Courting Shadows in reviewed on Entertainment Weekly online: "John Stannard, the narrator of Jem Poster's debut novel, Courting Shadows, is an insufferable snob. Hired to oversee repairs on a medieval church in a remote British village in the 19th century, the class-conscious Stannard treats his unrefined workers with arrogance. He's insensitive to the church's cleric and cruel to a seductive lass with whom he shared a flash of uncharacteristic bliss. It's risky placing such an unsympathetic, humorless character front and center. Poster keeps us engaged with prose that captures suffocating Victorian restraint, and a finale that doesn’t let the disagreeable prig off the hook." B - By Tim Purtell
Booklist takes a look at Jem Poster's mesmerizing new novel Courting Shadows, coming out in February 2008: "In a bleak English village in the late nineteenth century, John Stannard is a young architect chartered from the city to repair the parish church. Arrogant, self-righteous, and impervious to local sensitivities, Stannard narrates this claustrophobic story of modernity at odds with primitivism. His introduction to the villagers at Sunday service offers a brief glimpse of Ann Rosewell, a striking young woman who appears at odds with the sullen congregation around her. Discovering more about her through the nervous, well-meaning rector, Stannard pieces together a lofty ideal of the girl's background. A random meeting with her serves only to disappoint, and leering input from his team of construction workers further deters him, yet he remains curiously drawn to her. As their relationship tentatively progresses, his work at the church is marked with unsettling episodes that begin to wreak an effect on his mental and physical health, and the well-being of those around him. Written in lavishly beautiful prose, this is a consistently tense tale of rationality, self-delusion, and epidemic superstition."
Check out the starred PW review of Jem Poster's Courting Shadows, due out in ealry 2008.
"In Poster’s dazzling debut, set amid the Victorian gloom of 1881, snobbish John Stannard leads the restoration of a small,architecturally undistinguished church in a remote British village. It’s unglamorous work that the young architect thinks beneath him, what with having to disinter corpses, fend off enraged townsfolk and dole out 19th-century workers comp to injured laborers. Further complicating Stannard’s effort is the church’s curate, Mr. Banks, who seeks to preserve all of what Stannard aims to modernize and improve, no matter how rotten or broken. The debate between the two men escalates when, stripping plaster from a wall, one of Stannard’s employees uncovers a Doom Painting—a folk mural blending Christian and pagan influences dating from medieval times. At the same time, the buttoned-up Stannard begins to experience previously unknown passion, falling for the beautiful 19-year-old Ann Rosewell, an enigmatic local woman. The variously grotesque characters are spot-on, as is the static, lugubrious setting. Poster, who has worked as an archeologist, is formidable in his command of Victorian architecture and restoration, and uses his skills to construct an unlikely, subtext-ridden conflict—over the possibility of restoration to some original state of grace—that is wholly involving from start to finish. (Feb.)"
Courting Shadows in reviewed on Entertainment Weekly online: "John Stannard, the narrator of Jem Poster's debut novel, Courting Shadows, is an insufferable snob. Hired to oversee repairs on a medieval church in a remote British village in the 19th century, the class-conscious Stannard treats his unrefined workers with arrogance. He's insensitive to the church's cleric and cruel to a seductive lass with whom he shared a flash of uncharacteristic bliss. It's risky placing such an unsympathetic, humorless character front and center. Poster keeps us engaged with prose that captures suffocating Victorian restraint, and a finale that doesn’t let the disagreeable prig off the hook." B - By Tim Purtell
