t like his food cut too fine and giggles when his tummy is tickled.

The romance belongs to Amy and Jack and, to a lesser extent, Gwen and Hal. Gwen and Hal are good, decent people, who find unexpected happiness together. Their marriage is satisfying in ways that neither of their first marriages was, and yet Seidel shows us that both of them were happy in those first marriages; they loved John and Eleanor and grieved their loss. They are good parents. They worry about their children but recognize the days of parental fix-its have ended. Hal is a loving grandfather, and Gwen is delighted with the chance at that new role. Her scenes with baby Thomas were particularly endearing.

Amy and Jack’s relationship supplies the more conventional romance, conventional at least in their youth and in their journey to the HEA. Neither is conventional heroine/hero material. Amy is dedicated to her career. She loves the skating itself, but she also loves the disciplined world of a professional skater, the creation of the routines, the clothes, and the perks of fame and wealth. I found the latter quite refreshing. The changes in her are organic, and we understand her gradual awareness of how important it is to her to be not just her best as a skater but also her best as a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I loved that her love for Jack and the sex they enjoyed were reflected in a new physical awareness and greater sensuality in her skating routines.

Jack is a wonderful hero, all guy in his determination to fix things, whether the problem be a sauna that needs repairing or a young cousin who needs a friend. His love for his mother and sister and the baggage he carries because he thinks he disappointed his father are integral parts of who he is. He is a doer rather than a talker, and yet his words can be powerful and moving. He tells Amy as he leaves her, “Just remember—every time you put on your skates, every time you open a door and all sorts of cameras go off, just remember that you are loved.”

In addition to the romances, Seidel gives her readers a look at two marriages. The look at Ian’s marriage to Joyce is less intimate, but the reader sees enough to be aware of Joyce’s insecurities, enough to understand her choices even when finding them deplorable, and enough to hope Ian and his two young children find happiness. Because the reader has access to Phoebe’s thoughts, the view of her marriage is more revealing. It is a solid marriage between two people who know and respect one another, who care about one another’s needs, who are still stirred to passion for one another after more than fourteen years of marriage. Phoebe’s husband, Giles, with his quiet strength and concern for others is one of my favorite characters in the story.

World building is not a word that is used often in talking about contemporaries, but it is a skill at which Seidel excels. She creates a world—full, rich, and varied. Her fabric is not history or fantasy but rather reality as ordinary, and as extraordinary, as the reality the reader inhabits daily. I finish a Seidel book with a sigh of pleasure for the world I have visited for a few hours, and then I turn with fresh appreciation for the intricacies and revelations of my own world. If you require adventure and sizzle to love a book, <i>Summer’s End</i> is not a book for you. But if you appreciate characters so real you can imagine having lunch with them, a story that will engage your head and your heart, and prose pitch perfect in every syllable, I highly recommend this book--or any other book that carries the name Kathleen Gilles Seidel.

~Janga