At eighteen, Aurora Browne had already birthed three children for three different families on behalf of the Candidacy program. Will she try to escape? Buy your copy! Amazon Amazon.co.uk Froogle Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com SynergEbooks At eighteen, Aurora Browne had already birthed three children for three different families on behalf of the Candidacy program. The Candidacy serves to assist wealthy women produce children, in a cold desolate world where few women can produce healthy children on their own. The Candidacy uses slave, girls really, to populate the abused earth.Aurora Browne will learn more than she ever dreamed in as she begins her latest assignment as a Candidate for the Williams. With an introduction to Bain, the Williams's butler, she is told of another world that exists outside the stone walls of the Candidacy with its rules of confinement and enslavement. A world free of labels, people are allowed to marry whomever they choose and they are free. To add to the mounting challenge of continuing serving the Candidacy, Browne realizes that she's fallen in love with Bain. Love, a forbidden act for Candidates, their bodies belonging solely to the Candidacy, Browne must try to cope with her feelings for Bain. It is partially because of this love that Browne starts contemplating escaping the Candidacy program. The last attempt almost cost her life, and Browne had the scars to prove it. Will her newfound knowledge of a freedom and love result in her death or in her rebirth as a free Candidate?    Excerpt Aurora Browne took up little space on the soiled couch as she waited in silence. She had listened in frozen disbelief as her mother had placed the call, and then watched as the tattered old gym bag was packed with her few belongings. The ragged and drafty cabin that she had called home since her birth was old and drafty; the chill air of the day raised goose bumps along her arms. Her mother paced between the broken front window and the crooked door, muttering unintelligibly under her breath. Her eyes shifted between the window and Aurora. Her dreadlocks, far past need of a wash, hung in disarray around her head, obscuring the older woman's face from a clear view. She muttered to herself unintelligibly. The soft 'shhhhuuuuh' of the air pillow beneath a Unit broke the eerie silence of the day. Aurora's mother snatched open the door before the Pale Soldier even had an opportunity to disembark. The Unit was dark gray and cumbersome, a boxy contraption that looked like a cage with walls instead of bars. A narrow ramp slowly extended from the operator side of the Unit as the soldier walked across the broken concrete to the shack. "We're here for the Candidate."

Review of Browne Candidate by Marge Robbins
Simegen Reviews (http://www.simegen.com/reviews/fantasy/reviews/browne.html)Browne Candidate reviewed by Marge Robbins Rating: Five Stars
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Browne Candidate by Nicole Givens Kurtz
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Crystal Dreams Publishing
Publishing Format: PDF, CD, trade paperback, HTML, DOC
Author's Web site:http://www.mochamemoirs.com/NGivens.htm
Author's E-mail:ngkurtz@lycos.com

Browne Candidate is well written imaginative tale set in a future that could very well be our own. The story opens sometime after the start of the new millennium when the United World Council has all but taken over control of the world and made it vastly different from life, as we know it now. Many women, abandoning their feminity in exchange for the power and dominance of the main of the species, also lost their ability be bear children. Thus the stage was set for the Candidate system.

Women such as Browne, an African-American whose mother had sold her as a child to the Havistina temple, were more or less slaves, destined only to bear children for these infertile but powerful women. Browne had already born 3 children when she was placed in the Williams household to bear yet another child that would not be hers.

The Williams had a butler, also of African descent, named Bain. He and Browne were naturally drawn into an ever-deepening relationship that in the end drove them to abandon their life of servitude in search of freedom and true love.

Browne Candidate is a very well written, downright chilling tale of a future that might one day be ours. I recommend it highly.

Copyright © 2001 Marge Robbins All Rights Reserved.

Review of Browne Candidate by Irene Marshall
Escape to Romance (http://www.escapetoromance.com/reviews/kurtz-browne.html)
BROWNE CANDIDATE
Nicole Kurtz
Crystal Dreams Publications, 2001
Ratings: 4 Rosebuds, Sensuality Rating: Tangy
$15.00 Paperback
ISBN: 1-59146-025-5

Aurora Browne, age 18, had been sold by her mother, when she was only 10 years old, to become a candidate. In the last 8 years, she has escaped and been captured 7 times, and has borne 3 children to three different couples. In a time when few women are able to reproduce, candidates are closely guarded. Escape or attempted escape is severely punished. Known for the last 8 years merely as Browne, Aurora bears the scars as mute testimony of her activities.
Strictly indoctrinated with propaganda, Browne knows nothing of love or making love. Even kissing is completely unknown to her, until she goes to the Williams, hopefully to produce a 4th child, and meets Bain.

Bain had sold himself into a life of servitude, as a domestic servant, as a mere boy, in an attempt to survive. Now he's become a "surrogate" to Mrs. Williams. A man to replace her husband in bed, whenever she desires. He has accepted his life as is, till he meets and falls in love with Browne. His only living relative is his older brother, Ren, who is a high ranking officer in the resistance, down on a contaminated earth.

When Bain decides to escape back to earth and to take Browne with him, he relies on Ren for assistance. Since Ren has another mission scheduled in the area, he decides to combine the two. Bain manages to escape, alone, then returns for Browne. Their escape, combined with Ren's other mission, leads them all into enough danger and adventure to last a lifetime.

"Shades of A HANDMAIDEN'S TALE, Robin, I think we've got a real winner, here." While this book begins much like the afore mentioned book, it quickly surpasses THE TALE. Becoming much more exciting and interesting. The ending much happier. There are many opportunities for further books in a series, if the author so desires. Personally, I'd love to learn more about Angel and Ren.

Previously unheard of by this reader, Ms. Kurtz has a talent for story telling and for engulfing the reader into the story. I couldn't put this one down and read till after 2:30 am this morning. I just had to see what happened next. I certainly hope this author continues to share her gift with the rest of us.

-- Irene Marshal

Review of Browne Candidate by Jean Goldstrom
Ebookfanfare (http://www.ebookfanfare.com/kurtz.html)
Browne Candidate
by Nicole Kurtz


Aurora Browne was sold, by her mother, at the age of ten, to be a Candidate in the United World Council's program to help childless women - wealthy childless women - who wanted babies.
The Candidates came from the poor, the minorities, any group whose parents were so poor they would sell their girl children. The iron-bound government portrayed this action as a public service; it was a polite name for slavery.

Eight years later, Aurora had borne three children to three different families. She had escaped several times, and been severely beaten as punishment. She was punished even more severely for her attack on a "Mother," the name for those women who paid to have a Candidate engage in sex with their husband to produce a baby. The "Mothers" usually hated the Candidates, who could do what they could not do - produce a baby - and treated them with contemptuous cruelty. But since the Candidates were enslaved to the government program, there was no escape for them. They even had to wear a "mask" or face covering to further submerge their individuality at almost all times.

Candidate Browne was sent to a new assignment in New England Tre, an island dwelling place floating 200 miles above the ecologically-ruined earth. The weather was cold and windy. But Candidate Browne didn't expect anything else. Her new employers, the Williamses, were extremely rich but Browne didn't enjoy much of their bounty.

When she entered their luxurious house, Mrs. Williams sat her down and told her, "I've heard stories about you candidates. You're nothing but sluts that steal husbands and wreck homes. Mr. Williams is my husband." Mrs. Williams rose partially from her seat, closing the distance between them. Within inches of her face, Browne could smell the now identifiable and sickening mix of peppermint and alcohol on her breath. The mask hid her grimace. "If you're not in your room, do not take off your mask or whatever you call it. If I catch you without it or see any indication you're making moves on my husband, I'll have you severely punished."

Why anyone would want Mr. Williams was beyond Browne. The pudgy, whiny man was enough to turn any woman off sex completely. And to make things worse, the standard method of "coupling" was for the "Mother" to hold the hand of the "Candidate," while the "Father" did his part - so the two women would be "One," as Browne had been told countless times during her training. Her mental survival occurred only because she had found ways of being elsewhere, in her mind, during this distasteful experience.

The Williamses, despite their luxurious mansion, housed Browne in an attic room that was like a cell, and she was expected to help with housework when she wasn't having those dreaded "couplings" with Mr. Williams - while Mrs. Williams glared at her.

But things got a little brighter as Browne looked out the tiny window of her cell-like room.

The window was nothing more than a sliver of glass that looked out over the Williams' backyard...The blue grass stood high, almost eclipsing a young man who, despite the chilly afternoon, labored on. He was tugging out weeds or plotting more flowers ...The young man's long sleeved shirt showed sweat stains where his sweat had saturated the thin material. Browne could make out his sculptured muscles as they rippled in work and dedication.

"Who are you?" she whispered to the air. "This assignment may not be too bad after all."

Browne learned that his name was Bain, and he was butler, gardener and cook - and also Mrs. Williams's secret boyfriend. As he explained to Browne when they got to know each other better, he was in very much the same situation as she was. He had no choice about Mrs. Williams' advances, any more than Browne did about Mr. Williams.

But what they had a choice about was each other, and love blossomed for both of them in this unloving environment. Bain told Browne about another world, where people had sex because of love, not because they were forced to. He told her about the surface of the planet where people lived who did not have Candidates or any other slave-like underclass. This was hard for Browne to believe, but it was equally hard to believe that Bain loved her. Yet he told her, and showed her, and she began to believe, joyfully.

Then he disappeared. Mrs. Williams was mad with rage and accused Browne of doing something to drive him away. Snarling threats of punishments to come, she stamped off to her workplace. Browne did not care about Mrs. Williams' threats. They were nothing compared to the pain she felt as she concluded Bain didn't really love her. He had abandoned her without a word.

But of course Bain hadn't abandoned Browne. Like her, he was working on an escape plan. And unlike Browne, he had friends in the Resistance who could make it happen.

This novel moves on to take the reader into breath-holding suspense, as Browne, Bain and other suffering, enslaved people grimly and desperately plot a path toward freedom. While enduring and embracing the adventures undergone by these freedom-seekers - adventures depicted with almost painful clarity by Author Kurtz - no reader could fail to find a new, inner core of thankfulness for the freedoms that are so available to so many today, and to renew a determination to never lose those precious freedoms.