Travels With My Lovers

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Summary: Morally ambiguous and disturbing but honest and provocative
Review: Dr. Laura Schlessinger would blisteringly attack the operatic violinist heroine of Erica Miner's autobiographical novel Travels With My Lovers, a kind of erotic and romantic Gulliver's Travels. Her opera conductor husband is a closet gay, and while traveling in Italy with her two young children Julian and Regina, she visits Florence, a.k.a Fiorenza or Firenze, and has a liberating affair with a young Florentine Romeo named Carlo. Every summer she leaves the children with their father for three weeks and has exotic voyages into the territory of amore and amour in France, Italy, and Switzerland, for a start. This reader thinks: Judge not, lest ye be judged. The heroine's marriage suffers a blow because of the husband's closet homosexuality-a subtle comment on our society's invasive tendency to control people's private loves.

Erica Miner's heroine strives to be a good mother, and this is reflected in the tolerant attitudes of the children during the heroine's five life stages: young married mother, new divorcée, mature mother, single mother yearning for a commitment, and free-spirited mother of a teenage daughter. The novel is an exercise in freedom and unexplored frontiers, immersing us in foreign lands and languages, reminding us, post-9/11, that life without discovery and emotional complexity is no life at all.

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Summary: Travels With my Lovers
Review: "Now it was time to explore my own needs for adventure, my own sources of happiness, my own sexuality - to write the opera of my life. And I was ready to do it with a vengeance." Thus the intimate, most private self-discovery begins in "Travels with My Lovers", by author Erica Miner. Former violinist turned poet, and screenwriter Erica Miner has already been awarded the 2003 Direct from the Author Book Award Grand Prize in fiction for this first book of hers. This book was inspired by the author's own experiences of discovery, when her husband leaves her for another man. She does this in such a deeply, personal way, the reader forget they're reading fiction.
This remarkable journey takes us through Florence Italy, to the chateaux of Paris, to the monastic cells of Tuscany. The vivid imagery of these places is portrayed so eloquently that they leap from the page with their breathtaking beauty. Each trip is wrought with incredible romance and exhilaration, that she leaves each time with a new profound sense of self.
Author Erica Miner takes us past a romantic tale, but into a deeply personal look at life, love, heartache, and emotions. She transposes the reader to see what she sees, feel what she feels, and learn what she learns. Her words flow like wine: hypnotic, and rich to your senses. Their poetic nature fills this book with such depth and passion. Not just a sexual passion, but a passion to feel every emotion completely. It's impossible to put this book down. I found myself drawn to the words, and felt compelled to read over them several times. To me, it's no wonder this book has already won an award. Never has a book overwhelmed me, like "Travels with My Lovers" did. I look forward to reading more by Erica Miner.

Rating:
Summary: A heady and exotic read
Review: Erica Miner has created a heady and exotic read, very rich. She engages the reader in the culture well. As I read I felt that I should be listening to classical music, sipping red wine, wearing silk pajamas and eating bon-bons and slipping the odd Italian or French phrase into my vocabulary. Miner does an excellent job of putting the reader into the setting.

"Travels" is a sensual armchair journey to places I can only read about and wonder.....

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Summary: A passionate missive about sex, love, &romance ¿ a must read
Review: European love in the summer time: it's as hot as a Florentine cobblestone in July. Erica Miner's Travels with My Lovers delves the reader into a treasure trove of emotional highs and lows as her protagonist experiences a new side to herself.

The novella starts off in Florence, Italy in the 1970's. Travel's protagonist is travelling through Italy alone with her two small children. Her orchestra conductor husband, Eric, has chosen to spend the summer in New York City. Emotional tumult lies ahead as she discovers her husband's secret. Sensing a break-up in their future, she throws caution to the wind and allows herself to be pursued by a gorgeous Italiano, Carlo, in his mid-twenties. Just a few years older than he, the protagonist experiences intense sexual love that breaks open her heart and awakens her sexual being at once.

The novella is neatly organized into five easily digestible stories, each packed with a new discovery on her emotional horizon. The reader finds herself wishing each of the protagonist's five loves would be fulfilled in a happy-ever-after ending. But that is hardly the point of the book. Miner shows with great alacrity the protagonist's struggles to unearth her very self through these romantic escapades.

The author interweaves music, architecture, emotion and physicality in a beautiful blend of scenes and moments that cannot last. The bittersweet realization that one's longings can only be fulfilled through one's own sense of self, not through the Other, is handled with genuine grace.

Miner orchestrates the various romantic duets between American woman and foreign man (Italian, French, Swiss - take your pick!) with an unmatchable musicality. At moments, the reader believes to be in an opera by Puccini, witness to the indelible impact of Italian architecture and passion.

Erica Miner's book makes the reader long for warm summer nights along the Seine or the Riviera, arm in arm with a lover, gazing at life's beauty and the romance that can explode like a shooting star and then be gone in the wink of an eye. I highly recommend her book for its authenticity, its honesty, and its remarkable benediction to the human spirit.

Christine Louise Hohlbaum, American author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff, lives near Munich, Germany, with her husband and two children. www.diaryofamother.com

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Summary: Vacation Romances?
Review: There is something magical about vacation romances that seem to encourage you to let go and revitalize your energy and senses.
Moreover, perhaps the conditions are ideal to create peak emotional moments as love.

First time author Erica Miner's novella, Travels With My Lovers, has effectively captured these moments with her titillating adventures of an American woman, who frees herself from the shackles of her prudish upbringing, and a failed marriage that has ended in divorce due to her discovering that her husband was gay.

Narrated in the first person, readers are given the opportunity to peek over the shoulders of the narrator and explore sexual freedoms through the eyes of woman, who finds herself drawn into several amorous encounters during her annual vacation jaunts.
The narrator mentions, the principal protagonist's objective was to set out and explore the landscapes of her origins and to discover a new facet of herself.
You may ask, how is it possible to fall in love on a vacation? Perhaps, the highs are higher on a vacation romance, where time is short.

As the story unfolds, we peer over the narrator's shoulder as we are swept in by the quickness of her romances, where she goes from meeting someone, liking them, falling in love and in no time having sex with them.
However, the author does not permit her story to disintegrate into a soap opera. Insights into art, culture, foreign travel, history, food, philosophy and sexual attitudes all form an integral part of the development of the characters and the narrative.

We meet the Italian, Carlo, the first of the narrator's lovers, and who is very much the catalyst of her sexual awakening and experimentation. Then there was the Frenchman, Gérard, "whose sensitive, artistic nature evoked sympathetic vibrations," and who had awakened in our narrator a sense of herself.
The handsome Swiss, Jean-Jacques proved to be quite a disappointment, and a lesson in the hazards of romantic desires.
A married Frenchman Pierre, whom the narrator would have liked to have an affair, however, something in her psyche prevented her from committing adultery.
Finally, we end with the Italian Gianni, who presents the opportunity of a committed relationship.

Miner has written an entertaining and at the same time thought provoking book. After reading about the narrator's various experiences, we have to ask ourselves, is it preferable to live in the moment and the hell with the consequences?

Remember, vacations do provide a sample of you and the other person at your romantic bests. What happens when the novelty wears off? How easy is it to move on?

The above review first appeared on the reviewer's own site.

Rating:
Summary: Refreshing , fast read
Review: This is an extremely good novel. I could not put it down.the charactors are likable and interesting.I am really looking forward to the sequal..

Rating:
Summary: A sensual and involving saga, adroitly presented
Review: Travels With My Lovers by Erica Miner is a sexual and transcendental novel. A New York woman who travels to Europe and experiences the depth and breadth of life and love. As a young wife and mother who uncovers a life-altering secret about her husband, to a gay divorcee with children to be concerned about, to a soulmate in a quest for a former love, and finally, returning to her home soil when her kids are grown, the heroine of this narrative experiences a broad range of emotion and maturity. Travels With My Lovers is a sensual and involving saga, adroitly presented and skillfully narrated.

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Summary: Your ticket to romance, humor and Europe
Review: Travels with my Lovers transported me back to wonderful trips I had made to Italy, France and elsewhere in Europe. Miner's descriptions are so vivid, I could hear the music, visualize the art and taste the regional cuisine. Most importantly, I enjoyed putting myself in her shoes as she described the romances with European men that were more than just travels in Europe - they were journeys of her own self-discovery, growth and insight. Throughout it all, Miner's wit and observations made me cheer for the risks she took, and laugh with recognition at what it means to be a single American career woman in today's world. I had planned to read just a chapter or two at a time, but literally did not want to put the book down. I read it all in one day and didn't want it to end.