I found this story by clickingclickingclicking through the various posted responses to our post about M/M romance and Fan Fiction. Heidi gives good blog and then I was intrigued, as I always am with prison stories, by the short she wrote with Violetta Vane. This story is fabulous, I’m so thrilled I found it, and I can’t wait for more from this pair of authors.

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This summary doesn’t do much to explain how GOOD this story is. The writing is brilliant, gripping. The characters are engrossing. The story’s told entirely from Troy’s deep third-person perspective, but Daniel’s still a great presence.

Two weirdnesses:

1. If you buy the book direct from Storm Moon Press, it’ll come with an outtake, a blowjob scene from the middle of the book. Reading this scene after reading the story, I can’t understand why it was taken out. It’s integral to the establishment of the characters of both Troy and Daniel and to their relationship dynamic. It makes the betrayal later in the book more devastating, it makes the ending more magical. This is a perfect example of how erotic scenes, when done right, can NOT just be cut out without damaging the rest of the story.

2. The ending is a HFN/HEA, but only through a measure of magical realism that is hinted at, but by no means an integral part of the rest of the book. This book is firmly contemporary-set, but the only way these men are getting their HEA is through paranormal mumbo-jumbo, so it’s necessary to the book, worked in well, but a little unusual. My literary self both loved the implications of the way the ending was done, but had also enjoyed the story and characters so much that I would have been content with a non-HEA ending. And I never ever ever say that.

Grade: B+

P.S. Cover is horrible, but I love that Troy is actually depicted as Middle Eastern, as he is in the book.

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: A Private Gentleman by Heidi Cullinan
2. JOINT REVIEW: Double Blind by Heidi Cullinan
3. REVIEW: Dance With Me by Heidi Cullinan

This is a dystopian story set in the near past (1960) in New York. A new type of genetically engineered food, Manna, has ended starvation by providing basic nutrition to people all over the world. But something has gone wrong, leading to riots in Manhattan and implicating the company that makes the food. A handful of people who were attending the company’s job fair join forces to stay alive and to try to figure out what is going on. This is an m/m/m romance, which I don’t usually read, but Price makes it work for me. The three protagonists are all different from each other, all interesting, the polyamorous relationship makes sense in terms of their personalities and desires, and the sex scenes further the relationships nicely. As usual, the setting is excellently portrayed and the supporting characters are as well drawn as the leads. As a student of collective violence, I found the riot scenes gripping and authentic. The book began as a serialized novel whose course was determined by reader voting. I think this makes the storyline a little choppier, but it was fun to read about the way Price responded to the reader choices. I’m definitely picking up her latest (unrelated) serialized-novel-turned-book, Magic Mansion. Grade: B+. Recommended.

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Moving In Rhythm by Dev Bentham

This is a debut contemporary m/m novel that has received quite a few favorable reviews. I wish it had worked better for me. The main protagonist is a math professor with acute social anxiety; his condition is bad enough that he teaches online courses rather than being in the classroom. It also means that he is unable to sustain any long-term relationship and settles for quickie sex that makes him feel bad; his closest and most rewarding relationship is with his dog. When he goes to stay with his pregnant sister-in-law while his brother is deployed overseas, he meets a dance instructor to whom he is instantly attracted. It’s a leisurely story, as much about the narrator’s journey as about the romance. The dance instructor is unbelievably patient and sensitive and pretty much perfect, and we never really get to see what they are attracted to in each other. Given the level of social anxiety described, I found it hard to believe that falling in love and coming out of the closet was enough to make it manageable. The writing is quite competent, but the mood shifts (from melancholy to sunny to erotic, explicit sex) are sometimes quite jarring. Grade: C

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Harm Reduction by Heidi Belleau and Violetta Vane

This is a short story, almost a vignette. It alternates between 2012 and 1992 Manhattan. In the present day, Julio tries to keep his foster son on the straight and narrow. In the past, he negotiates a relationship with a troubled youth named Linley, trying to reach out to him, keep his own attraction in check, and convince Linley that Julio’s rejection of Linley’s advances isn’t a rejection of Linley. Linley disappears, and Julio is unable to find him or forget him. The sense of time and place in this short story is amazingly authentic, and the writing is very good. I badly wanted the story to be longer, because I didn’t want to let these characters go. No stereotypes, no trope abuse, just a moving, compelling slice of life. The ending gives me hope that just maybe, there will be more to come. Go read it and come back and tell me what you think, because it’s FREE. Grade: A-. Recommended.

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The Rebuilding Year by Kaje Harper

This m/m romance covers a year in the life of two initially straight men who meet and find they are kindred spirits, go Gay4U, start a relationship, fall in love, co-parent the children of one of them, and end up in an HEA. It’s smoothly written and the scenes with the teenage children are well done. The rest was much less effective. Both the men start out unhappy and/or frustrated in their lives, and to believe that they would quickly and unproblematically fall in lust and then love required a huge suspension of disbelief on my part. The ex-wife is mostly evil, until near the end, and there is an evil new husband who seems to exist primarily to make the ex-wife look better. There is also a suspense storyline that comes and goes until the end, when it sails completely over the believability horizon. This was an exercise in frustration for me, because the writing and the family-drama part of the plot kept me reading but I kept having “oh no you didn’t” moments about almost everything else. After two books and similar reactions to both, I’m pretty sure this author is not for me. Grade: C.

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First You Fall by Scott Sherman

This is a gay mystery with a romantic subplot, but it is in no way a genre m/m romance. For one thing, our narrator is a gay prostitute and the reader is shown that he is quite happy in his job. For another, the romantic storyline is up and down, with no HEA in sight (this is the first of a series, so I’m assuming the romantic arc spans the novels). But the author’s voice is a lot of fun, it is impossible to dislike Kevin Conner, and his relationship with his mother is the gay version of many a white male New York writer’s story. Yes, she’s a stereotype, but she’s also a lot more than that. Sherman does an excellent job with her, and he briefly but skilfully captures the mood of a long-married couple in late middle age. The tone is light but not superficial, the mystery is interesting, although it takes a few too many turns toward the end, and the supporting characters are deftly drawn. I grew a little tired of the voice toward the end of the novel, so I’ll probably take a break before the next installment. But I’ll definitely read it. Grade: B-.

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3. What Janine is Reading in February and March 2012

I picked up your book because of a recommendation by someone whose taste I trust and because I liked the excerpt. The story was cute, but the flaws outweighed the cuteness for me.

This is a book about Being a Gay Athlete. This was NOT a romance. Oh, it had a love story in it and the love story had an HEA, but that HEA was never threatened. There was no barrier, no conflict, no tension integral TO the love story. The barrier/conflict/tension was all located in the Being a Gay Athlete story.

First up: I know nothing about baseball. Nothing. I actively dislike baseball, in fact. So I mostly skimmed details about the games. I’ve invited Sunita to comment on those aspects of the story in particular (but also on whatever else she wants to say).

The story is thus: Matt Blanco is a Hall-of-Fame worthy first baseman with the Brooklyn Eagles in his fourteenth season. His knee hurts, a lot. And he’s very very closeted. Ignacio Rodriguez is the Hot New Thing who has just been traded to the Eagles as their new third baseman. Matt might be fifteen years older than Iggy, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t appreciate precisely how hot Iggy actually is. There’s a little bit of lust for a chapter, then they both figure out the other’s gay in chapter 2. Which seemed a bit quick to me. Then they quickly get together.

The book takes place over four years and includes Matt’s coming out post-retirement and Iggy’s while still playing. Like Sunita (see below), I thought both of those were well done (except in that Matt wrote a book and the day before the book released in stores was when he came out for the first time. I just don’t believe that the secret would have been kept to that point). I like that the book doesn’t try to schmoosh everything into one season. I like that a lot.

However, I was frustrated by many things in this book. The “gee, shucks, little ole me?” stuff from both men got old pretty quickly. Both of them have obscene amounts of money and obscene endorsement contracts, and they just “want to play ball”:

Iggy rubbed his head. “This was easier when the hardest decision I had to make was whether or not I’d pose holding a bat in my baseball card photo.”

“I know, but these are all excellent opportunities. You’ll gain more visibility with fans, which puts more of those fans in the stadium, which gets you more favorable treatment from the Eagles front office. Everything is linked.”

“With money.”

Chris scoffed. “Don’t be like that. It’s part of the game, Ig. You signed your name on that contract knowing that.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m really grateful for all this. It’s just completely overwhelming.” Although, now that he’d said it, he wasn’t sure “grateful” was really the right word. He supposed he was happy enough that people wanted to give him money. And really, if having too much money was his only problem, he was happy to take it.

“You’re kind of a sex symbol, you know,” Chris said. “You could be cultivating your female fans.”

Iggy sighed. “Is it a cliché to say I just want to play baseball?”

Yes, in fact, it really really is. And just seemed utterly disingenuous to me, on the writer’s part, not on Iggy’s. The character has to be sympathetic, so god forbid he actually be money-aware. Just easier to make his aw-shucks-y instead.

The telling, not showing was most frustrating for me, though. At one point, Matt’s knee gives out on him during sex. The next day, he’s thinking about it:

 Matt still regretted having to put the brakes on their session the night before, but it couldn’t have been helped. He was embarrassed, too, that Iggy now knew about the knee. He hadn’t wanted Iggy to know, hadn’t wanted to lose face in front of him. He’d wanted to be a whole man for Iggy, a strong man. He wanted to live up to the image Iggy had worshipped for years. But now Iggy had seen his weakness. [ . . . ] Matt dug his sneakers out of his locker and eavesdropped on the conversations around him. A few more players trickled in and roamed around, some idly talking about plans for the evening. Matt mostly wanted to go home and ice his knee. And, he found, he wanted Iggy to come with him. Not even for sex—Matt didn’t think he could make his knee work well enough for that anyway—but just to hang out and talk with. The cat was really out of the bag now. It was kind of a relief not to have to pretend with Iggy that everything was hunky-dory.

Really? This could have been…so much better done. This was rarely hinted at in the lead-up to the scene, and it could have been a site for serious tension between Iggy and Matt until Iggy assured Matt that of course he cared that Matt was injured, but only in so far as he wanted to be able to help and support him…or something similar. Instead, it’s a throwaway couple of paragraphs and then ignored.

And then there’s the fact that the whole thing was about Being a Gay Athlete. EVERYTHING had to do with this. Every scene, every tension, every decision, every discussion, every plot point, almost every sex scene, it seemed. It got tiring and a bit boring. But if readers like that sort of this, then this is the book for them.

If I were to compare this book to anything, it’d be Amy Lane’s The Locker Room (basketball, not baseball), but I think that book did a much better job of making the tension of being closeted into something that almost tears the heroes apart. This book tries to, but doesn’t quite get there.

One thing I will say, boy, you can write great sex scenes. The writing soared during the sex:

Iggy dug his fingers into Matt’s back. Matt thrust his hips forward, and their cocks rubbed together. God. God. Goose bumps broke out everywhere, and Matt groaned, his heart rate and anticipation mounting. He knew sweet release would come disastrously fast, but he didn’t care much. This was so damn good, and Iggy seemed to be right there with him, grunting and biting now.

Except for the unnecessary “sweet” here, I loved this scene. Most of the sex was very well done.

Overall, this book could have been so much better. The characters themselves were great. I really enjoyed watching them have dates together, to be honest, when they were just talking. But the book as a whole never really gelled for me, mainly because I could see the potential there and was frustrated with what was should have been there, rather than with what existed.

Grade: C

Sunita: This book is a great example of how two readers can see entirely different things in a story. My grade is not that different from Sarah’s, but for very different reasons, and I would recommend this book for certain readers.

First, the baseball. I know the author is a big baseball fan (she talks about it in the front matter of this book, among other places), and so I was looking forward to a romance that got the sports right. In some parts she succeeds, but in others, not so much. The camaraderie of professional athletes is really well done. I enjoyed the locker room scenes with the other members of the team, and a later scene in the hospital was just terrific, in part because the author took it in a totally different direction than I expected. But I had two gripes about other aspects, as well as a third I share with Sarah. The shared gripe is that their salaries are barely mentioned. These dudes are really rich. We all know what star athletes get paid, and even the MLB minimum is nothing to sneeze at. So can we please not pretend that they’re anything other than totally loaded? Make it something Iggy is getting used to, but don’t treat it as unimportant.

My big complaint is that the protagonists don’t seem to concentrate very much when they’re in a game, or in the late season and playoffs. They wind up in the ALCS, but they’re thinking about their romance. When they walk up to the plate, they’re thinking about each other or something related. When they’re in the field, they’re making eyes at each other. Really? Once in a while, okay. But it happens over and over again. It really detracted from the verisimilitude of some of the scenes. Pro athletes spend their entire lives preparing to get to the top. That takes a very high level of focus and compartmentalization (for most of them).

My small complaint is that the strategy within the games, which is sometimes important for the plot, sometimes doesn’t make sense. When Matt hurts his knee, it’s when he breaks from third to home. On an infield popup with one out. That kind of boneheaded running play would get you chewed out in Little League, let alone MLB. And there are other descriptions of play that had me shaking my head. It’s tough to satisfy both baseball aficionados and those who don’t care, and mostly the author does a good job. Perhaps because of that, the little things stood out.

OK, the romance. Unlike Sarah, I definitely thought this was a genre romance. Maybe it wasn’t executed as well as it could have been, but I saw both internal and external conflicts. The problems of being a gay athlete are analogous to external conflicts in historical romances, e.g., class, race, religion, and another similarity is the way in which external issues create internal conflicts to be resolved.

One of the reasons sports settings work so well in m/m is that the closet is a requirement, not an option, in most (male) professional team sports. The fear of being discovered, the fear of your teammates turning on you, all that is very real and ever-present. And I thought the age difference and the fact that they were at opposite ends of their careers made for an interesting internal conflict, giving it a Star Is Born quality. The internal conflict wasn’t as well developed as it could have been, and I would have liked to see more of Matt’s post-baseball issues and how they affected the couple. I did think the two big coming-out scenes were really well done. I’ve read two earlier books by this author, I felt these scenes were far better integrated here.

Matt and Iggy were thoroughly appealing characters, which again is a feature of this author’s books (I have liked every one of her main characters). They could have been a little less loveable, to be honest. And a couple of the supporting characters verged on stereotypes (please, authors, middle-aged mothers do not have to be From Hell or From Heaven).

I can see why so many readers loved this book. Once I got over my baseball-related niggles and there were more interactions with the other baseball team members, I quite enjoyed the story.

Grade: B-

~SarahF

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3. REVIEW: Simply Insatiable by Kate Pearce

Dear Ms. Allen,

This review is long overdue. I loved this book when I read it last year, so much that I put it on my Best of 2011 list. But I didn’t get the review written in proper time, and then the Dreamspinner Press debacle happened and Sarah and I stopped reviewing DSP’s books. Your review became collateral damage of that decision. Then you retrieved your rights from DSP, and I swore to myself that I would review it as soon as it was available. You’ve self-published it (at an attractive price, no less), so here we go!

Jonah Woolner is a bank clerk in New York City. He is a very good bank clerk, and when his superior retires he hopes to be promoted to replace him. But instead, the bank owner names an outsider, Reid Hylliard to the position. Jonah is devastated; Reid is charming, handsome, and charismatic, and he soon wins over everyone but Jonah. But Jonah’s antipathy is not just sour grapes. He genuinely fears that Reid’s policies will undermine the bank’s business and undo all the good work Jonah has achieved. Reid sees Jonah’s animosity clearly but refuses to accept it. He works to win Jonah’s friendship and then, slowly, more than that. But just as Jonah succumbs to his attraction to Reid and hesitantly begins to believe in an emotionally satisfying life, their fortunes and that of the bank are jeopardized by a bank heist that places them in mortal danger. And worse, it may or may not involve Reid.

One of the aspects of your novels and short stories that I enjoy so much is your ability to create not just a sense of place, but the fullness of the historical moment in which you are writing. As you did in Whistling in the Dark and If It Ain’t Love, you paint a compelling, rich picture of life in New York City, this time in the late 19th Century. Jonah commutes to the bank by a combination of walking and streetcar, and we make that journey with him. The bank comes to life through your words, as do the people who work there. Jonah’s boarding house is full of the kinds of characters that populated Americana novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they are utterly believable. For me this novel recalls the writers of the urban landscape of the United States in that era, like Dreiser writing about Chicago in Sister Carrie. More recently, it brings to mind Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler, which painted a minutely detailed portrait of an ambitious young New Yorker. These are the kinds of books that causes me to forget that I’m sitting in a suburban house in Northern California in 2012 because I’ve so thoroughly immersed myself in the milieu. Anyone who reads my reviews knows how high a premium I place on context and historical authenticity. For me, you’re the gold standard, and this book is an exemplar.

But the characters are just as compelling as the context. Jonah is not an easily likeable character. He is extremely disciplined in his approach to his work, and he has little personal life that we can see. He cares about the bank almost too much, the way a more emotionally rounded person might care about another human being. And yet, I had to respect him. His devastation at being passed over for promotion wasn’t just a reaction to his thwarted ambition, he really worried about the bank.

Reid is a complex character. We see him through Jonah’s perspective, and we share Jonah’s suspicion, puzzlement, and unwilling attraction. Where did he come from? He’s obviously intelligent, gifted, and ambitious. Why this bank, now? And why is he attracted to Jonah? This is a classic opposites-attract setup, but Jonah isn’t one of those characters where, when he metaphorically takes off his glasses and gets a good wardrobe, turns into a gorgeous stunner. He really is prickly, repressed, and hidebound. So what does Reid see in him? Does he have an ulterior motive?

At first, Jonah resists, but then as he gives in, he warms up, and Reid sheds some of that obvious, self-protective charm and becomes more genuine. He’s still a mystery, but he’s more approachable.

“You said it yourself. I’m not one to take risks. I’ve been as careful in the planning of this venture as any officer in the bank.”

The searching light returned. “I was wrong,” Reid said quietly after a moment. “You’ve taken one damned substantial risk.”

“Being involved with you?”

“Handing over your heart.”

Jonah raised an eyebrow. “Very sure of yourself, as usual.” That provoked a low laugh, and Jonah was glad to feel more of the tension ease from the limbs wrapped around him. “The damnable thing is—you’re invariably right.”

“Good. That’s the one thing I most wanted to be right about.”

Jonah smiled. “Does everything come to you so easily?”

“Easy? You?” Reid snorted. “Jonah—”

“Jo.”

Reid’s narrowed gaze could not mask an elated light. “You’re just trying to prove me wrong.”

Jonah laughed. “That’s part of it. But only a very small part.” His kiss encouraged more, and Reid took his breath away.

As Reid opens up, Jonah is more willing to let down his guard, and the romance that develops between them is warm and very believable, as is the way you deal with the historical issues surrounding homosexual relationships (I should note here that as with your other stories, the sex scenes are not at all explicit).

Even after the physical and emotional relationship deepens, it’s obvious that Reid is still hiding a lot. I found the contrast between Jonah, who is naturally reticent, and Reid, who seems so extroverted but masks so much, intriguing, and assumed it would cause conflict. And it did, but not at all the way I expected. The storyline ratchets up once the possible heist comes into play, and we move from a rather leisurely character study to an action plot. There are hints of it in the earlier parts of the book, so it’s not out of the blue, but I still found it a bit disconcerting. I probably should have anticipated the mystery better (and Reid’s role in it), and I’m sure other readers will figure it out much more quickly; I think I was subconsciously avoiding solving the puzzle because I wanted to stay in Jonah’s head.

The HEA is quite satisfying, and again, it’s believable for the time period. I closed the book wanting to read it all over again. I can still see Jonah walking to the streetcar, or walking with Reid down the streets of 19th-century New York. Once again, you’ve written a compelling, romantic novel that makes me glad I have one more Tamara Allen book left in my TBR.

Grade: A-

~ Sunita

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As we all know, it’s impossible to be objective about a review. And this is fine, as long as we can be honest about the sources of our lack of objectivity, if we know them. This book has flaws, even major flaws that have been pointed out to me by other really astute readers, and I will talk about these flaws. But I was and am utterly unable to be aware of these flaws as I read this book, no matter how many times I read it — and I’ve read it at least three times by now. This book ripped my heart out, stomped all over it, put it back, then did it again, only harder.

I need plot summary to explain my particular and specific non-objectivity: The story is set at some point during Victoria’s reign — gas lighting and indoor plumbing exist, for example. Lord George Albert Westin, or Wes to his very few friends, is the second son of a very powerful Marquess, painfully shy, reclusive, a brilliant botanist, completely gay, a stammerer, and addicted to heroin that was first prescribed to him by a doctor to control his panic attacks. Michael Vallant is a first class whore, beautiful, and the victim of rape at the age of twelve by none other than Wes’s father. I am giving nothing away by saying this because it’s all revealed very early in the story.

My utter lack of objectively arises from the fact that I was sent the ARC of this book a week after the Penn State/Sandusky story broke. The situation at Penn State broke my heart and made me furious, in turn/together. So the first time I read this book, all I could think of was Sandusky’s victims, who seem to have been lost in the circus of all the other “more important” players of the “scandal.” The most recent time I read this book (for this review) was about two weeks after a very close friend told me about how their heroin addiction destroyed their life and how they’ve struggled to piece it back together. So I have no ability to separate from this book. I haven’t the slightest hope of viewing it with anything close to objectivity or even impartiality. This book is real people to me, desperately vulnerable people and/or people I care about deeply.

This book, if you couldn’t tell, is utterly over the top. Everything that happens, every character, every plot point, every sentence, is designed specifically to rip your heart out and stomp on it. Being the glutton I am, I love this. I’m a Romantic (Big-R, literary movement Romantic) at heart, as well as a romantic (small-R, people falling in love romantic), so I go for the grand gestures, always have. I love Over The Top. This book, therefore, utterly worked for me. But I know that’s what exasperated some of my astute reader friends who read it.

For instance, the stock characters: the villain (Wes’s father) is evil incarnate. He’s not like Sandusky was — everyone’s best friend and buddy. Daventry is only after power. You get the impression he isn’t even really a pedophile; rather, he just gets off on the utter power of “owning” a boy and doing exactly what he wants with him. He’s evil and horrible and that’s the point. Then there’s the pimp with the heart of gold: Michael’s mother (an aging courtesan) sold Michael to Wes’s father when Michael was 12. After the week with Daventry was over, Michael ran away and was saved by Rodger, who was 16 at the time and — of course — a master thief and pimp. Rodger’s basically controlled everything about Michael’s life since then, with Michael’s full permission. He knows all, sees all, controls all. But he loves Michael and wants what’s best for him. And there’s also Penelope Brannigan, the American “social worker” (an anachronistic term I’m using here just to make a point) with the horrible past that’s the reason she’s trying to save the world, one addict at a time.

While these characters are completely from Stock Central, and therefore annoy other readers, they completely worked for me because of their layers. Yes, they’re stock, but stock characters exist for a reason, and really, any representation of a pimp has become a stock representation, ditto a social worker with tragedy in her past that spurs her to do her good work. Cullinan doesn’t leave them at that, though. Rodger comes to realize his mistakes in dealing with Michael and the interaction between them is so well done. Penelope helps Wes overcome his addiction and control his stutter, but at cost to herself. And honestly, people with Over The Top issues like this do actually exist in real life. I know a surprising number of them, in fact. So it doesn’t actually seem over the top to me.

However, the ONE issue I had with this book was with Wes’s brother: if any character was cardboard, it was him, parroting their father’s estimation of Wes, focused on his son as “the heir,” not as a boy. That did bother me and seemed too OTT, even for this book. His about-face acceptance of the relationship between Wes and Michael at the end of the story (remember, this is a historical, so “sodomy” is a crime, etc.) bothered other readers I talked with, but I bought it, considering the specific circumstances (that are spoilerish so I will comment no more).

But really, the love story between Wes and Michael is strong enough that it allows me to say words which might seem unbelievable, but here I go: addiction and child rape aside, this book is about Wes and Michael, two very damaged souls, finding each other and becoming both weaker and stronger together. As always, Cullinan delivers the goods (for me). For instance, Wes (whom Michael calls and thinks of as Albert) is trying to convince Michael to wear his much-needed glasses:

Albert only smiled wryly and held out the spectacles, dangling them from his fingers. “Wh-Wh-Why will you n-not wear them? You p-p-prefer not to see?”

Michael’s cock was pounding as hard as his pulse now, and as he knew neither would get release, he lost his temper. “My lord, I make my living by my looks. How many whores have you met with glasses thicker than most windowpanes?”

He doubted he’d have been able to read Albert’s face even if he could see it. It made him angry, and he would have stormed out, but he couldn’t leave his glasses. He’d fallen asleep before he’d finished the Dickens.

“Wh-Wh-Why d-did you ask m-m-me to k-k-kiss you?” Albert asked at last.

“Because you haven’t kissed me all week,” Michael shot back.

Albert’s reply was measured, careful. “You w-w-wanted me to?”

“Yes.” Michael folded his arms over his chest. “I did.”

Albert took a step forward, his blurry form coming into partial focus. “H-How m-many c-clients h-have y-you m-met with s-s-s-such a c-c-clumsy st-st-ststammer?”

Heat raced up Michael’s cheeks. “You’re different,” he whispered.

“S-S-So are you,” Albert whispered back.

Don’t fall in love with him. Rodger’s words rose up in faint echo, a last warning.

Too late, Michael admitted, frozen in place as Albert lifted Michael’s glasses and arranged them carefully on his face.

The impetus for the story is that Wes and Michael meet by accident at a not-quite-ton party. Michael is there to find tricks (which in retrospect seems odd, considering how much he stays at the brothel during the rest of the book), but is instead being harassed by a rejected customer; Wes is there to see a rare orchid (he’s a botanist) but is unable to control his social anxiety enough to ask his hostess to see it. Wes and Michael are trapped together by Michael’s irate former customer and “talk” to each other on Wes’s notepad, allowing them to have a conversation without consideration for Wes’s stammer. They have a sexual encounter which sends Michael into an unaccountable tailspin of flashbacks to his abuse at the hands of Wes’s father. Unable to earn his keep anymore, Michael asks Rodger to find Wes, hoping that another encounter with Wes will fix him (Michael), just as the first one messed him up. It doesn’t, but after Michael’s panic attack, Wes buys a month of Michael’s time, during which they spend every afternoon together, learning each other, falling in love, and struggling with what life has thrown them.

Cullinan’s writing is brilliant, as usual. Michael and Wes are amazing characters; their relationship is perfect for them. They don’t cure each other. There’s no insta-cure in this book for heroin addiction or for PTSD flashbacks to child sex abuse. But their love for each other makes them want to try to be better, however much they stumble along the way. But I also love how the characters don’t just strengthen each other — they weaken each other as well; their relationship makes things worse for them as well as better. It’s brilliantly done.

Once again, I feel like my review doesn’t begin to do justice to the book. Honestly, yes, the book is over the top and if that’s not your thing as a reader, then this book will NOT work for you. But, you know what, every now and then I’m confronted with the fact that some people’s lives are like this: maybe none of Sandusky’s victims will end up with a recovering heroin addict for a partner, but both deserve happiness just as much as anyone else (except Sandusky himself, of course). Sometimes the love story should be about the victims, the non-Alphas, the ones who are left behind, the ones who aren’t strong — but of course, are the strongest of us all. That is this book. And I adored it.

Grade: B+ (Recommended Read for February)

Best regards,
-Sarah

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Dance With Me by Heidi Cullinan
2. JOINT REVIEW: Double Blind by Heidi Cullinan
3. REVIEW: Nowhere Ranch by Heidi Cullinan

I loved this book. Just loved it. I read it in one sitting, finally going to sleep at 3am on Friday night, damn you. In retrospect, it has flaws, but I didn’t notice them as I was reading.

Brad is a football player and in a frat. I really REALLY love the way the book starts:

One of Brad’s frat brothers bent over naked in the locker room showers early one Thursday morning, and he thought, “I’d tap that.”

He stood there frozen, skin stinging from the pelletized water, soap suds streaming down his chest while his world made a . . . What did they call that? Paradigm shift.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. He’d been trying to avoid this. Admitting it to himself. Consciously. His subconscious had been admitting it for a while in his sleep. Emitting it.

Brad flicked another quick look at Collin. Yeah, he still had a delectable ass. Dammit.

Brad had spent years trying to avoid the “G” word, but denial was suddenly circling the drain. He stared at the water pouring down at his feet, and thought about hanging on to the security that came with telling himself he wasn’t into guys. But it was pointless, right? It wasn’t going to go away. Trying not to know it now was like trying to make the soap suds go back in the bar.

Brad gets to the point where he just wants to figure it out, get it right for once. So he accepts that he’s gay and starts chasing his delectable history TA, Sebastian. Now, this is where I start getting really picky — do TAs just grade papers? Maybe in some schools? Are you going to have a Ph.D. student at a College? I don’t think so. And no one, NO ONE *EVER* enjoys grading. Ever. Or if they do, I wish they’d come and grade mine, dammit.

But details about academic life aside, Sebastian is hot, Brad’s hooked, and he has to work up the courage to come on to Sebastian. This takes a full quarter of the book, but I wasn’t at all bored. During that time, Brad comes out to his completely accepting family, figured out that despite his size and looks, he’s probably a bottom, comes out to an ex-girlfriend, plagiarizes a paper to try to catch Sebastian’s attention.

Once Sebastian and Brad get together, the sex is smoking hot, the relationship is interesting, and the humor is just nonstop. That’s the thing about this book — it’s laugh-out-loud funny without trying too hard to be so (and without really being excerpt-able, despite reading through the whole book again to try to find a suitable excerpt ;). Sebastian watches everything with a sort of amused, affectionate disdain, so bits of the book from his perspective were fun. And Brad is just…wonderful. He’s not particularly smart (although he’s not stupid), and watching him figure out how to be gay is just an amazing journey. He’s stubborn and intense and committed to being authentic. SUCH a great character. Just a taste:

On Saturday morning, Brad woke up early and watched Sebastian sleep. He knew it was dorky and he tried to stop, but he couldn’t seem to look away. He’d done it last Saturday, too.

He was lucky. Really fucking lucky. He wanted to just stay here forever. But he had to get back to his room and do some laundry, as well as inventory the damned kitchen at the frat house and get ready for the stupid pledge ceremony.

He sighed. He’d rather be here with his boyfriend. Who seemed to be waking up. Just before he thought Sebastian was going to open his eyes, he rolled over and scooted backward into Sebastian’s body. He didn’t want to get caught staring at the shape of Sebastian’s jaw or his long eyelashes in the sunlight, but he could rub up on him some.

Retrospective niggles (I have no idea why this part of the review came out in bullet format, but it’s better to have it written than to fight it, so here you go):

• Sebastian did not read like a 28 year old. It would have made more sense to me if he’d been doing his M.A. and he were 24 or so. But a 28 year old Ph.D. student seemed a bit more of a stretch to me with the character as written.
• Once the relationship starts, there’s not much narrative tension, except the tension that’s still about Brad figuring out who he is. Which was engaging and fun, don’t get me wrong, but not relationship-focused so much.
• The Black Moment is very slightly contrived and not exceptionally well explained. When Brad and Sebastian fight, I had to read it two or three times to really figure out exactly what was drawing them apart. Once I’d figured it out, I believed in the problem — it was subtle but strong and had been foreshadowed throughout the book. But it took me a while to get there.
• Once they split, there’s a bit too much “gathering of the support network,” as Brad puts it, before they get back together…a few too many conversations with other people before they get together to figure things out together. The book started to seem like an ensemble piece, except the ensemble didn’t really gather at the end, so that was odd.
• And the final scene ends abruptly. We’ve had pages of Brad coming out to his frat, and when he and Sebastian go upstairs…the rest of the house isn’t mentioned again at all. But then, I’m a big believer in epilogues, or slightly more drawn-out endings, post reconciliation. In my opinion, there needed to be an extra scene from the next morning, or with Brad’s brother banging on their door, telling them to quiet down, or something.

Grade: B+

Best regards,
-Sarah

P.S. Your blurb’s awful (SUCH a strange shift from second to third paragraph and it doesn’t capture the true tension of the novel), the cover’s pretty (nice abs) but strange (what IS that living room supposed to represent?), and the title’s horrible. But hey, YMMV.

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Prince of Swords by Anne Stuart
2. REVIEW: Black Ice by Anne Stuart
3. REVIEW: Blue Sage by Anne Stuart

Sarah: My experience with fanfiction comes from two different directions: as a Jane Austen scholar and as a reader of m/m romance.

I have to say from the start that I don’t willingly read fan fiction. I know that it can be a wonderful thing for writers and readers and fan communities, as Jan and Has so brilliantly attested. I certainly don’t think other people shouldn’t read it. It’s just not for me. RPS creeps me out and I’m uninterested in reading alternate or continuing storylines from fictional worlds and characters that I enjoy, whether TV, book, or film.

For me, it comes down to voice. I read primarily for voice and, in my opinion, it is incredibly difficult to replicate another author’s voice. I mean, yes, I read romance for the happy ending and the depth of characterization. But I read specific authors for their voice. I fall in love with characters because of the voice in which they are written. So I’m uninterested in Further Fan Fiction Adventures of favorite characters, because they will by definition be written in a different voice.

Sunita: As I said in my earlier post, I came to fan fiction through m/m romance. I didn’t know much about either when I started reading m/m, but as I read more and more, it became clear to me that there were certain characterization, setting, and relationship tropes that recurred far more often in the novels than they ever showed up in real life. Retrospectively that seems unsurprising: after all, romance is populated by billionaires and dukes, as well as feisty, beautiful heroines who want to save their families, and I don’t bat an eye. But I think that subconsciously I was expecting m/m to be more realistic. When I discovered its roots in slash, those tropes made much more sense.

While I notice and appreciate voice, especially that of favorite authors, it’s not the primary reason I read genre fiction. I pay more attention to characters and setting. So I’m not opposed to works that port characters to a different world, or new characters in the same setting. I read a lot of series and linked books, for that very reason.

Sarah: The first direction from which I encountered fan fiction was Jane Austen. I am an Austen scholar during my day job. Jane Austen’s books, of course, are out of copyright, so Austen fan fiction does not run into the issues that Fifty Shades of Grey does with appropriating someone else’s copyrighted characters. There is a LOT of Jane Austen-inspired fiction out there. (Twilight, of course, is famously one of them, ironically enough.) Since 1993, there have been about 100 books inspired by or continuing Pride and Prejudice alone, let alone Austen’s five and a half other books (Lady Susan being the half) and two unfinished novels. And of course, Austen herself has become a character in a lot of these modern books.

I’ll admit, I read and enjoyed Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, a modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice and I enjoyed Ann Herendeen’s slashy Pride/Prejudice for the intellectual exercise of the thing. And I adore the films (Pride and Prejudice: A Latter Day Comedy and Bride and Prejudice are my favorites). But in general, I find it VERY difficult to read any of the books that purport to continue Elizabeth and Darcy’s story or that tell the stories of other characters (Mary Bennet, Georgiana Darcy, etc.) because no matter how hard an author tries, she cannot replicate Austen’s voice and because she’s necessarily influenced by twenty-first century priorities, rather than those of the early nineteenth century. And, honestly, I enjoy leaving characters with their HEAs; I’m not interested in their Further Adventures. I like narrative closure and I prefer to leave it closed. YMMV.

Sunita: I have no interest whatsoever in Austen fanfics or retellings as novels. For one thing, they’re written in a modern voice, by modern writers. Austen isn’t historical fiction or historical romance; she was writing about her contemporary world. By definition, any work that continues those characters’ stories is going to be doing so through a modern lens. That’s a distortion I’m not interested in.

Sarah: This is precisely why I love Bridget Jones, both book and film, and P+P: A Latter Day Comedy and Clueless. (And the fabulous Easy A, a retelling of The Scarlet Letter)! They are modern, taking the plot and themes and having them comment on modern characters and settings.

Sunita: Out of that group, I really only like Clueless, but I agree with you that the modern retellings are more enjoyable. I tend to treat movies as a different kind of aesthetic and cultural experience. They’re showing me something (literally, since it’s a visual medium) that is not there in Austen but could be. Of course, they’re modern too (even the period, “authentic” ones), but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much. I guess I expect movies by definition to be different.

Sarah: And this is why I can enjoy the Keira Knightley/Matthew McFadyen P+P (with bonus Wuthering Heights ending), or the completely fictional “biography” of Austen, Becoming Jane: because I treat them solely as a movie with its own narrative and visual conventions.

Getting back to fan fiction: Almost all Austen fan- or repurposed- or real-person fiction makes a point of mentioning the Austen connection if it’s not obvious, precisely because of the cultural cachet it garners. This is precisely the opposite of most m/m romance that’s repurposed slash or fan fiction, which tries to hide its origins. And it’s that intellectual dishonesty and its repercussions for me as a reader that is the reason I try my hardest to avoid P2P books.

I have reviewed (and reviewed very well) a lot of m/m romance that I discovered later is fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off: Zero at the Bone (Brokeback Mountain), Shades of Gray (also Brokeback Mountain), and All’s Fair in Love and Advertising (some scifi show I know nothing about), at the very least (there was also intense speculation about I Just Play One on TV -– probably RPS). I’m sure people with more knowledge could find more among the books I review (part of my problem with fanfic is that I don’t watch TV and I don’t read fanfic, so I rarely know what to look for, or even THAT I should be looking).

As an aside: Alternate Universe (AU) fanfic seems to be the easiest to repurpose (like 50 Shades): the author has already created a different world, so all she needs to do is change the characters just slightly enough (names and looks), and it can look like original fic and people defend you by saying things like, “Twilight was about vampires, 50 Shades isn’t paranormal,” so obviously, they’re not the same at all.

Sunita: I see two ways in which fan fiction has influenced m/m. The first is this reworking — sometimes extensive, sometimes … not — of stories that had been previously published and disseminated on line for free. And m/m publishers have, to different degrees, been complicit in this process. Most of the well-known m/m publishers have published books that are lightly or heavily transformed fan fiction. If you look at a list of favorite m/m romances at GoodReads, Jessewave’s site, or our own yearly Best Of lists, you’ll see books that started as fan fiction. The main difference I see between the presses is that some of the older ones wanted fan fiction that was substantially reworked. Some of the newer ones seem to accept more work that comes close to the file-off-the-serial-numbers approach.

Unlike the current brouhaha around 50 Shades of Grey, many fans who were aware that published m/m novels had been reworked from fan fiction did not reveal the origins. I can understand why readers were quite annoyed to discover that the books they thought were original were not. Some are like you and don’t want to read repurposed fan fiction at all, no matter how different the new product is. Other readers don’t care. I have mixed feelings. But I think that disclosing provenance is important. Attribution to a previous source matters to me. At the same time, I’ve read and enjoyed books that turned out to have begun as fan fiction, and I’m glad I read them.

Sarah: I would not willingly have read these books, and certainly would not have reviewed them, if I’d known ahead of time that they were fan fiction. I personally feel that it’s intellectual theft and it’s lazy. Don’t get me wrong: when it’s written as fanfic, to be distributed for free, I think it’s a wonderful thing. But if an author pulls to publish, I think she’s disrespecting her readers, specifically the readers who don’t know that it’s formerly fan fiction.

Jami Gold said it the best for me in her post on “What Makes a Character Unique“:

Characters—good characters—go much deeper than their job, their human/non-human status, their name, number of siblings, where they live, etc. Real characters are born out of their history, family background, worldview, religious beliefs, moral code, self-image, self-delusions, strengths, flaws, goals, etc. They aren’t puppets fulfilling our goals for a plot.

Most fanfic stories—no matter how out-of-character the characters might act—still intend for their characters to evoke those of the original author. While superficial details might be different (especially if it’s an “alternate universe” fanfic story), most of those things I listed above would be similar to the original. In other words, not a unique character.

Someone wrote out an extensive list as a comment in another of Gold’s posts of the connections between Twilight and 50SoG. Ana is clumsy because Bella is clumsy, for example, not because E.L. James decided Ana is clumsy for reasons of her own. Or, in the case of Zero at the Bone, I commented in my original review (before I knew the book was BbM fanfic):

“D’s “dialect” is…slightly annoying. [...] It’s part of him. It’s perfectly sustained throughout the book. But it’s never explained by where he came from (either geography or class). And it slowed down my reading sometimes enough to be mildly irritating.

I didn’t know at the time, but D’s dialect comes from the fact that he’s actually Ennis Delmar from Brokeback Mountain and that’s how Ennis speaks. When ZatB was fan fiction, that doesn’t need to be explained. But in original fiction, the way a character speaks has to come from somewhere and the P2P author was, in this case, too close to her source to know to explain that when she was publishing it as original fiction.

The issue for me comes down to this: I believe that P2P disrespects its non-fanfic readers. This is the distinction for me between Austen fanfic and P2P fanfic that purports to be original. The fact that it’s Austen fanfic is the point and one is expected to read it, whether it’s canon-set or AU, with the knowledge that it’s Austen-based. It’s meant to be read as Austen-inspired and that fact is meant to heighten the reader’s pleasure in reading it. This is precisely the point of fanfic, no matter the provenance (out of copyright or not).

P2P fanfic that purports to be original is disavowing that layer of pleasure, claiming, in fact, that it doesn’t exist, but then still fails to explain vital character traits or plot points for the unsuspecting reader, because they didn’t need to be explained when the story was fanfic.

It’s that intellectual dishonesty towards the non-fanfic reader that makes me SO mad when I discover that a book I’ve enjoyed is P2P fanfic. I feel like the author’s pulling one over on me and it retroactively destroys all the pleasure I felt in the book when I read it.

Sunita: For me, the second way that fan fiction affects m/m as a genre is less ethically problematic but perhaps just as important in the growth and maturation of the genre. I’m talking about the adoption and immense popularity of certain types of stories, such as hurt/comfort, Gay4U, Out4U. Fan fiction writing experience is very helpful in developing certain aspects of a writer’s craft. Writers are often very good at character interaction. Good m/m romances have interesting characters, and the romantic relationships are carefully and compellingly written. But not all authors are as good at other components of a story that are necessary when moving into the world of original fiction.

Violetta Vane has an excellent post on the issues authors confront in moving between fan fiction and original fiction. She notes a number of weaknesses fan fiction writers have to overcome:

Setting detail. Most settings are already given to us by canon. They’re taken for granted. Describing setting takes time away from the stuff everyone wants to read: the characters interacting and having a rich inner life.

Character description. We know how the characters look already in canon. There’s no need to describe them all over again.

Original characters. There’s a frequent prejudice against original characters, especially female ones.

Plot. The major plot points are already given to us in canon.

Conflict and suspense. It’s very hard to introduce this in fanfic, because conflict and suspense rely on CHANGE, and fanfic writers 1) often don’t want to truly change the characters they love 2) even if they do, their audience may not accept the change.

Some authors are very good at these aspects, but many otherwise good writers struggle with some of them (and have remarked on it). And if publishers are not doing a lot of developmental and content editing, then those weaknesses aren’t going to be addressed in the book production process.

So for me, the relationship of fan fiction to the m/m genre is a mixed bag. It has given us many talented authors and wonderful books. But as long as the genre isn’t open and up-front about that relationship, the disadvantages that closeness brings are not likely to be addressed.

Related posts:

1. How I Came to Appreciate Fan Fiction
2. Fan Fiction Author Roundtable: Cyndy Aleo, Tamara Allen, Jane Davitt, & Jami Gold
3. GUEST REVIEW: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James

I’ve been reading genre fiction (romance, mystery, SFF) for a very long time, but I didn’t become aware of fan fiction as a category of writing, much less its role in creating community, until I found internet blogs about fiction writing. Back when I was reading mystery blogs regularly, I ran across a ranting post on the illegitimacy of writing stories using other authors’ characters and worlds. Many commenters in the very long thread attempted to explain what attracted them, and to a person they argued (believably to me) that they were doing it for the love of the characters, not money or fame. But the original poster was obdurate. He refused to concede that there was anything legitimate, much less beneficial, about fan fiction.

I didn’t participate, because I could barely figure out what everyone was talking about. But I was initially sympathetic to the anti-fan-fiction argument, probably because I’ve never wanted to do anything that resembles it. Of course I’ve hated certain books’ endings, I’ve wished for sequels, and I’ve thought about the off-page lives of favorite characters. But I’ve never written to authors to ask them to keep writing about a particularly loved protagonist. And I’ve never wanted to write my own versions of books.  Not because I thought doing so would be wrong, but because it just never occurred to me.

Then I started reading m/m romance and discovered there was not only fan fiction about the Potterverse, Buffy, and Tolkien, but also slash. And I found that many authors whose published fiction I enjoyed had written fan fic earlier in their writing careers, and some continued to write in both worlds. I learned derogatory phrases like “filing off the serial numbers” and “pulled to publish,” but I also discovered that quite a few well-loved books might have begun their lives as Brokeback Mountain fanfics or Kirk/Spock fanfics. The relationship between fan and original fiction was so commonplace that even books that didn’t begin as fan fiction were sometimes thought to have originated there.

I decided that if I wanted to understand the genre I was reading, I needed to understand fan fiction. But I was stymied by my inherent inability to understand the motivation. As you may have gathered by now, I am a terrible storyteller. I do not have the gift. But recently, when I was idly perusing a chat board, I came across an example using some of my favorite m/m characters. The commenter was explaining the drive to rewrite Brokeback Mountain with a happy ending by using the fourth book of the Adrien English series:

Imagine that Adrien went on that boat with Paul Kane and Jake did nothing because he was so fearful of exposing himself. Even worse, that Adrien didn’t even bother to tell Jake what he was going to do because he’d given up on him. Imagine that Adrien died at Paul’s hands and Jake spent the rest of his life eaten up with regret — and still in the closet. Then you can understand why so many people turned to fanfic for relief …

And suddenly it clicked for me. When I was reading Death of a Pirate King, I knew that somehow Adrien would wind up with Jake. Because it’s a romance. But what if the fictional romance that really grabs you occurs in a non-romance, and they don’t wind up together? Or they don’t/can’t wind up together in the canonical version of the fictional world (Kirk and Spock again)? You can shrug your shoulders and move on to another book. Or, if you’re a writer, you can sit down and make it happen. And there are readers who will love you for it.

This path isn’t just about creating new romantic relationships or changing unhappy endings to happy ones. What if you think the most interesting character in the Harry Potter novels is Luna Lovegood and you want to read more about her? J.K. Rowling isn’t going to oblige, but someone else can, and Luna is a pretty interesting character on the page, so there’s a lot to work with there. She’s not your character, but you can develop her in ways that Rowling may or may not have thought of but hasn’t written down. Even if you adhere strictly to canon, there’s plenty of scope for your imagination, and there will always be someone who is interesting in reading it.

Before the internet, writers passed around their work by hand, mail, or other slow and small-scale methods. Once communities could develop online, though, the relationship between writers and readers became far more immediate and interactive. Beta readers are a key aspect of fan fiction writing, just as critique partners are commonplace for authors of original fiction. Prompts offer suggestions for new work, and the norm of issuing the story serially in the form of weekly or monthly installments has meant that it can be shaped by reader feedback as it is written.

Non-writing readers have always underestimated the extent to which books are the outcome of a collaborative process, and this underestimation is even greater for fan fiction. The community is frequently essential to the process. It provides support, feedback, editing, and encouragement. Big Name Authors in fan fiction can have hundreds or even thousands of readers, and these readers can be more vigilant than the BNA herself in defending the product and the author.

From my perspective, the emphasis on characterization and the interactive relationship of writers and readers are two of the distinguishing characteristics of fan fiction, which set it apart from other types of adaptions, interpretations, and retellings of earlier cultural products. Even in Alternate Universe fan fiction, characterizations can remain quite faithful to the canonical descriptions. Whether the changes authors introduce to these characters are sufficient to make the jump from derivative to transformative is not something we can usually predict in advance, but I think it’s important to have a conversation about what such a transformation entails and think about conditions in which authors might succeed or fall short.

As part of that conversation, we’ve scheduled the following posts:

(1) Has from The Bookpushers will talk about fan fiction, the importance of fandoms, and the thorny issues raised by commercialization.

(2) Four authors who have been active as readers and writers in fan fiction communities will participate in a roundtable post in which they talk about how they started writing, how they separate fan fiction from their original fiction, the role of fandoms and communities, and what they see as the most important issues for the genre.

(3) Jayne will have a special fanfic-related movie review on Friday.

(4) Jane will talk about plagiarism, copyright, and other legal aspects of the fan v. original fiction debate.

(5) Sarah Frantz and I will have a conversation about the special relationship of fan fiction and m/m romance.

And finally, we are very, very fortunate to have Rebecca Tushnet as a guest to answer questions about legal and ethical issues in writing and disseminating fan fiction. Professor Tushnet is professor of law at Georgetown University as well as a writer of fan fiction. She is a founding member of the Organization for Transformative Works, an organization designed to support fans and fan fiction, and which argues that fan works are legitimate and transformative forms of creative expression. She has agreed to take questions from Dear Author’s readers and answer as many as she can in a Q&A post. Please post your questions in the comments. We will send them on to her and then post her answers in the final article of the series.

Related posts:

1. Does Thomas Harris Read His Fan Fiction?
2. Interesting Fan Fiction Promotion Event
3. Fan Fiction = 33% content around books

I really enjoyed the main characters in this book. I’m…ambivalent enough about the other characters and some of the plot that it affected my enjoyment of the book as a whole.

Jesse is running for Governor of California. He has no experience whatsoever in pretty much anything. He comes from acting royalty but is a semi-reality-show also-ran himself. He has very little life history before his decision to run except for the fact that he’s married to an Oscar-winning actress. So his decision to run was never fully explained to my satisfaction. Yes, the Republican candidate is horrible. Yes, Jesse has name recognition. But he claims throughout the book that he can handle the actual job of governor but doesn’t know how to campaign. But really, he’s never done either. What in his background allows anyone to believe, himself included, that he’d be a good governor?

Anyway, he’s also gay. His wife, Simone, knows about his sexuality and they’ve decided to divorce…right after the election. But until then, part of the campaign strategy, devised by Jesse’s senator uncle, is to play the happy-married, deeply-in-love couple. But Simone has Issues. She’s got a huge history with eating disorders that arises from her inability to access or process emotion. She tends to get vicious when she gets angry and she sublimates all stress into her eating disorder. So, it’s totally a good idea to put their sham marriage front-and-center of Jesse’s campaign, right? Right.

Jesse’s senator uncle’s former campaign manager becomes Jesse’s campaign manager. Anthony is driven, exceedingly competent, as principled as he can be, a smoker, gay, and totally hot for Jesse. Jesse in turn is totally hot for Anthony. Anthony is convinced that Jesse is straight. Jesse can’t tell if Anthony is gay or not. Commence sexual tension. One thing you do well, Ms. Witt, is build sexual tension. The slow bloom of a relationship, the realistic movement from lust to affection to love is something you do brilliantly, and this book is no different. The scene in which Jesse finally FINALLY comes out to Anthony is just perfectly done (I’d quote here, but Loose Id is securing their ARCs and I’m not typing out the whole damn excerpt — trust me, it’s an amazing scene).

The relationship between Jesse and Anthony builds so very slowly. For a long time, they can’t find time together to have sex because of the demands of the campaign, so they really have time to fall in love rather than just fuck like bunnies. I like that. I totally believed that these two guys love each other.

And really, only you would be able to make a smoker sexy because it’s so much a part of his personality. That was fascinating.

The book is long, more than 350 pages. So it’s almost inevitable, perhaps, that it sags badly in the middle. Once Jesse and Anthony have established their relationship as best they can, it’s pages and pages and PAGES of angst over the Catch-22 everyone is in. Simone is losing weight! But we can’t talk to her about it because she’ll just get mad and flounce away! But we’re hurting her! But we can’t help ourselves! And anyway, she pushed us together! But the voters! Over and over and around and around, with no solution until after the inevitable crisis point.

The character of Simone really bugged me. Women in m/m romance is a fraught issue. Usually there aren’t any. Some dedicated m/m readers will actively avoid books with women in them. So any woman who is a main character in m/m is bound to carry a lot on her shoulders. So on the one hand, Simone is an interesting character with her inability to access emotions and her need to exert control through her eating disorder. But on the other, she’s incredibly annoying because she’s so irrational no one can talk to her and it seems that she’s just the figurehead for the Conflict rather than a real character. And the saggy middle harping on that conflict without a solution made it all a bit much for me. It’d be nice to have a female character in m/m who doesn’t have Issues. (Admittedly, Jesse’s personal assistant is female and a wonderful sidekick character.)

So, as much as I loved Jesse and Anthony (and boy, did I!), the pacing issues and Simone’s whole character (and especially her final admission) really pulled this book down for me. The ending, though was a nice twist. I liked the reason for the Conflict and loved Jesse’s solution — even though it seemed a bit too cavalier, it did maintain his integrity. Overall, I couldn’t put this book down, but I did read some of it while squinting a bit.

Grade: B-

Best regards,
-Sarah F.

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2. REVIEW: Ex Equals by L.A. Witt
3. REVIEW: AJ’s Angel by L.A. Witt

Twice Fallen: Ladies in Waiting by Emma Wildes. I discovered Wildes when she was writing for smaller presses and really liked the relationships and the type of sensual/sex scenes she writes. I tried one of her major-publisher releases a while back but it didn’t work for me. This one did, for the most part. Wildes’ historical milieu is somewhat superficial, but she stays out of mistorical terroritory. This book is part of a series but I found it easy to read as a standalone. There are two romantic storylines, one between an unmarried Earl’s daughter and a Duke’s younger son, the other between the heroine’s cousin James and his mistress, who is an artist, an older woman, and illegitimate. There are a lot of standard romance ingredients in this novel, but Wildes does interesting things with them. For example, Lord Damien is a spy and Lord Lillian has a scandal in her past, but both plot points develop somewhat unexpectedly. There’s a mystery, but it doesn’t overwhelm the romance. Full review to come.

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Irregulars, by Nicole Kimberling et al. This is a paranormal anthology comprising four novellas that are set in the same universe, with characters that overlap slightly. The Irregulars are members of a NATO investigative division that keeps track of other-worldly beings who are on Earth out of choice or necessity. The stories, by Kimberling, Josh Lanyon, Astrid Amara, and Ginn Hale, feature goblins, elves, demons, humans and combinations thereof. Each story revolves around a mysterious death (or deaths) and a pair of protagonists who solve them, and they all have HEA or HFN endings. The worldbuilding is excellent across the board, and the characterizations are equally strong. The settings range up and down the West Coast, from Vancouver to Mexico City. For fans of these authors and of well-written gay romantic fiction more generally, this is a must-read. Full review to come.

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Sydney Harbor Hospital: Lily’s Scandal, by Marion Lennox. As readers of DA know, Marion Lennox is an autobuy for me, but this story didn’t work as well as hers usually do. The book is the first of the new Sydney Harbor continuity series in the Medical Romance line, and it has to introduce a lot of characters, including the recurring characters Finn Kennedy and Evie Lockheart. This installment centers on the romance of Luke Williams, a plastic surgeon, and Lily Ellis, a temporary nurse at the hospital. Lily is fleeing the fallout from her mother’s latest scandal, while Luke is avoiding romantic entanglements altogether after an unhappy marriage that ended in tragedy. They are thrown together in their work and personal lives, and they slowly, reluctantly fall in love. It may be that I’ve read too many Lennox romances in a row, because the characters felt overly familiar to me, and the writing style felt choppier and less compelling than usual. If you haven’t read Lennox as often, you are likely to enjoy it more. Luke and Lily are both engaging, realistically drawn characters, and the supporting cast is well done. I’m definitely reading the next installment in the series. Grade: B-

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Dauntsey Park, by Nicola Cornick. I bought this when it was first published as The Last Rake in London and dug it out of my TBR after the Downton Abbey discussion. I really wanted to like it, and the Edwardian setting seems very well done as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, I had a number of problems with the characters and the storyline. The heroine, Sally Bowes (I had a difficult time not picturing Liza Minnelli in Cabaret), runs a gambling house and takes care of her no-good younger sister and her perpetually broke suffragette sister. The hero, Jack Kestrel, confronts Sally when he’s looking for the Miss Howe who is blackmailing his seriously ill uncle. The pair go from insta-lust to fake engagement to insta-love in about three days, and there is way too much telling through internal monologues. Sally is a martyr who defends her sister beyond any reasonable point, Jack is only mildly rakish on the page, and the supporting characters are predictably stock. I liked the setting so much, but I wanted to knock sense into both the leads. Great idea, disappointing execution. Grade: C.

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Once a Ferrara Wife, by Sarah Morgan. Another autobuy author, but this time the story lived up to my expectations. From the first scene you know this is going to be an angsty ride, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I’m not big on full-on angst, but it is well motivated here; this is a marriage in trouble book and the storyline is about their paths back to each other. Laurel Ferrara and her billionaire hotelier husband, Cristiano, have been estranged for two years. When they meet again at his sister’s wedding, they are forced to revisit both their unresolved conflicts and their reignited attraction for each other. Laurel still hasn’t forgiven Cristiano for the crisis that drove them apart, and watching him comes to grips with what a true apology is, not to mention accepting responsibility for his mistakes, is something to behold. But Lauren isn’t blameless; she has to overcome her inability to trust anyone, even those she loves. Cristiano’s billions and Lauren’s business success are almost beside the point as we watch them try and forge a healthier relationship (although the usual Presents accoutrements certainly help the background scenery). The scenes where Cristiano thinks he is making huge strides while we (and Laurel) know they are inadequate are especially effective. My least favorite aspect of the novel was the epilogue, especially considering what had caused the rift in the first place, but I give props to Morgan for making it less predictable than usual. Grade: B

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Dark Soul, Vol. 2 by Aleksandr Voinov. I wasn’t sure what to expect after the thrill-ride of Volume 1, but Voinov maintains the intensity and the emotional complexity he established in the earlier episodes. These comprise two short stories that move both the plot and the relationship between Silvio and Stefano forward. The first story is basically an extended phone-sex episode between Silvio and his mentor/lover, Gianbattista, but that bare description can’t do justice to the emotion. The reader suspects this relationship is over, but there is still a strong attachment between the men, and the conversation and the sex are suffused with a bitter melancholy. Reading it is arousing but so very sad. The second story shifts gears and is more plot driven, as the Russians who have been threatening Silvio show up to challenge him. There is plenty of on-page violence and mayhem, expertly depicted, and the fallout from the confrontation has consequences for all the major and minor characters in the story. Silvio and Stefano share an intimate scene toward the end, about which I have mixed feelings. I think this is an It’s Not You It’s Me issue, but it didn’t work for me as well as everything else in the novella. Not that that stopped me from moving directly on to Vol. 3. Grade: B

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3. What Sunita is Reading in late September and early October

I’ve been remiss in not reviewing these books. I recommended them in November, but then the end of the semester and the holidays and then the beginning of the semester and and and…caught up with me. But I’ve been dipping into them again and again through the last few months when I needed to cleanse my palate from other books.

Nicky Avery is a TV star who is rehearsing for a Broadway show. He meets Devon Turner, film star and all around amazing actor. They connect instantly, Nicky feeling Devon’s dominance, Devon reacting to Nicky’s submissiveness. But this isn’t a touchy-feely story. This is pure D/s with intense sadomasochistic overtones. Devon doesn’t let Nicky get away with anything, either physically or emotionally. The first book, Master Class, shows Nicky and Devon’s meeting and the start of their relationship. SUBlime (really on that title?! Please trust your readers to Get It without the hokey capitals!) is a serious of short vignettes, mostly (really great) wank material more than anything else, that reveals scenes in their daily life, but that doesn’t really forward their relationship.

Devon and Nicky meet at a dinner with friends. I love this. I love that they don’t meet at a Kinky Klub of Kinkiness. They meet like other normal people do. And they’re drawn to each other through mutual attraction rather than some ridiculous set up. The book definitely has a lot of “All-Knowing All-Seeing Dom Who Knows What’s Right for the Misguided Little Submissive”-itis to go around. Devon recognizes that Nicky’s submissive, that he’s deeply masochistic, that he’s utterly fucked up. And he knows just what Nicky needs. Of course. (Honestly, just once, I’d like to read a book with a fucked up Dom and a has-it-together sub who saves him/her.) But if that’s going to be the point of the book, it’s very well done. Brilliantly done, even.

Devon takes care of Nicky. He knows what Nicky needs and he gives it to him. And as physically excruciating as their play can be, both for them and for the reader, depending on the reader’s squick levels, it’s possible to see Devon’s care for Nicky all the way through the book.

As an example of the physical and emotional intensity of the book:

Devon retrieved his crop. He wasn’t usually such a one-toy man, but he needed precision tonight without too much bite. He thwapped it lightly against Nicky’s testicles. Stretched and weighted as they were, even a light touch was painful; Nicky grunted, stumbled, fell. The rigging caught him, and he scrambled back to his feet and forced his limbs back to their straining stance. Devon rewarded this by striking Nicky’s nuts again, upping the force a bit. Perhaps expecting it this time, Nicky kept his feet.

“Now, I do believe we were having a conversation. Tell me what I’m doing.”

Another strike. Nicky gasped.

“You’re cropping my nuts, sir.” Again, and Nicky lifted one foot but quickly put it back, gasping out, “Fuck, it hurts.”

Devon knelt down to add a second weight to the leather cord, stretching Nicky’s sack a little more. He let it go carefully, stroking one sweat-damp thigh as he released the weight. Nicky’s whimper went straight to Devon’s cock, but he ignored it. Right now, his boy demanded all his focus.

Devon picked up the crop again and rubbed it against the stretched skin of Nicky’s scrotum, then slapped it lightly, several times in succession, until Nicky danced away. “Hold still,” Devon warned, grabbing him by the rigging to keep him in place and resuming his tapping with the crop.

It was impressive that Nicky remembered to speak through this treatment. He gritted out, “Tapping my balls, sir,” through increasingly heavy breaths that became grunts, then cries: Devon’s cue to stop. Devon smoothed over the hot skin with his thumb, gave Nicky’s half-hard cock a few quick pumps.

“And I suppose you know what my next question’s going to be.”

Chest heaving, limbs quaking, Nicky said nothing as Devon worked his erection. Finally, he shook his head, looking contrite and a little frightened. A drop of sweat flew from his chin and plopped to the floor.

Good. Nicky was moving beyond the ability to parse every little thing, moving beyond control and into true subspace. Devon added another weight, and another.

“How do you feel, Nicky?”

“Hurts,” he panted.

“How you feel, Nicky, not how it feels. That’s five.”

This book is not for the faint of heart. It shows an intensely physical and deeply emotional relationship between a sadist and a masochist, between a Dom and a sub, that has some necessary suspension of disbelief (do people REALLY play that hard — especially emotionally — with each other right away?), but is otherwise beautiful, brilliant, and if you like that sort of this, deeply arousing.

Grade: B+

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SUBlime, on the other hand, is a series of vignettes that seems to lose sight of the fact that Devon and Nicky are people. In these stories, ever-in-control Dom and bratty sub are thrown in with various kinks (medical play, knives, cross-dressing, isolation, mummification). And while the individual stories stay true to Devon and Nicky’s personalities, and while the stories are arousing if it hits the reader’s kink buttons, and while they’re very well-written, Devon and Nicky are no longer actors with real lives. They’re just posable kink dolls you brought out whenever some nifty new kink caught your fancy.

Which is not to say they’re not fun, but I doubt very much that an A-list film actor can bring his A-list stage and TV actor boyfriend to a huge party, no matter how “private,” and parade him around in pony-play gear without having to worry about it getting out to the press. No matter how much you trust other people in the lifestyle, stardom is still fraught with blackmailers and paparazzi, and I just missed the real lives of Devon and Nicky amidst the kinkiness.

I feel like I’m hammering these stories for not being something they never tried to be, and I REALLY hate it when people do that. I *think* they were written first, precisely AS wankable shorts, and Master Class was written to show how Devon and Nicky got together. But however they were written, they were published as a stand-alone story and some sequel shorts, so that’s how I read them. And with that in mind, the posable kink doll thing bothered me, as much as I enjoyed the individual stories themselves. They were more erotica than romance. Brilliantly GOOD erotica, with each short having an emotional arc of its own, which is SO important, but erotica, not romance, nonetheless. As erotica, I’d give it another B+. But as romance:

Grade: C+

Best regards,
-Sarah

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2. REVIEW: Skin Deep by Anna J Evans
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You have a knack for writing characters who are all different, no matter how many times you seem to write them into similar situations or how similar they seem at the start. And your conflicts are entirely character-based, so the conflicts are all different. I find your construction of BDSM sometimes requires a lot of suspension of disbelief but as you get the emotions right, no matter how far-fetched some of the scenarios, I (usually) don’t really mind.

In my shopping sprees buying your books, however, I had avoided this particular book. I’m a simple girl and tend to like my romance non-paranormal, non-world-building-heavy. I like books to focus on the characters, not on supernatural aspects. But when I was rhapsodizing about your other books, Duck! was recommended so often and by so many people I trust, that I bought it, devoured it, and loved it.

Ori Jones is an avian shifter. The avian shifter community is rigidly heirarchical, with birds of prey as the aristocracy and all other birds fulfilling more or less submissive roles below them. The bird you are seems to guide your personality to a great extent, so crows are assholes who hang out in packs, ravens are clever and strong, seagulls are bad-tempered, peacocks are tattoo artists. And everyone’s gay. Or at least, willing to fuck other men.

Up front, the one thing that bothered me most about this book is that there are NO women. Anywhere. Not one female is mentioned — literally, the words “she” and “her” don’t show up once. I have no idea if there are female shifters, no idea how shifting gets passed down, no idea if women CAN be shifters, or if they can be a part of the shifting community. I found that extremely odd, especially since, if the entire world is built on heirarchies, some species of birds are matriarchal, with reversed gender dimorphism. If the invisibility of women in m/m romance bothers readers, they should avoid this book, because women are more that invisible — they’re almost hyper-present in their complete absence.

Anyway…Ori is “an ugly little duckling,” according to the avian elders who watched his partial shift when he first joined the community. He can’t fully shift until he comes of age at 21. He’s been serving in the “nest” for six months, a sort of communal hotel/dormitory/community center, having come to the community at 20 because his foster parents suggested he see if he’s a shifter (implying a Alternate Universe in which shifting is known and acknowledged by outside humans, but this is never really dealt with or discussed in the book). Ori’s been serving in the communal restaurant/cafeteria, suffering the abuse of the birds higher in rank than him (pretty much anyone). One day, Raynard, a high-ranking hawk shifter, saves Ori (twice) from a pack of crows and eventually takes him from the nest to be a personal servant. And that’s…pretty much the story for much of the book, although the emotional stakes are higher than they sound here. Ori serves Raynard and slowly finds his place in the world as they slowly figure out their relationship. Ori is first servant, then submissive to Raynard, then lover, then beloved. But all is halted when he completes his first shift.

This gets a bit spoilery, perhaps. It happens just over halfway through the story, so if you don’t like to know this stuff, then don’t read anymore.

This story is overtly styled on the “Ugly Duckling” fairytale, so it should be obvious what Ori actually shifts into, rather than a duck. But this changes everything, because swans are:

the purest species of avian that exists. They are good, and noble, and beautiful. They have the most exquisite spirits, the finest temperaments.

Swans are the tiptop of avian heirarchy, treated like royalty, cossetted and served, able to command all other avians, no matter their rank. It would have been nice to have some sort of indication, some foreshadowing, some hint of a swan’s rank prior to Ori’s shift, so we could have known what was coming. Instead, it comes out of the blue, because, really, why would a swan be royalty in the heirarchy except for the need to fit the fairy tale inspiration? So Raynard leaves Ori at the nest to get used to his new life as an unexpectedly high-ranking bird. Except Ori hates it, is actively hurt by losing his master, by not being allowed to serve, as is his nature.

The D/s in this book is all about the characters’ nature, tied up with their avian species. And I love what Dare does with Ori’s nature as a swan, why and how he’s a better swan when allowed to act upon his submissive nature. This is an incredibly emotional book. Not much actually happens, but every action is deeply felt by both characters (and we do get both Ori’s and Raynard’s viewpoints), their motivations deeply explored, their responses deeply examined. And it’s a very sexy book. Raynard and Ori have a lot of hot sex, all of it D/s flavored.

In fact, it’s got one of my favorite lines so far for a D/s sex scene. Ori, of course, is not allowed to come unless with his master’s express permission. Raynard’s just had a wonderful orgasm, leaving Ori wanting:

The older man pushed the last of his clothes off the bed and collapsed back against the mattress. Ori nibbled at his bottom lip as he watched the dominant settle and rest. There was a sensitive spot on his lip, where his master’s teeth had caught him hard enough to draw blood. He ran his tongue over it, relishing the sensations it sent spiraling through him.

“Come here.”

The first word almost had him spilling onto the sheet. Somehow, Ori managed to shuffle forward without tripping over his orgasm en route. [Seriously, I just love that. Sweet and funny.] His master’s hand wrapped around his cock as he reached his side, his grip tight and perfect.

Ori met Raynard’s eyes. There was a touch of amusement mixed in with the sleepiness and the afterglow, but all the anger and confusion was gone, at least for a little while. Moving his own hands behind his back, Ori knelt next to his master and arranged himself as close as he could to his rest position, his knees spread wide apart and his head bowed to watch his master’s hand toy with him.

Raynard had always liked to hold him like that, to cradle him in the palm of his hand and know that he had complete control over his lover. He was treating him in exactly the same way he had when he was a duck. Ori had never been more grateful to feel so painfully frustrated in his life.

“Come.”

The word was said at his master’s discretion, and according to his own timetable. Ori knew that. He also knew he’d never been more thankful to hear it spoken.

He came. Lights flashing, head spinning and his master’s hand never even slowing its movements. The older man’s palm kept pumping around his shaft long after he had stilled.

Ori whimpered, too sensitive to truly enjoy his master’s touch right then, too lost in his submission to even consider protesting. Gradually his master’s hand slowed of its own accord until it finally left him completely.

Despite my misgivings about the utter absence of females and the sometimes sketchiness of the world building, I really enjoyed this book. It was such a different take on the fairy tale, such a different take on a shifter myth, such a different take on D/s, that all in all, it was way more interesting — and way more well-written — than it was confusing or annoying.

Grade: B

Best regards,
-Sarah

P.S. Loved the cover. Very evocative. (Except that’s only one full wing, not two, which looks kinda funny.) Copy editing from this publisher sucks (I lost all my OMGWTFBBQ highlights when my Mantano app started acting strangely on my Android device, but still, the copy editing sucks.)

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I like your voice. I really do. After all, it’s why I keep trying your books. I’ve even enjoyed some of your Hammer Club series (Kinky Klub of Kinkiness, ahoy! in which Sarah learns about sexual sounding. O.O ). I just wish you believed in plot a little more strongly. I think I’ve just got to stop reading your books, because they never give me what I need and I just get frustrated. It’s not even good “Plot What Plot?” I’m all for hot sex without plot (although it’s better WITH plot) but even the sex isn’t that important, at least to this story.

This story is about Donny, fresh out of college with an Early Childhood Ed degree who can’t get a job because he’s both male and gay. The world sucks in that this is probably absolutely true to life. Anyway, he goes to an interview to be an in-home nanny for Jeff. It’s trial by fire because Jeff is not doing so well and Donny walks in on a disaster-zone. Jeff inherited a three year old boy and a three month old girl. They’re his biological children, but he never expected to have them full-time. Their mother, his very close platonic female friend, to whom Jeff donated his sperm and not much else, died in a house fire. Jeff accedes to Beth’s wishes and commits to taking his kids, but he’s completely out of his depth and with his hours as a chef at a high-end restaurant, he desperately needs a nanny. Jeff and Donny connect over being gay (they call it “family,” a term I hadn’t heard before) and Donny moves in immediately.

And then everything’s perfect. They’re attracted, they make out, they share blowjobs, they become lovers, the kids are fabulously perfect, Jeff’s strangely unbalanced ex-boyfriend, who left when the kids arrived, shows up and tries to destroy everything, Jeff almost lets him by becoming depressed (but no less committed to Donny and the kids) but then he snaps out of it when his sister tells him to and they all live happily ever after. Easy-peasy.

There’s NO tension of any kind until the last quarter when the ex shows up, and then that tension’s completely manufactured and fake feeling because the ex is quite so unhinged. There’s no angst about whether Jeff should be banging his children’s nanny. There’s no angst about anything because these are two perfectly ordinary men who meet, fall in love, join households, and are happy. Their kids are well-adjusted, their relationship is healthy. There’s no barrier to their relationship, which is great in real life (falling in love is almost always an amazing feeling), but it’s not so great for a book.

A little tip: character *conflict* + character *conflict* + relationship *conflict* + happy resolution to all the conflicts = satisfying book. For a romance to be really great, each character has to have their own emotional arc that intersects with a relationship arc. They have to learn something about themselves. They have to become better people because they’re together. They have to get over themselves to make the relationship a priority. And the relationship has to overcome something as well. For a romance to be even worth reading (rather than really great), either one of the characters or the relationship has to have some sort of conflict to overcome. There’s NO conflict in this book until the manufactured foaming-at-the-mouth ex who comes out of nowhere, inflicts random destruction, and leaves. And he’s not even captured by the police and no one seems to care.

Random inconsistencies: At one point, Jeff thinks that he’s been best friends with Beth since kindergarten,but  at another, Beth’s parents says something about them meeting when they were sixteen. That’s…quite a difference there. At one point Jeff complains about not having health insurance, but then makes no demur about being taken to the emergency room in an ambulance for a panic attack (and then there’s no discussion of how to pay for it). I don’t believe that Jeff makes the kind of money as a chef (without ANY advanced degree) that would build him such a beautiful house, but maybe I don’t understand how restaurant economics work.

All in all, fun dialogue and good characters can’t support for very long sloppy research, sloppy writing, sloppy editing, and no conflict at all. Despite the delightful characters, I think I’m done with your books. Even the stories that teach me something (see above re: Hammer Club series) don’t often have emotional conflict. I need to care about these characters, above and beyond them being delightful people.

Grade: C- (ie: reading it wasn’t a complete waste of my time because I *liked* Jeff and Donny, despite their saccharine sweetness)

Best regards,
-Sarah

P.S. That cover is fucking awful. That is all.

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1. REVIEW: The Daddy Catch by Leigh Duncan
2. HALLOWEEN 2-in-1 REVIEW : I Fell In Love With A Zombie by Sean Kennedy and Mummy Dearest by Josh Lanyon
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You’ve done it again. While Bad Boyfriend is perhaps not as perfect (to my mind) as No Souvenirs, I much prefer it to Bad Company. The book focuses on two fascinating men and their relationship with each other and with those that surround them. There’s no intrigue, no mystery. There’s just people trying to live life without getting hurt too much. Eli and Quinn just jump off the page from the first time they touch and they don’t let go until their book is done.

The book opens with Quinn having sex with Peter, his boyfriend of ten years, for the first time in four months. The next day, Peter leaves him because he’s getting married to the woman he got pregnant two months prior. Not only is Quinn in Peter’s wedding to  Chrissy, who has no idea about Quinn’s history with Peter, but she asks Quinn to be the baby’s godfather. So the story really starts the night before the baptism. Quinn’s at the local gay bar with his friend:

“I’m not still in love with him if that’s what you’re saying.”

“So prove it. Put an end to this insanity with a big fuck you.”

“Like how?”

“Show up tomorrow with a drag queen on your arm and ask Peter if he thinks she makes your dick look bigger.” [This is totally one of the reasons I read your books, Ms. Mitchell, for lines like this. Beautiful.]

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“His family. They’ve always been good to me. I couldn’t—” He hadn’t worried about losing touch with Peter’s brother Dennis. They went back too far for that, had been through too much in the Academy together, but he’d thought losing Peter meant losing the rest of the Laurents too—cracking on pop culture with Peter’s sister Alyssa, war games with Peter’s dad, and worst of all, losing Peter’s mom. Claire had welcomed him, mothered him, from the first time Dennis had brought him home on their break from the Academy. Two weeks after Peter moved out, Claire had called to tell him her son’s business was his own, but as far as she was concerned, Quinn was still a member of her family. He couldn’t humiliate them in church like that. [This is the -- very believable because fully explained -- motivation for much of the story. Peter's family is more important to Quinn than Peter is by this point. They're the only family he has and they love him for who he is, whether or not Peter left him.]

But the idea of showing up with a date, a very obviously gay date, someone who Peter would have to notice, got entrenched in Quinn’s brain.

So Quinn finds Eli. Eli is friends with Nate and Kellan, the heroes of Bad Company (Bad Boyfriend stands alone but it’s a little bit richer if you’ve read Bad Company first). Eli is 22 (Quinn is 35). Eli has never not been out, he’s never been able to hide who he is:

Eli had always been out. He didn’t really know how to make it a question of what he was willing to talk about. People took one look at him and knew he was gay. Not for the first time he thought it was a lot harder to look like Quinn, stupid little ponytail and all.

So he works it instead:

Being fuckable was something Eli aspired to every second of the day.

"[He's] A man whore. He hit on me.”

Dennis rolled his eyes.

It was Eli’s turn to fold his arms. “I’ll have you know most gay guys find me hot.”

Dennis looked like he was trying to figure out why.

Anyway…]

So Quinn approaches Eli to ask him to go to the baptism in the morning and somehow gets sidetracked into the hottest sex he’s ever had. The hottest sex Eli has ever had to. And something I haven’t read before in a m/m romance (although maybe I’m not looking hard enough):

He slid his hand down the muscle-ridged torso and landed on what he’d already felt rub on his belly. The fat length of Quinn’s dick stretched up to just under the waistband of his jeans. Eli stroked and let the inside of his wrist find the damp head pushing up past the denim.

“Ooo, Daddy,” Eli purred. “Is this all for me?”

Quinn didn’t stop smiling, but he looked like now they were both in on the joke. “Only if you’re a good boy.”

“Oh, I’m always good.”

Yes, Quinn and Eli get each other off with Daddy kink (I can’t find an explanatory link that’s not fanfic related). FWIW, Daddy kink is not in the slightest age-play or incest-play, or at least it’s not in this book. It’s an older, more dominant man with a younger, submissive man, using “Daddy” and “boy” as their sex-related nicknames. And in this book it’s completely fucking hot.

And…that’s really the book. Quinn and Eli have to find their way to each other, despite the hot sex, despite Quinn’s attachment to Peter’s family, despite Eli’s abandonment issues. Quinn has to appreciate the joy and heat Eli brings to his life, while Eli has to trust that Quinn will never let him go.

This book not only has the best one-liners; it also has some of the best, most deeply personal relationship-related lines:

Every game Eli had played, tied spread-eagle, a hand or paddle bruising his ass, a flogger stinging into his crack, nothing had ever forced surrender on him like this deep, gentle fuck from Quinn. Eli had thought he liked to give up control, take a break for awhile and let a man push sensation onto his body. This was different.

Terrifying.

Because this was what it was like to really lose control. To let Quinn inside, to let him make Eli feel so much more than the amazing sensations of bodies together.

And inside that surrender was safety. Quinn around him, voice in his ear whispering, “I’ve got you. Let me make you feel good, honey.”

But really, one of the best expressions of love I’ve ever read is when Quinn desperately tells Eli:

And even if you end up breaking my heart, I won’t mind, if I get to have you in my life for awhile.

::melt::

This review is much more about impressions than a solid narrative of my reading experience because that’s what it feels like to read it. I’ve read this book at least four times, and each time I read it I get a different, deeper impression of how Quinn and Eli fit together so perfectly, how they work perfectly, how they become better people together by becoming more themselves. It’s easy just to remember the kinky sex, but each time I reread it, the lines I go back to again and again are about the relationship, not the sex.

Problems? First, Quinn and Eli have the big scene in which they figure each other out, figure their relationship out, and then…there’s one last scene with Peter and his family. And while it was a necessary scene for finishing up the loose ends of the story, I vaguely wish the emotional climax (hur hur) finished the book instead. I see why it had to happen that way, and I usually love to see characters just being together with a full understanding of their love for each other, but Quinn had already had his “I feel nothing for Peter anymore” scene before the final two scenes, so this seemed a bit too much.

And second, Peter was just…so fucking selfish I don’t understand how Quinn managed to miss it for so long or how Peter managed not to be an asshole for long enough that Quinn stayed with him. I get that it’s stress that really brings out the worst (or best) in people, so we’re seeing him at his worse, but there needed to be some redeeming something to make me understand why Quinn stayed for so long.

But overall, I adore, once again, how you let the reader work things out for ourselves. You don’t force-feed us the characters’ motivations; you don’t even spoon-feed us. You let us figure it out as the characters do. And that helps me know, viscerally, that these characters are utterly made for each other.

Grade: A-

Best regards,
-Sarah

P.S. OMG, that cover’s brilliant. Those two men are perfect for Eli and his attitude and for Quinn and his smile.

Goodreads | Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. JOINT REVIEW: Bad Company by K.A. Mitchell
2. REVIEW: Regularly Scheduled Life by K.A. Mitchell
3. REVIEW: Collision Course by K.A. Mitchell

I’ve been intrigued by your writing for a while. Your tagline is “Kink, love, and a happy ending. Do you Dare?” which I think is incredibly cute. Honestly, though, I’ve been put off by your publishers (Total-e-Bound and Resplendence Publishing…who?) and by the fact that your series are quite so long (TWELVE stories?!). But I bit the bullet, bought all TWELVE of your G-A-Y series, and I’m going to review ALL of them here.

I chose the G-A-Y series because they’re all m/m, they’re all kink (as all your books are), and they “revolve around various problems gay men might encounter. The stories can all stand alone, and can all be read in any order,” although I’m reading them in order. And the series is complete, so I won’t be missing any. $36 initially seemed steep for 12 stories, but, God, these are SO good, it’s almost worth it.

TL;DR overall impressions for those who can’t be bothered:

• The editing sucks. Doubled words, missed words, and homonyms, worse in some stories than in others. So I was right to be leery of your publisher. And the prices are a bit ridiculous: $2.96 each for 15,000 words each. It just seems…a bit much.
• However! The stories are AMAZING. Oh my ghods, lots of angst; perfect emotional arcs for the short novella size of the stories; amazing distinct, individual characters; hot hot sex.
• The stories are all D/s. You’ve got very little pain play in the stories (except one) and occasional sneers about “sadists” which set up my hackles. But the D/s is fun and very well done and it’s SO fucking refreshing to have stories in which the fact that the characters are D/s isn’t where the angst and trauma is located.
• I’ve read more of your stories than this series (all m/m, though — none of your m/f yet) , and unreservedly recommend every one I’ve read. You’re a very consistent author with strong writing, strong individual characters, great conflict that gets solved satisfyingly every single time, and really great sex.

1. Gaydar
Mathias has incredibly bad luck with men. Either his gaydar is completely messed up, or he’s got really good asshole-dar. He makes an assignation to meet someone in the men’s room of a bar, only to be met there instead — and thoroughly kissed — by the bartender, who has been watching him and lusting after him for months. None of Matt’s experiences have ever been more than fumblings in the dark or an hour in a hotel room, so he’s completely unprepared not only to be with someone who is out, proud, happy, and looking for a longterm relationship, but is also a dominant. He’s very confused and very turned on:

The moment Flynn closed the door, Matt dropped to his knees and reached for the other man’s fly. Flynn easily caught both his wrists in his grip before he even felt denim under his finger tips.

“Don’t do that,” Matt protested.

“Do you remember what your safe word is?” Flynn checked.

Matt nodded. “Yes, but I find it a hell of a lot easier to think when you don’t do that, so if you’re going to start confusing me again, I’d much prefer it if you didn’t hold on to me like that.”

Flynn smiled. “It only distracts you because you like it, don’t you? Being held like this, belonging to another man.”

Matt looked at his wrists, somewhat scared by just how much he loved the feel of Flynn’s hands wrapped tight around his skin. Trying to push that aside, he cleared his throat. “I’d also like to suck you off. I’m good at that. I know what I’m doing with that.”

“I’m sure you do.” He made no move to release Matt’s wrists and let him get on with it.

Matt looked down. “I don’t know what you want from me,” he whispered, surprised by his own honesty. Without knowing what it was Flynn wanted, he had no idea how to keep Flynn wanting anything at all from him and that was even scarier than the lust that shot through his veins every time Flynn’s hands took hold of him.

I liked this story. Told entirely from the perspective of Matt, he’s funny and sweet and sad — partly it’s his unrealized submissive nature that steers him wrong in the first place — and it’s great to see him get his happy ending. Flynn was…pretty much a cipher, but he liked, respected, and wanted Matt and that showed. The only thing that was annoying was Flynn talked about himself in the third person: “It’s not a test. Just show your master how much you like sucking his cock and everything will be fine.” I loved the collaring scene in this story, how it shows that Matt has the courage to go after what he wants. And the sex is hot.

Grade: B+

2. Gay Like You
Tristan’s mother is trying to set him up with someone, anyone. She invites Cory to dinner, someone Tristan knew in high school but who hasn’t been around for years. Cory hasn’t been around because his family threw him out when he was 15. It’s implied, although never stated outright, that he hustled to make do. Certainly he doesn’t know how to interact with Tristan at all without bringing sex into the equation. Tristan shows him that he likes Cory without the sex, but it takes some intense work to get Cory to believe him:

Tristan turned the smaller man around in his grip. “If we have sex like this, you’ll disappear and I’ll never see you again.”

He had no doubt about that. Something about Cody screamed his need to belong to a man who didn’t screw him at the first opportunity. Even if Cody didn’t know it was what he needed, Tristan knew he had to prove that he knew Cody was more than a convenient screw.

“You think I’ll stick around to be turned down again?” Cody snapped. “Thanks, but humiliation isn’t one of my kinks.”

As a result of the waiting, the sex is put off and put off and is intensely emotional when it happens. I LOVED this story. I loved the angst. I loved Cody’s emotional barrier. I loved Tristan’s solution. It’s told from the alternating perspective of both men. And the sex was SO hot. I can’t think of anything wrong with it besides the fact that it was too short. Hits all MY buttons.

Grade: A-

3. Gay Till Graduation
Baxter, who is gay, has lusted after his best friend for years. Spencer, who is bi, is swearing off women, because they might get pregnant and thereby prevent successful college graduation, as it does for a mutual acquaintance, six months before graduation. He’s also intrigued and, we get the impression, pissed that Baxter’s been seen subbing at a kink club. Spencer’s “gay till graduation” vow quickly includes “Baxter’s master till graduation.” Three months later, they’re doing well together, but there are cracks at the edges because Baxter’s convinced Spence is going to dump him as soon as they graduate. Seeing his stress, six weeks later, Spencer’s trying to convince Baxter that everything will be better after graduation, which hurts Baxter terribly, because he thinks Spencer wants to get rid of him.

It’s all one Big Misunderstanding, but for all that, it’s well done and believable. And the fight they have is so well done. Authors can write good sex, good barriers, good resolution, but still fuck up fights. This fight was great and natural and fun. And the make-up sex is, naturally, awesome.

Grade: B+

4. Gay For Pay

This is NOT a Gay For You story, like I thought it would be. Ben Smith is a security consultant and has been charged with finding the missing son of one of his clients. He finds Nate Lockwood for auction as “Gay for Pay” in a ridiculous BDSM club. He buys Nate (hope he can expense that!) and gets him out of the club. He then works out that Nate has promised his father never to say that he’s gay (we find out that it’s because his father is worried that Nate, with his submissive nature, won’t be able to hold his own in business when the gold diggers come out after he comes out — it’s complicated…).

I thought the plot was a little too far-fetched, but Ben’s gentle, dominant guidance of Nate’s first sexual (and first BDSM encounter) was sweet and hot. The story wraps up all the emotional ends very nicely, but there’s one thing at the end that’s odd. Ben gets Nate to sign two documents and then uses the fact that Nate signed without reading them as an object lesson in the fact that Ben’s not a gold digger and doesn’t want any of Nate’s money. But we never find out what the documents are. And that’s just strange.

Grade: B-

5. Gay Divorcee

This one was a little odd. Jones is raving about the possibilities of gay marriage equality at a BDSM club and pisses of Grayson, an older Dom who, it is revealed after he makes a fool of himself ranting about how gay marriage should be banned, married his submissive as soon as he was able to but then found his submissive fucking another man and had to get divorced. So he’s bitter. But not bitter enough to refuse Jones’ offer of spending Christmas together. They hit it off while they each try to figure out what Christmas means to them, but have too much vodka-spiked punch. In their drunkenness, Grayson collars Jones using his submissive’s old collar and when he realizes in the sober light of morning what he’s done, he vows to take things much slower.

What I like about Dare’s work is how she’s got 24 men in these stories, and even though 12 of them are dominant and 12 of them are submissive, they’re all still very distinct from each other, as is the sex and even the D/s interaction between the men. This one is about two men who are really comfortable with themselves and their sexualities finding out what they like about each other and how they can negotiate each other’s baggage and still have a successful relationship, very little angst involved. Gentle, sweet, and hot.

Grade: B

6. Gay Since Today

Tyler Harris and James Ford are at university. Tyler’s had a crush, both romantic and kinky, on James Ford, even though James is straight. Except Tyler’s friend comes to tell him that James is in the gay bar across the street. Tyler rushes there and meets James, who’s just come out (“Gay Since Today”). Tyler takes him back to his place and introduces him not only to gay sex, but also to kinky sex — and he’s right: James is a fabulous dominant. But after their first encounter, it looks like James was pulling off an elaborate April Fool’s joke, rather than really coming out. The Medium-Sized Misunderstanding is dealt with quickly and the boys get back together.

I love reading about an experienced submissive and a virgin-dominant coming into his own. It’s so seldom done because the balance of being “tutored” by the submissive and still exercising dominance is pretty difficult to do. But Dare does a pretty good job. The misunderstanding in the middle was…annoying more than anything else and it seemed that the heroes went through the same realizations in the second half as they did in the first half.

But at the end, there’s a HUGE error about the day on which everything happened. First encounter is March 31, second is April 1, but at the end of the novel, they’re saying it was April 1, and then April 2. Pulled me right out of the story and pissed me off right royally.

Grade: C

7. Gay Pride

Jayden shows up drunk and wearing only a gay pride flag on Crenshaw’s doorstep. Crenshaw is a gay and leather rights activist. Jayden is a reporter who nominally wants to interview him, but really just wants to introduce himself to Crenshaw and hopefully start a relationship. Crenshaw refuses Jayden’s drunk advances that night but allows Jayden to sleep on his couch and in the morning they start to explore their attraction. Crenshaw introduces Jayden to some pretty heavy bondage and Jayden loves it. There’s a hiccup when Jayden announces that he’s a reporter and Crenshaw takes it the wrong way, but Jayden sticks up for himself and gets Crenshaw to admit that he’s wrong in his assumptions.

Over all cute, but not a standout story. I like that Jayden stands up for himself, but the opening scene where he’s naked and drunk and Crenshaw turns him down (rightly so) is a little wince-inducing. But the sex is hot because so unusual

Grade: B

8. Gay Man Seeks Same

Craig McKinley has a huge crush on his coworker Donovan but feels that Donovan’s way out of his league, experience-wise, and anyway, he just wants to find one guy to love and grow old with and he knows One-Night-Stand Donovan doesn’t that. So he goes onto an online dating site and tries to find someone else like him. His first date turns out to be…with Donovan, who is finally ready to admit his interest — his long-term interest. But Craig is convinced that Donovan wants with him what he’s had with all his other lovers. Refusing to consider any alternatives, he figures this is a chance for him to have one night with Donovan before he moves on.

Donovan doesn’t make clear until the very end that he’s interested in anything other than a one night stand, so the reader is taken in as much as Craig is, especially since Craig is the only point-of-view character. Donovan is dominant, of course, so Craig gets to explore bondage with his friend. Confronted with Donovan’s bedroom of kinky delights, Craig feels overwhelmed. Donovan asks him:

“Do you know what my favourite thing is—what I like to play with more than anything in the world?”

Craig shook his head.

“A submissive. Without a man to tie up, the rest is all pointless. It’s the man who goes in the bondage that’s important—everything else is just window dressing.”

I love that answer. :)

Grade: B-

9. Gay Friendly

Ellis is 18 and goes with his cousin to a “gay friendly” hotel, where he finds himself fending off unwanted advances from all the other guests. Thompson helps him out by granting him a collar of protection and then letting Ellis sleep in his room when Ellis’s cousin’s friends get too “friendly” in their room. Over the next week, Ellis and Thompson slowly start exploring each other.

The age difference here was a bit squicky: Thompson is over 30, Ellis is 18. But Dare doesn’t leave this undiscussed. Thompson insists that Ellis ask for everything, that it be obvious to all concerned that Ellis wants everything that happens to him. And it goes deeper than that:

Part of him couldn’t help but believe that Ellis would be far better off with a vanilla boy his own age. Except he’d seen how panicked Ellis became when he was with a man who wasn’t old enough to know how to take his time and appreciate someone who was so new to everything. And he’d seen the way Ellis had soaked up every touch of dominance that had been offered to him.

Bowing his head, Thompson brushed another gentle kiss against the younger man’s lips and forced himself to face the true facts of the matter. He had no intention of telling Ellis he would be better off with another kind of man because the thought of another man laying a hand on him made him want to throttle the guy. He tightened his grip around Ellis’ wrists at the very idea. Ellis whimpered his approval and rose onto his tip toes in the hopes of gaining a deeper kiss.

Because the age difference isn’t ignored, and because Thompson is such a mature character, perfectly aware of how far and how fast he’s falling and how to deal with Ellis, I totally trusted that these two would make it, despite the age difference.

Grade: B

10. Gay Best Friend

And here we have the Gay For You story I was expecting earlier and the opposite type of sub from the previous story. Carlton, who is straight, is best friends with Bryce, who is gay. At the pub one day, Carlton is sort of goaded into kissing Bryce (the other guys they’re with made a bet behind their backs, but Carlton noticed, kissed Bryce, and took the ante for the bet and split it with Bryce). This precipitates Carlton getting trashed, finding out that Bryce is not only gay, but kinky, not only kinky, but a very pushy, brash submissive, and then trying out his Gay-For-You feelings out on Bryce when utterly smashed. Bryce pours him into a cab, but the next time they get together, they explore things a bit more.

This is another story with an inexperienced dominant and an experience submissive. But this submissive is very dominant in his everyday interactions with everyone:

As fantastic a friend as he was, Carlton was more than a little aware that Bryce had the potential to be a complete bastard when you caught him in the wrong mood, and he sure as hell wasn’t the kind of guy to make things easy for a friend who suddenly found himself out of his depth.

No, Carlton couldn’t help but smile a fraction at the idea of him babying someone through anything. Bryce was very much the ‘learn how to swim fast or get back into the shallow end where you belong’ kind of guy.

I love how we get into Donovan’s head, even though the whole story’s from Carlton’s perspective:

The look of easy relaxation Carlton had seen in his friend’s expression earlier in the night deepened with every moment that passed, as if Bryce had focused in on that one task and, if only for a little while, that let him forget about the rest of the world.

I also love that this story has the dominant choosing to bottom for sex, to make a point to his submissive about how “Gay For You” he really is:

When Carlton opened his eyes, Bryce was staring up at him. It was only then that he really realised just how closely every single move he made, his every reaction was being studied. And Bryce would remember it all. He had no doubt about that. Bryce would always know, and he’d always know that his gay best friend knew just how much pleasure shone in his eyes when he rode him for the first time.

Loved this story all around.

Grade: A

11. Gayday! Gayday!

Okay, first thing: Rip and Slade? Really? Scraping the bottom of the name barrel there. >.<

Right. So, Rip is a submissive who has a habit of getting himself in over his head at clubs. At which point he calls Slade, his dominant but straight — or so Rip thinks — friend to come save him. And Slade’s happy to oblige, giving them a great scene each time he does, with no strings attached. Except both Rip and Slade increasingly want strings. Finally, Rip gets himself into a really bad situation…and gets himself out of it again, meaning, he thinks, that his need for Slade’s “white knight” routine is exposed for the ruse it has been for a long time. Then things get really interesting.

I love the twist at the end where Rip thinks he’s messed everything up by NOT needing saving. But I found it incredibly frustrating that he remains utterly blind to the fact that Slade is very very bisexual. Even at the end, Rip thinks:

he had never allowed himself to fall so far into his fantasies that he’d forgotten he was playing with a straight man who was occasionally willing to indulge in a little guy-on-guy kink when given the right motivation.

This is quite so frustrating, because it’s made very clear in their very first scene that Slade comfortably identifies as bi.

That aside, this is a great story. It’s one of the very few that has some pain play in the D/s when Slade punishes Rip.

Grade: B+

12. Gayish

After reading eleven really strong, interesting, sexy stories, it was very disappointing to read the last one of the group. It seemed very scattered and confused and the characters seemed a little off.

Ben Langford, out and proud, is at a gay pride rally in the rain. He sees across the road, standing in the rain, the deli counter guy he’s been lusting after for months. The guy’s either waiting for a bus, or trying to get up the courage to go to the rally. Langford takes him home, dries him off, takes him back out to the rally to introduce him to people, then takes him back home and fucks him. And I understood why he did that, but it dragged the story out and didn’t seem to add much to character development. And Tayton was just a wet blanket. I wanted him to grow a spine and he never really did.

Grade: C-

Overall, except for the last story, I loved these stories. They all did a great job at showing the very beginnings of twelve different relationships between twelve different couples. Each of the characters were distinct, as were all the relationships, all the D/s pairings. This series utterly hooked me on your writing. Which is great, because you seem to do a lot of it.

Amazon | BN | All Romance

Related posts:

1. Winners of the Lydia Dare series
2. REVIEW (actually more of a summary) of The Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning
3. Quadruple Review: SEALed series by Mary Margret Daughtridge

It’s no secret that I love your very British voice, your brilliant characters, all completely different from each other, and your wonderful stories. So I was excited to see you had another story out. And part of me thinks this one is different from your others, but then, I don’t think you really have a “style” or a theme you keep coming back to, or a particular way of writing.

This book is a Gothic romance. It’s a contemporary-set m/m Gothic with some fascinating twists, but it felt to me like the characters were being pushed to act in or even to BE certain ways in order to fulfill the Gothic conventions and requirements. The characters were true to themselves, don’t get me wrong. They don’t act out of character at all — I think you’re too good an author for that. It’s just that their personalities are constructed to fill a particular role in the novel, rather than constructed organically.

Will Golding is visiting his old summer vacation place, the Isle of Wight, with his best friend Edward Barrie, or Baz. They’re there because Baz, a journalist, is supposedly researching a book about ghosts on the island. Except he’s not really. What he’s really researching is a notorious, decades-old murder/suicide, but he doesn’t tell Will that. Will is a personal trainer in London and he’s had a crush on Baz for years. They’re friends with very occasional benefits (almost entirely Will blowing Baz and Baz reciprocating with a handjob). Will knows he’ll never get more but was looking forward to the week with Baz nonetheless. So he’s pretty ticked off when Baz immediately takes up with a woman at the campsite they’re at.

The first night on the island, Will sees a “ghost” swimming in the ocean. He realizes later, when Baz interviews him, that his “ghost” was really horror writer Marcus Devereux, owner of the local “house on the hill.” Will thought Marcus was a “ghost” because Marcus has albinism, which means he doesn’t go out during the day because it’s too bright for his eyes…but also because he suffers from severe social anxiety. Marcus is also kept virtual prisoner by his guardian, Leif, who is very overbearing, even when he’s not there, keeping Marcus psychologically isolated.

The problem with the story is that Baz is an asshole, Will’s a bit thick, and Marcus is a shrinking violet who can’t stand up to his overbearing guardian. I liked Will and Marcus when they were fumbling their ways to each other. Suffering from social anxiety as he does, Marcus isn’t very good with people. So he attempts to reconstruct a scene he had with Will:

But while he was supposed to be writing about scary things happening, all he could think about was Will. He kept turning the evening’s conversation over in his mind. Had he behaved reasonably? Damn it. Pretend this was a scene in a book. A conversation between two characters. Call them…call them Martin and Bill. How would one expect the reader to react to Martin’s behavior?

Marcus started to type.

Scene: Bill has just helped Martin, in manner of Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility (is this foreshadowing? Might Bill turn out to be Willoughby-type rogue and/or cad?)

Martin: Thanks for helping me. Why don’t you come in for a drink?

Bill: Thanks, I will.

Martin: *Leaps upon Bill and sexually harasses him*

Bill: Why don’t we get to know each other first? *Performs highly competent First Aid* Oh, and I think you should know my friend has been asking strange questions about you.

Martin: *In manner of outraged maiden aunt* Get out of my house and never darken my door again.

Oh God. Oh God Oh God Oh God. Marcus wanted to pull a cushion over his face. Maybe he’d suffocate and die and not have to live with this excruciating embarrassment… He’d been an idiot. Will must think…Oh God, Marcus did not want to dwell on what Will must think of him.

Marcus and Will together are sweet, endearing, and funny. Will is utterly unable not to be perfectly forthright. If something’s bothering, he comes right out with it. Marcus is trying to figure out how to have a relationship. Will thinks Marcus is beautiful, Marcus loves how safe he feels with Will. They’re great together and I enjoyed those parts of the book.

But Baz is too much of an asshole and Will too much of an idiot when he deals with his friend, and Marcus too tentative with his guardian for me to enjoy the whole story. And there was too much mystery-type sleuthing of Baz and Will interviewing people all over the island about Marcus’s story. This is very well done, in fact — Marcus would never tell Will about the story, because he’s too private. He doesn’t have to break character for us to get the story, and that’s great. But it doesn’t really forward the relationship at all. Or tell us much else about Marcus’s and Will’s characters, besides the fact that Will is a bit too stupid to figure out what Baz is doing, which was just annoying.

And then the murder attempts start and it all just gets in the way of Will and Marcus together and I didn’t much care for it all. I still loved the two main characters, but I personally don’t like mysteries — go out of my way to avoid them — and this felt too much like a mystery to me. So if readers like mystery that’s more like suspense, actually, with a lot of Gothic thrown in, with their romance, they’ll probably jump all over this. I…don’t. But that’s me.

Grade: B-

Best regards,
-Sarah

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Camwolf by J.L. Merrow
2. REVIEW: Muscling Through by J.L. Merrow
3. NOVELLA REVIEW: Pricks and Pragmatism by J.L. Merrow

*****

Self published superstar C.J. Lyons has been picked up by Minotaur.  I thought that Lyon’s books were romantic suspense but if they are published by Minotaur, it sounds like they are more thriller?  I believe Minotaur was the publisher of Barry Eisler before he accepted a similar offer from Amazon.  Minotaur also bought three books from Allison Brennan for over $500K soon after Eisler turned down his offer from Minotaur.

*****

In non related book tech news, Republic Wireless is offering low cost cellular service because it falls back and uses wifi whenever possible.  The cost? $19 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice service.

As GigaOm reported last week, it will cost only $19 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice. It can offer these low rates because its phones use a special ‘Hybrid Calling’ system that relies on Wifi whenever possible, falling back to cellular connections when Wifi isn’t available. The initial cellular partner is Sprint, but Republic is working to use other carriers as fallback options as well.

Yeah for competition!

*****

Merrian sent me this link to the Australian Romance Reader survey. Book buying overall is down. Digital usage is up. Paranormals is the most read genre.

• The most popular sub-genre this past year was contemporary romance, followed closely by historical romance and paranormal romance. But when asked which one sub-genre they read most, the majority of respondents said paranormal romance.
• The most popular book format is still mass market paperback at 60.4% (but this is down from 69.2% last year). Ebooks on the other hand are up to 24.3% from 19.2% last year.
• Book buying is down this year, with 59.9% buying less than 5 new romance books a month (46.7% last year) and 22.6% buying 5–10 news books (32.9% last year). Those buying more than 15 new books a month is down from 6.7% last year to just 2.9% this year.

Updated to reflect proper pronoun usagee: M/M author A J Llewellyn has been posting as a gay man for most of his writing career.  He’s allegedly written blog posts about coming out, being a victim of gay bashing, and even hired a man to sign for him at a booksigning.  He apologizes to any reader “who feels lied to” but argues that he is a victim herself.  Ugh.

This unsavory appropriation of an oppressed minority group’s life for profit has always been part of my problem with male pen names in the m/m genre.  It’s done, of course, to gain authenticity; to increase sales of books.  It’s not done because someone has some issue with transgender feelings.

Related posts:

1. Tuesday Midday Links: Sad news in Romancelandia
2. Publishing News: Linda Howard admits health condition affects writing voice
3. Wednesday Midday Links: Topless Female Duelists

When Hot Head first came out, I heard good buzz about it, read the blurb, and refused to read anymore. I didn’t even read the excerpt because the blurb sounded so ridiculous:

Since 9/11, Brooklyn firefighter Griff Muir has wrestled with impossible feelings for his best friend and partner at Ladder 181, Dante Anastagio. Unfortunately, Dante is strictly a ladies’ man, and the FDNY isn’t exactly gay-friendly. For ten years, Griff has hidden his heart in a half-life of public heroics and private anguish.

Griff’s caution and Dante’s cockiness make them an unbeatable team. To protect his buddy, there’s nothing Griff wouldn’t do…until a nearly bankrupt Dante proposes the worst possible solution: HotHead.com, a gay porn website where uniformed hunks get down and dirty. And Dante wants them to appear there — together. Griff may have to guard his heart and live out his darkest fantasies on camera. Can he rescue the man he loves without wrecking their careers, their families, or their friendship?

Yes, let’s keep our secret…by doing online porn. Because we’ll never get found out that way, right? And FDNY Gay For You? Just…no. Too ridiculous for me.

But I kept hearing about how good it was from people I trusted, whose tastes match up with mine. And then Heidi Cullinan told me to get off my ass and read it. So I did. And OMG, it was so SO good.

While reading it, I kept flashing back to Evangeline Anderson’s The Assignment, in which two ostensibly straight, but really really close, police partners take an assignment to go undercover to a gay vacation resort owned by, I think, a mob boss (drug runner?). There, in order to maintain their cover, they’re forced into doing more and more sexual acts, almost all of them in front of others. Their sexual encounters, of course, just fuel the perspective character’s unrequited love for his partner. While The Assignment was much more utterly ridiculous (and WHY was it set in the early 1980s, I ask you?), Hot Head had a similar feel to it. Griff loves Dante but has no way or hope of ever telling Dante, so he suffers in unrequited silence with a mighty case of blueballs. Dante secretly loves Griff too and figures out a way to feel out whether Griff is interested by working for the HotHead.com website. He pushes them further and further in their sexual encounters in front of other people, finally breaking down the barriers of heteronormativity keeping them apart so that they can admit their love for each other.

The thing that really worked for me about Hot Head, though, is that Griff, from whose perspective the whole story is told, embraces not only his attraction for Dante, but quickly identifies as gay. He’s not gay for Dante. He’s gay and it’s his attraction to and love for Dante that allows him finally to realize it. He even thinks at one point:

Well, maybe that was the real solution. Maybe if Griff didn’t confess his feelings for his friend to his friend. Maybe he could just float the idea that he might like dudes, yes, like-like. But what if that changed things between them? What if Dante laughed and winked and offered to get him a discount on a HotHead membership? What if Dante felt weird around him after that?

He felt trapped.

Right. The thing to do was to try and get over Dante. He needed to find another guy and get used to the gay thing and move on. Fairytales were bullshit. Happy endings were for suckers. People didn’t love each other forever.

The boys find their way to each other through sex — they use it as an excuse to be able to touch each other, feel each other out both literally and metaphorically. But the absolutely hottest scene in the whole book was the first time Griff watched Dante’s jack-off scene at HotHead.com. It was unbelievably sexy to watch one guy watching the object of his unrequited lust and love masturbate.

One niggle I had: do jack-off websites REALLY pay that much for their models, no matter what their models do? Kink.com, for example, doesn’t pay nearly what HotHead.com apparently paid (NSFW link), and that’s much more hardcore than the mutual masturbation and blowjobs Griff and Dante did for HotHead.com. (Why, yes, I know way too much about this, NOT because I’m interested in modeling — like they’d take me, ha! — but because I tend to click on every link at a website from OCD researcher compulsion.) Anyway…

I loved these characters. They’re so different from each other and fit together so well. I loved the writing. It’s very visual and very understated. I know from your bio that you’ve written for TV and film for years and whether knowing that affected my reading of the book, or whether I would have thought that anyway, I don’t know, but it did feel very cinemagraphic in places, very visually focused, allowing facial expressions to set a scene or answer a question, rather than having the characters actually come out and SAY what they needed to say. This cinemagraphic focus, however, was also occasionally a problem in that you used weird sounds a lot. When the characters are having sex, lines like “Ungh. Unghh. Mmmph. Fuck.” and “Ungh. Ungghh. Aww!” are just ridiculous, not sexy. Either have the characters babble in real language or describe the sounds, but this seemed silly to me.

Overall, though, I can’t WAIT for the sequel. I can’t wait to see the fallout of Griff and Dante coming out to the firehouse and to Griff’s father. I can’t wait for the story of secondary character Tommy. I loved the community Griff and Dante gathered around themselves at the end: family and friends, gay and straight. This is a deeply character-driven book with a silly premise that gets worked out brilliantly.

Grade: B+ and a Recommended Read

Best regards,
-Sarah

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Strongman by Denise Rossetti
2. REVIEW: Damon’s Price by Ali Katz
3. REVIEW: Over Her Head by Nora Fleischer

This book is one of Riptide Publishing’s initial releases as it opens its doors for business. I had high hopes for it: contemporary m/m about a member of our Armed Forces kicked out under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and his hero, a writer of m/m romance. Unfortunately, this is one of the most boring books I’ve ever read. Not actively infuriating — I never yelled at the book, I never rolled my eyes — but just unutterably boring, with cardboard characters, speedbump conflicts, ordinary sex, and no tension whatsoever.

Cole is a former Marine major kicked out under DADT. He has (relatively mild?) PTSD and the first semester of law school is very very hard (cue tiny violins.) Marc is a waiter at a local diner who writes m/m romance on the side. He’s hoping eventually to be able to earn enough from his writing to make it a full-time job, so he’s very committed to it. Cole has breakfast at the diner, Marc’s hot for Cole because he has a fetish for military men,  Cole leaves his cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone in the diner, Marc takes it back to him, Cole invites him in, Marc gives Cole a blowjob, Cole throws Marc out.

And really, the emotional depth of the actions are just about reflected in that summary.

Okay, so Cole gets mad at himself for being an asshole, goes back to the diner to apologize, Marc agrees to go out with him again, and they both agree to take things slowly. But then Cole gets spooked when they touch in public, so Marc gets mad at the closet case. But then Cole realizes he’s being an asshole and it’s all solved! And then they quickly get together to the point that they’re almost living together. Then they ARE living together. Then Cole’s asshole father calls to say his mother fell down, can he come visit, so Cole goes home to North Carolina, and is shocked at what he finds, because his mother has early-onset Alzheimers that no one told him about. So he stays and casually asks Marc to join him. Marc refuses, Cole breaks up with him. Marc changes his mind, goes out to NC to be with Cole, who tells him maybe not. Cole still wants them to be together, but he can’t ask Marc to give up his life. He sends Marc home, eventually goes back himself, and…oh who cares?

Honestly, every barrier is treated like a speedbump. Cole has PTSD! Marc whines him into going to see a psychologist, so that’s all taken care of. ::dusts hands:: Cole’s parents are falling apart and Cole has to be with them, even though his father hates that he’s gay and refuses to get help for his wife. Cole asks Marc to move to NC because he has no idea how long he’ll be there, Marc says no, Cole breaks up with him, Marc changes his mind, Cole changes his mind. Each one of these steps is maybe a conversation. That’s it. Seriously! For example: Marc chucks it all, goes to NC, meets Cole’s father, who throws him out, which Marc just accepts. Marc tells Cole his dad will just have to get used to him:

“Marc, you don’t get it,” Cole said slowly. “He’s an old-school Marine with a very set way of looking at the world. Everything’s either black or white to him. Right or wrong. If he won’t even accept his own son, what makes you think he’ll accept you?” [Oh, okay, so rolling over and letting him live with his own hate is the way to go? Check!]

Marc stared at him, swallowing another sip of wine. He couldn’t have looked more stunned if Cole had hauled off and slapped him. [Yeah, no shit.]

“Look, as much as I appreciate your offer, I think moving here would be a big mistake.” Scratch that — now Marc couldn’t have looked more stunned. [Uh, yeah, me too. What the hell happened to getting so mad he wouldn't come out that you broke up with him. Over the phone?!] Cole scooped up his hand, cradling it between both of his. “Sooner or later you’ll start resenting me for making you leave your friends and your job and your mom behind. [You couldn't have thought of this BEFORE asking him to move? And then breaking up with him because he said no for all of these perfectly valid reasons you're now quoting back to him as if you thought of them first?] I love you, Marc, and I want you to be happy. But believe me, you’ll be miserable here. I don’t even want to be here. I’d give my left nut to get on a plane back to California with you tomorrow.” [So...why'd you ask in the first place? Why no apology for asking?]

“Why don’t we leave your left nut where it is, okay?” [Oh, har har. Humor!] There was that crooked smile he loved so much, and Marc’s comforting arms wrapped around him, pulling him back down beside him. “I like knowing where I can find it. And all your other parts, too.”

He carded his fingers through Marc’s dark curls [wow, I got REALLY tired of this image -- find another way to say "ran his fingers through his hair" please], inhaling the faint piney scent of his shampoo. “Go home and take care of Thomas. I’ll be back to see you when I can.”

“Still think it’ll be a few months?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. But I’ve got a feeling we should get ready for the long haul.”

“All right.” Marc sighed.

They lay there in silence for a while.

And that’s it! That’s the sum total of their conversation. REALLY? Marc came all the way across the country because Cole asked on a whim and then broke up with him when Marc said no, and then Cole completely changes his mind, and Marc says “all right” and that’s it! Can we have a little more emotional affect between these two men?

No, apparently not.

This book could have been amazing. Cole could have been deep and fascinating. He’s never had a boyfriend before, doesn’t know how to treat one, doesn’t know how to believe that he himself deserves a relationship. He misses the Marines, hates law school. Except…nothing’s dealt with beyond mentioning it, let alone examining it. Marc actually writes a story that matches their story, as they’re living it, but again, it’s just mentioned. There’s no THERE there, nothing insightful, nothing interesting, nothing beyond, “ooh, a writer and a Marine! Nifty!” Nothing about a writer having insights about what’s happening to him, or meta-commentary about his own story, or…anything.

(And that’s leaving aside the ridiculousness about how Cole’s parents could not have been living in the same house in Raleigh NC his whole life if his father had actually spent 30 years in the Marines, because there are no Marine bases in Raleigh and they would have moved around more than that anyway. But whatever…)

Anyway, it didn’t take long to read this story because plot points was all it was. But I can’t imagine myself ever reading anything else you write if this is the level of your story-telling ability.

Grade: D

Best regards,

-Sarah

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Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Marrying the Royal Marine by Carla Kelly
2. REVIEW: Mitzi’s Marine by Rogenna Brewer
3. REVIEW: Sureblood by Susan Grant

Dear Mr. Kennedy,

I’ve been known to describe your first novel, Tigers and Devils, as Nick Hornby meets Shaun of the Dead, even though there are no zombies wandering its Melbourne setting (the friend/family relationships remind me of those in the movie). I Fell In Love With A Zombie shares Shaun‘s zombie-filled setting but is set in a more grim and less populated landscape. Jay is the sole survivor among his friends, family, and neighbors after a flu-like virus sweeps through the land and kills a majority of the inhabitants. Even more cruelly, all the dead don’t stay dead; some return as hungry, violent and freakishly strong creatures. Jay has lost his partner, Mike, to the virus, and he hasn’t heard from his parents or his brother’s family, and now he’s running out of food and fuel. He fends off a zombie attack, uses his newly acquired survival skills to hotwire a car, and sets off into the country. On his journey he meets more zombies, a few humans in similar straits to his, and a lot of desolate, abandoned countryside. But by the end of the story he’s not alone, and while the future is uncertain, the fragile HFN feels almost optimistic.

This is at times a brutal, violent, and deeply sad story. But in your hands, Jay’s essential decency and desire to keep going light the darker aspects and keep the reader hoping that something good will come to him. Part of this feeling stems from the prose style. For the first few chapters of the book there is no dialogue, just Jay’s first person POV, and except for one sequence he bears most of the burden of conversation and exposition. This is a tricky feat to pull off, because the narrator’s voice becomes even more crucially important than in usual first person. But I took to Jay’s voice immediately and although I’m generally kind of squeamish, I was so caught up in the story I didn’t even have to read by squinting through my fingers. As he prepared to leave behind everything he knew, Jay’s matter-of-fact voice conveyed how quickly his nightmarish existence had become normal:

I hoped zombies were late sleepers, took one last look around my house, saying goodbye to all my familiar things, and walked out the door. I hoped maybe one day I could return, but shrugged it off. Even if things got better, I would want to start life somewhere new, where memories of Mike, my family and my friends wouldn’t haunt me everywhere I turned.

I knew my own gas tank was empty, so I headed across the street to where the Davisons lived. They were a responsible yuppie family, with a double income and two kids. They had also been the first to die on our street. I was home from work, looking after Mike, when I saw the ambulance arrive and cart their bodies away, sealed up in hazmat bags.

Anyway. They would surely have a full tank. They were that kind of people.

Jay encounters another uninfected human just when he needs help, but it turns out to be a mixed blessing (to put it mildly). They provide each other a respite from their aching loneliness, but it can’t be called pleasant. Jay finds that his unresolved grief for Mike is even more painful to bear in the company of strangers than his loneliness, and he doesn’t trust this new situation. So he moves on, through the post-apocalyptic landscape, boosting cars until they run out of fuel and fending off more zombies. Just when he thinks he is about to run out of luck, he meets a zombie who doesn’t want to kill or eat him, for the most surprising of reasons, and this exception to apparent “zombie law” makes Jay wonder if the effects of the virus have been fundamentally misdiagnosed. To give too many details would spoil the story, so I’ll just say that Jay and his zombie reach a satisfying level of understanding and companionship, and while they have to continue moving on, they do so together, eventually adding a third member to their little party.

There are a number of layers to this short novel. I don’t think there’s much that is new, but key aspects of the context and the questions raised by the transformation are dealt with thoughtfully and sometimes in unexpected ways. The road trip reminded me of scenes from Children of Men more than, say, Mad Max, perhaps because there still seems to be hope among the devastation and loneliness. Jay has an essentially sunny disposition that somehow manages to endure despite so much evidence to the contrary. There is one essential, painful, and extremely unromantic sex scene, but there are also scenes of love and surprising tenderness.  I really enjoyed this novella, and I think if I went back to read it a third time, I’d find even more in it.

Grade: B+

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Dear Mr. Lanyon,

I sat down with Mummy Dearest expecting a light, tongue-in-cheek holiday novella. I got all that, but I also found that the story had deeper and more nuanced characters than I had anticipated, and as a result this tale of a quickie meet-cute attraction felt like something more substantial and enduring. Drew Larson is a junior professor who wants to bolster a tenure case already viewed with suspicion because of his romantic relationship with his department chair, Noah. Advised that an additional peer-reviewed article will improve his chances, he takes a quick trip to tiny Walsh, Wyoming, home of the Lasse Dime Museum’s Egyptian mummy exhibit.

Drew’s plans to examine and photograph Princess Merneith are thwarted by the appearance of Frasier Fortune, host of the cable documentary series The Mysterious. Initially wary of each other, they agree to join forces and Frasier films Drew’s examination of the mummy for his show.  Drew initially rebuffs Frasier’s overtures, but after a seemingly relationship-ending phone call with Noah, he joins Frasier for drinks, dinner, and mummy-related adventures. The entire story takes place over about 24 hours, and while the ending definitely suggests an ongoing relationship for Frasier and Drew there are a lot of loose ends. Mummy Dearest’s subtitle is The XOXO Files, Book 1, so the reader is clearly warned that the story and relationship are ongoing.

Drew is a classic Lanyon protagonist. He’s smart, handsome, prickly because he’s consciously insecure about his tenure and subconsciously about his relationship, and somewhat cynical. Frasier seems pretty uncomplicated at first, and he probably his, but he turns out to be more interesting than our initial introduction to him suggests. He’s not intellectual, probably not as smart as Drew, but he’s good at his job. And he’s a genuinely warm and decent person:

His face bumped into mine and his mouth latched on. I hadn’t been thinking in terms of kisses. That seemed something that belonged to another time, place, relationship, but the softness of his lips and beard—contrasting with his considerable hunger—robbed me of protest.

And then I didn’t want to protest. I think it was the ChapStick that did it; he tasted like ChapStick and Jack Daniels. That reminder of human vulnerability got to me in a way that polished experience wouldn’t have. Not that he had lied about the experience. This was a man who knew his job, but underneath his bravado was something I totally understood. Instead of insecurity making Fraser mean and greedy, he was generous. He kissed me with such sweetness it was almost unbearable. And he kept kissing me, giving me barely time to breathe, let alone think.

Drew’s wonder at Frasier’s generosity and straightforward affection sharpens his realization that his relationship with Noah required emotional compromises he never fully acknowledged. Frasier repeatedly cuts to the heart of the deals Drew has been making with himself:

“I think you’ve been underreacting for two years. I think you’ve been brainwashed. You’re smothering your personality to try and adapt yourself to this old geezer.”

“Fifty-five isn’t exactly—”

“I’m not talking earth years. I’m talking stick-up-your-butt years. He’s, like, seventy-five in stick-up-your-butt years. My God. Next you’ll tell me he drags you to the opera or flower shows or some shit like that. How many times a month does he make you visit his mother?”

I started to laugh. As a matter of fact, we visited Mirabelle every other weekend.

As an academic, one thing I really liked about Drew’s attraction to Frasier is that it captures why academics wind up in relationships with non-academics. They may not understand everything you do, or be as book-smart, but they can sure cut through the crap.

The plot is enjoyable and not too farfetched (hey, it’s a Halloween mummy story), and the Wyoming context is rendered with your usual dexterity. There were a few tiny glitches. It is highly unlikely that a bar in a Wyoming town the size of Walsh (let alone Walsh itself) would be non-smoking. And “instructor” was used interchangeably with “professor,” but they are distinct ranks in US academic parlance. But these weren’t enough to pull me out of the story and I had little trouble suspending disbelief, especially because so much of Drew’s career anxiety rang true and the rest of the Wyoming setting felt right on target.

For readers who think the Lasse Dime Museum is a stretch, I would just point them to real-life “museums” like this one (and there are many more out here in flyover country). The solution to the mystery seems particularly apropos, and I look forward to more installments with Drew and Frasier. I would also really like to see Noah get his comeuppance.

Grade: B+

Goodreads | Amazon | BN | nook | Sony | Kobo

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Petit Morts 6-10 by Jordan Castillo Price, Josh Lanyon, and Sean Kennedy
2. REVIEW: All She Wrote by Josh Lanyon
3. REVIEW: Snowball in Hell, by Josh Lanyon