.📚 Review Summary: The Refused by Ron Singerton For Deep Ledger, October 15 Issue

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Set against the backdrop of Paris in the 1860s and 1870s, The Refused follows Jack Volant, a Union cavalryman and aspiring artist who flees the trauma of the American Civil War to pursue his creative vision in Europe. There, he meets Charlotte Stuart, a sculptress with ties to Empress Eugénie, and her half-brother Jerome, who becomes entangled in revolutionary politics.

The novel’s title refers to “Les Refusés”, the avant-garde artists rejected by the French establishment—Monet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and others—who forged their own path outside the sanctioned salons. Singerton’s narrative explores the tension between creation and destruction, progress and regression, and the redemptive power of art in times of upheaval.

Critics have praised the book’s historical depth and emotional resonance. John Danielski, author of the Pennywhistle novels, calls it:

“Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written… a page-turner that will keep you reading long into the night.”

The novel has also been featured in Idyllwild Town Crier and Chantireviews, where reviewers highlight Singerton’s ability to blend factual history with compelling fiction, drawing on his background as a history and art educator.

While reader reviews remain limited, The Refused stands as a thoughtful meditation on exile, artistic resistance, and the search for meaning amid chaos—making it a natural companion to Deep Ledger’s own explorations of origin, silence, and the geometry of doubt.

• Goodreads

🎨 The Refused and the Forgotten: A Comparative Meditation

by Callum Veritas

Deep Ledger, October 15 Issue

Paris, 1870. A sculptress chips away at marble while revolution simmers in the streets. A Union cavalryman paints to forget the war. The salons reject the Impressionists. The empire cracks. And in the shadows of all this, The Refused unfolds—not just as a novel, but as a mirror.

It mirrors Deep Ledger’s own obsessions: origin, exile, creation under duress.

In Tectractys, we watched an architect lose his axis. In The Refused, we watch artists lose their audience. Both are stories of dislocation—one spatial, one cultural. Both ask: What happens when the world refuses to see what you’ve made?

🧭 The Bermuda Triangle of Taste

The Paris of The Refused is a Bermuda Triangle of aesthetics. The academy demands realism. The public demands spectacle. The avant-garde demands freedom. And somewhere in that vortex, truth disappears.

This echoes our own digital age, where creators are pulled between algorithms, patrons, and platforms. Where the origin point of meaning is lost in the fog of monetization.

🏛️ The Draughtsman vs. The Painter

Ramsey’s architect builds without grounding. Singerton’s painter creates to escape. One forgets where he is. The other refuses where he came from. Both are haunted by the weight of knowing—of having seen too much, felt too deeply, and still needing to make something.

The sculptress in The Refused becomes a kind of oracle. She shapes what others fear. She carves what cannot be spoken. She is the draughtsman who remembers the origin point—and suffers for it.

📡 The Frequency of Silence

In both stories, silence is not absence. It’s resistance. The refusal to conform. The refusal to be understood. The refusal to be reduced.

And yet, the silence speaks. It speaks through brushstrokes, through broken gridlines, through journal entries written in the margins of collapse.