Book Review

Basic Details:

Book Title: A Thing With Feathers

Subtitle:

Author: J. John Nordstrom

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Part of a series?

Order in series:

Best read after earlier books in series?

Available: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61209601-a-thing-with-feathers

Overall score:

I scored this book 5/5

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Short Summary of the book:

As a disillusioned solicitor and struggling writer, Jonah starts work in a law library. He soon becomes the victim of harassment and targeting by a vindictive lesbian lawyer who hates everything male. She puts pressure on Jonah to make him leave and even tries to falsely accuse him of workplace sexual harassment of his co-worker to get rid of him. Will he survive and will love be kind?

What I liked about the book:

The love for everything literary and the willingness to stand up for what is right by the main character.

What I didn’t like about the book:

There was nothing to dislike about the book except for the baddies.

My favourite bits in the book:

I enjoyed the entire book.

My least favourite bits in the book:

There were none.

Any further books in the series? Any more planned by this author?

This is the first book I’ve read by this author.

What books could this be compared to and why?

The book is in the genre of contemporary romance.

Recommendation:

In summary, I would recommend this book to the following readers:

Children No

Young Adult Maybe

Adult Yes

If you like contemporary romance, this book may be the book for you

Book Description by Author:

Drawing on his own legal background and personal experience, his debut novel A Thing with Feathers tells the tale of two troubled lawyers who find redemption in soulmate love, after they meet, quite unexpectedly, as co-workers in a county law library, run by Superintendent Queen Bee and Director Mimi Streeter. Underlying the events in the novel is the fictive, and quintessentially romantic, dream of a modern-day Edgar Allan Poe meeting a modern-day Emily Dickinson in the 21st century, thus correcting what Fate never saw fit to do in the 19th century before Poe dies tragically at the age of 40 on October 7, 1849. Based on a true story, this novel is fictional autobiography.

Jonah, a forty-year-old lawyer and wannabe writer, disgusted with the nonstop corruption in the legal profession in Washington, D.C., quits the practice of law, loses his girlfriend, and becomes suicidal. Haunted by dreams and visions of Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson dancing together, he comes to believe Fate has a plan for him, however. As finances get desperate, he takes a low-paid job as a reference librarian in a law library. But there is one catch: he must pretend to be gay, as the twin tyrants of County Bar, Superintendent Crawford and Law Librarian Mimi Streeter, hire only submissive gay men and women financially on the edge, to control them. Despite moral reservations, he agrees to attempt the ruse, but when the tyrants realize they have been deceived, they respond in kind to protect their criminal fiefdom.

Streeter and Crawford hire, on the sly, twenty-seven-year-old Julia, a much younger woman lawyer in library science school, as Jonah’s superior, with the expectation he'll will quit in FU resentment. The plan backfires when romance ensues as the lovers tentatively test the theory that the one is a soulmate for the other, that Poe and Dickinson might have found one another, albeit in the 21st century. But Crawford and Streeter are not done with them yet... So begins the dark chess game, in which Jonah and Julia must fight to protect that which is most beautiful and dear to them, or be destroyed in the process.

About the Author:

J. John Nordstrom (“Joe”) aka Joseph John Jablonski, Jr., J.D., PhD, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and raised in the small suburb town of Millbury, by mother Sandra and his late father Joe Sr. He is a poet, novelist, lawyer, sociologist, and political scientist. His poetry and fiction nom de plume, J. John Nordstrom, was taken in honor of great-grandmother Gerda E. Nordstrom and grandmother, Elna E. (Nordstrom) Anderson, as well as his mother Sandra Lenore (Anderson) Jablonski, who have all, in their own ways, majorly encouraged his literary endeavors. His great grandmother gave him a now-treasured copy of Aesop’s Fables for a seventh birthday. The fable of the tortoise and the hare was her favorite, as it is his.

His poetry stresses intuition over reason and is heavenly influenced by the Romantic tradition in both America and Britain. It explores natural, emotional, personal and artistic themes, for example, lost love, the mystery of soulmate love, death, beauty, wisdom, the human being’s relationship to nature, the mystery of the Muse, and life’s existential mystery.

Nordstrom draws from academic, literary, professional, and personal experiences over his lifetime and weaves them all into a novel called A Thing With Feathers. Nordstrom has remained a bachelor and has several other novels in the works.