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Breaking Faith |  | Author: Stuart Aken
Publisher: YouWriteOn.com
Category: Book
Buy New: £7.99 (8.29EUR)
as of 4/9/2010 04:45 IST details
New (6) Used (3) from £7.22 (7.49EUR)
Seller: Amazon.co.uk
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 505780
Media: Paperback
Pages: 348
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1849233144
EAN: 9781849233149
ASIN: 1849233144
Publication Date: December 8, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
Compelling reading December 2, 2009
D. Witham (North Lincolnshire)
The story of Faith's journey through life: From a naïve and deprived village girl to an awakening woman. The story is mainly set in Yorkshire during the blistering heat wave of 1976 and is a romantic thriller. The characters come to life and lead you through pity, despair, love and hate. I was more intrigued with each page and eager to reach its shock conclusion. A story well written and set in beautiful Yorkshire scenery that comes to life for the reader. Looking forward to reading Stuart Aken's next novel.
A fresh look at sexual mores with a stormy ending December 1, 2009
T. Hewtson LE ROUX
One of the great pleasures of reading indie authors is that they are often literary Luddites, exuberantly smashing the commercial frameworks imposed on their more industrially-produced cousins, replacing them with a more zestful, fresh, individual and - might I say - compelling approach to their work.
It is not that they do not recognise as well as anyone the existence of the rules and formulae drawn up to govern the structure, content and style of mainstream modern literature, it is just that they prefer to explore other creative options for the good of their, and our, souls. "Know what you should do then do as you like" was the moral guideline I was schooled in by my parents and it is the literary guideline of many indie authors too.
Let me declare straight off that Stuart Aken's pointedly joyous `Breaking Faith' is the output of such an independent and questing mind. However, if you like to slot books as automatically and systematically into standardised categories as the priapic photographer Leighton Longshaw likes to slot his .... no, no, I'll come back to that later .... then this novel may pose you something of a challenge.
At first I thought it was some form of hybrid of Stella Gibbons' `Cold Comfort Farm', of Emily Brontë's `Wuthering Heights', of the Elle McPherson film `Sirens', and of E.M. Forster's `A Room With A View' with its ringing closeted declaration that the only crime in love is for those who love each other to be forced apart, but halfway through the book I realised that it is something considerably more surprising - the unlikely revival of the Victorian high-moral literary melodrama. You might well quibble that the morals espoused by this work are not very Victorian, nor very moral, but I am sure that there was many a Victorian master of the house who retired to his study to indulge his taste for similarly stimulating reading material. It would definitely not be for the eyes of the women and the servants of the household though, and it would like as not come wrapped in deceptively bland packaging, which is how appropriately this book started out although it now sports a cover much closer to sex on legs. Indeed, if you want the briefest of summaries of the plot, that was it. Faith starts out in bland packaging and ends up as sex on legs.
To provide a more detailed resumé of the story, it revolves around the shamelessly libidinous Mr. Leighton Longshaw who enthusiastically and compulsively slots himself into the moist nether regions of his willing photographic models as plentiful opportunities arise. Then, for want of a Girl Friday, he hires the reputed village idiot, Faith, albeit one ready-furnished with a conversational vocabulary of around 100,000 words. Something, I cannot think what - call it male intuition - hints to him that there is more to this woman than meets the eye.
As in all the best moral works, the names of the characters say it all. Faith comes tarnished by the hell-fire religious bigotry of her father but, given a few determined applications of Silvo, is soon all burnished and wondrously bright. Her two sisters are called Hope and Charity. Hope, with heavy-handed (not to mention tasteless) irony is paralysed from the brain down as a result of a surgical misfortune although her abusive father hopes to revive her come what may. Charity is as charity does. She is supplied with seemingly inexhaustible resources and very few requirements for eligibility for hand-outs other than youthful masculine energy and good looks.
And the moral? I have a bit lost count of how many of the characters have spouted it now, so it is almost certainly that free sex is fun but that it has to be stirred through thoroughly with true love and steadfast, honest passion for it to be alchemised into a truly satisfying blend - not a bad moral really.
And not a bad book either. It will almost certainly contain enough pert nipples and lubricated crevices to please discerning customers - there is a passage where Leigh and Netta couple seven times in a night and I think we get all the balls and whistles on each and every one of them - and there is no debating that this is a huge page-turner, partly because it is well-written and partly because the characters are so appealingly fleshed-out in personality as well as in anatomy. Several reviewers both on the jacket and on Amazon state that this book is hard to put down and that was my experience too. At 343 dense large-format pages it is quite a weighty book but I read it effortlessly within two days. You will certainly race through the last few chapters as it makes an unexpected breakneck dash for the finishing line.
Whether this represents a realistic social depiction of an albeit niche 1970s North Country lifestyle is another matter. Maybe it was discoverable in the Yorkshire Dales but it never reached the East Yorkshire Wolds that I ever stumbled across, although I believe that it put in the odd appearance in Holderness from the 1950s onwards. However realism, by definition, is not what moral tales are all about. They seek to point the way towards the ideal, and if some of the dialogue sounds like it has been drafted and voted upon as manifesto composites at the annual conference of the Socially Liberated Party, so be it.
One word of advice - don't be tempted to present it to any Aunt Matildas for Christmas, unless you want to see them off. They would probably much prefer one of the original Victorian high-moral literary melodramas - `Eric or Little By Little' maybe where the reader continually discovers the headmaster in his study on his knees in prayer. In `Breaking Faith' he wouldn't be praying - his prayers would already be well on the way to being answered.
 Multi Level Read July 6, 2009
Yorkshire Reader (UK)
This is an ambiguous exploration of actions and consequences through characters who profess truth to each other while lying to themselves. Lost in the glamour of his glamour photography and the willing women he exploits and who exploit him, Leighton despises those who buy his product to satiate, or fuel, their lust. Faith believes herself untouched by the sexual rapacity around her because she interprets in an academic black and white, draping her frankness in the colours of naïve honesty, yet willing, at the last, to control as she was controlled.
Alternating first person viewpoint is difficult to accomplish, but Leighton's tone and photographer's eye for the natural curves of his human subjects is as artistic as that for the rugged Dales landscape that presses in, claustrophobic while seeming benign, towards Longhouse and its inhabitants.
Read for its depth, it will leave the reader considering afresh blinkered human frailties.
Breaking Faith January 31, 2009
Michelle Mccabe (Gateshead, North East England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I thought this was a really original story with an intriguing hero and an even more intriguing eponymous heroine. I also felt an intense dislike for some of the other characters meaning Stuart Aken's characterisations were really well done and the denouement tied all of the plots up to a surprising conclusion. Switching the first person narrative from one to the other and looking at the same events from both sets of eyes was a wonderful means of seeing the reasoning behind both of their actions. The story compelled me to read and read and read (a habit that, with an eight year old son, I confess, I have lost recently).
I would recommend it to anyone and look forward to reading Stuart's next novel!
Breaking Faith January 17, 2009
Karen Wolfe (east Yorkshire, England)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is the story of a triumphant human spirit. Heroine Faith's rite of passage from horrific neglect and abuse to fulfilment and true love is an inspiring one. Stuart Aken's novel, set in the summer of 1976, simmers with heat, decadence and sexuality,all of which Faith transcends to become her own woman. I loved the Yorkshire Dales setting, and I was rooting for Faith all the way to her well-deserved happy ending. More power to Stuart's pen!!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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