I found this book by looking for your backlist after I fell into reading your new Loose Id release (that I will review when I’ve finished it). I finished this one first, though, because it’s shorter. And I couldn’t stop reading it.

Connor works in a video store with his roommate Boyd. One day, Dane comes into the store to take out a movie. Connor and Dane spend three days dancing around the issue of whether they like each other, then two weeks of slowly building a relationship. That’s it. And seriously, that doesn’t sound like enough, but I could NOT stop reading. I HAD to know how it ended. Srsly.

I know I said in my review here that no conflict in a story was an issue for me. And Subtle Build has very little conflict. But it’s a short little thing — 60 pages or so — and the tension between these two adorable characters of will they or won’t they get through their own insecurities is amazing. In My Summer of Wes there was no tension around the relationship — the characters get together very early and stay together, with no internal barriers to get over. In Subtle Build, there’s no outside plot at all–this is just two guys meeting and falling for each other — but the internal tension, the sexual heat, the “let’s not screw this up because we’ve got something important here” was just perfect. So while there was no deep emotional angst, no secret in their past, nothing that needed to be healed, there was still tension and worry and hope and sweet seduction.

The story is told entirely from Connor’s third person perspective, but you don’t lose Dane’s character at all. They’re distinct people, wonderful characters. You’ve got a gift for dialogue and emotional representation:

Connor’s phone broke without him realizing it. He talks with Dane after he figures it out:

"I thought it was because I wasn't putting out. I saw you, what? Five, six times? And all you ever got from me was a kiss."

"It's fine," Connor said in a rush. "I don't mind, honestly. I can wait."

"Really? Could you wait for, say, a month?"

"Yes. Definitely."

"You don't even know if I'm worth it," Dane said, an odd edge to his tone.

"I'll take the risk."

Dane was silent for a moment. "What about six months?"

"What?" said Connor, before he could stop himself. He cleared his throat. "Um. I mean. Yeah, if that's what it takes. I could try…" Even he could hear the uncertainty in his voice, and he grimaced. "You know what? I want to wait. We're waiting."

"Really?" said Dane. "That's a shame, because I was kinda hoping we could forget the whole waiting bullshit and you'd let me suck your cock next time I saw you."

Despite this excerpt, there’s almost no sex in this book. But I totally didn’t need it. There’s enough sexual tension to fill 300 pages.

This story was laugh-out-loud funny, but more than that, it was sweet. It was sweet and gentle and I could FEEL these two men just fall for each other. I could feel them yearning, I could feel them clicking, and I could feel them a bit pole-axed about how quick it was. It was amazing, and OMG, I can’t wait to read your Loose Id release.

Grade: A-

Best regards,
-Joan/Sarah F.

Book Link |  Fictionwise |  Cobblestone Press

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Considering I put this book both on the Recommended Reads for December and on my Best of 2008 list, I figured I should actually review it. Not that it’s not a pleasure to reread such a great story.

I love the way this book starts:

Eighties dance music blasted through the Yaris’s speakers as Joey Miller flew down the passing lane of I-10, dancing in his car.

That tells us everything we need to know about Joey. He’s cute, he’s expressive, he’s impulsive, and he’s very very gay. Seconds later, he witnesses an accident and, do-gooder that he is, stops to help an unconscious woman trapped in a minivan and calms her toddler. At the accident, he meets Aaron Chase, a paramedic, equally well-described in his first words:

Flashing lights, sirens and caffeine were near the top of Aaron Chase’s very short favorites list. All three gave him a rush that was almost as good as sex-’which took up at least the top five on that list.

They are attracted to each other and fuck in Aaron’s ambulance after all the excitement is over, starting a tentative connection that they both work hard at both torpedoing and also strengthening without quite knowing why.

Joey has two problems. First off, he falls in love very easily:

It didn’t matter how many times it had been wrong, he still wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe it when he kissed a guy and everything inside said him. It had been wrong about Mark and Noah and Jorge and Tom and the whole list going right back to kissing Eduardo under the bleachers in tenth grade. Or maybe before. When he’d been three and told his mom he was going to marry his best friend Cody.
It didn’t happen with every guy, of course. Because then Joey would have a whole hell of a lot more than-’shit, he was into double digits-’ten ex-boyfriends.

And second, he not only goes around with a soundtrack in his head of music that accompanies everything he does, but he has a script he expects his relationship to follow, and when they do, he gets kinda bored. This being a romance, of course, Aaron refuses to follow Joey’s scripts right from the start, making the relationship real. Master manipulator that Joey is–in the nicest, sweetest way–Aaron bulls his way through everything and just does what HE wants to do–and that’s mostly Joey.

Aaron has a few problems of his own. He’s had a very crappy childhood and isn’t really one for boyfriends — he’d much rather a quick, emotionless fuck. He’s also a bit of an asshole. But we see enough from his perspective that we understand why he’s an asshole.

You have a gift for writing sex. There are many sex scenes in this book, but not only do each of them advance the plot and the characterizations, but they also are completely different from each other without being obvious about it. It doesn’t feel like, “Well, here’s the first sex, and here’s the blowjob, and there’s the dildo scene. Oh! and spanking…” Instead, the scenes are brilliantly seamless, fun, exciting, and oh so hott! In one scene, Aaron has Joey talk him through giving Joey a handjob so he can get it right — it’s one of the hottest things I’ve ever read, because is shows how much Aaron cares about getting it right and how unabashed Joey is about sex. One spanking scene in particular brings the characters closer together in ways that only BDSM can, and you do a brilliant job of showing how and why that closeness is created and how amazingly erotic it can be.

I also really like how not only how the sex is an integral part of the story, showing us how the characters and how they grow and mature and fall in love, but their careers are too. In fact, their careers provide both the tension of and the resolution to the story and it’s so great to see jobs be more than something the characters seem to ignore while they get it on. Aaron is an adrenaline junky of a paramedic, gruff and competent, who has managed to raise four siblings through awful family circumstances and fourteen years of battles with social services. Joey, of course, is a social worker, raising all Aaron’s hackles immediately. However, while Aaron can’t stand Joey’s job, it also is an integral part of the man with whom Aaron so reluctantly falls in love. And (desperately trying to avoid all spoilers here!) their careers are what bring about the reconciliation of the story’s tension in fascinating and completely unexpected ways. Kudos for the ending, actually. I can’t talk too much about it, but it’s amazingly done.

There’s just slightly too much of Joey’s ex-boyfriend who was the hero of one of Mitchell’s previous novels. While Mitchell avoids rehashing the entire previous book, thank goodness, Noah and the new boyfriend are sometimes just a little too overpowering.

That aside, this is my favorite type of romance novel: just a romance. No mystery, no “must save the world” suspense, no paranormal aspects, nothing but two men meeting, overcoming their own internal obstacles so that they can truly fall in love, and finding a way to be together permanently. And it’s brilliantly written, with strong, witty dialogue, distinct characters, sharp descriptions, emotional depth and breadth and interest, and scorching sex.

Grade: A-

This book can be purchased in ebook from from Samhain.

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I’m not big fan of holiday stories so one featuring two Christmas haters is probably perfect for me. There’s something deliciously ironic about the self referential nature of the story and the characters attitudes toward the holiday. It seems to me that they would hate Christmas themed stories.   

Noelle Bradenton overhears a man and a woman in a dressing room having a very provocative conversation and assumes that they are having sex. Then the man with the sexy voice exits the dressing room and accidentally falls into her room. Their eyes meet and a zing occurs; they kiss but the saleswoman interrupts their interlude and before they know it, Noelle and the sexy dressing room guy are separated without getting the others’ name.

Mark Santori, the aforementioned sexy dressing room man, is a Chicago detective, and by happenstance meets Noelle again when the youth and woman’s shelter where she works is robbed by a Santa and Mark is sent to investigate.

Despite the seemingly ridiculous dressing room setup which is actually addressed by both Noelle and Mark (i.e., Mark confronts her with about kissing him if she really thought he was having sex next door with another woman, telling her that she was “really twisted.”), their meet and greet works. There are other, far fetched concepts in the book that required larger leaps of faith – much of it having to do with the whodunit aspect of the story.

In the beginning, I thought that the sex scenes read very exaggerated. I think that the slow motion way of describing the scene worked to make it more clinical than hot. I didn’t find this to be true toward the end of the story when the couplings tend to appear more spontaneous.

I found Mark’s character to be described inconsistently. He self maintained that he   didn’t want to be in a relationship (thus furthering the conflict) but his internal narratives were belied by his near constant pursuit of Noelle and his quick movement from “I want to have an affair” to “I have feelings for you” stage.   

Noelle, having been hurt badly from a previous relationship, wants to only have anonymous sex with a stranger (no thought to how dangerous this might be). Mark plays that role for her, trying to ultimately convince her to give up the artifice.  Nicole struggles to remind herself and Mark of the purely sexual nature of their encounters when her nature is to nurture and to nest.   This was the more interesting part of the story.

As I said previously, the latter half of this book worked better for me than the first half.    C+

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or from the Sony eBookstore.

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Jay, the poor misguided fool who thought she wanted to be a lawyer and now who cannot read for pleasure because all she does is read opinions, really enjoys your books and has been trying to get me to read them for months now. You Don’t Know Jack was an ebook and I jumped at the chance to try you out. Soooo glad I did.

If you allow me to pigeonhole you a bit, I would characterize your voice as Meg Cabot all grown up. Your characters are all very nice. Usually that is something that drives me nuts but in your book, as with Cabot’s, I end up liking the characters in spite of myself. Case in point is your heroine. Jamie Peters is a social worker bent on saving the world. She specializes in rehabilitating convicts and still believes that she can effectuate change. Her need to fix things bleeds into her personal life and she is always taking on lost causes, making them into perfect boyfriends for the next girl. (this reminds me of a Jayne Ann Krentz heroine). This doesn’t seem to bother Jamie because she hasn’t loved any of her exes. She really doesn’t want to fall in love given her father’s abandonment of her family when she was young but she’s open. When one of her projects, a transsexual, psychic former felon, tells her she is going to meet her soul mate soon in a food related incident, she finds herself checking out the other shoppers at the local market, feeling up one melon too many.

The psychic also tells her that she should not let a deception stand in the way of being with her soulmate. Jamie hates deceptions. She hates liars. She would never be with someone who lies.

Jack is a day trader who made it big and got out of the rat race while he was still young. But being retired and in your 30s has major drawbacks such as boredom. In reviewing grant requests for his family’s charitable foundation, he finds that his sister’s roommate’s Jamie has submitted a grant proposal. Unfortunately, the financials accompanying the proposal reek of SEC violations. He decides to check Jamie out and basically begins stalking her. One day he plans to bump into her “accidentally” and strike up a conversation in hopes that this will lead to more information about her grant proposal. Jack falls for Jamie, almost immediately, and proceeds to lie out of his ass to get her to fall for him.

There are some big flaws in this book such as Jack’s motivation for following Jamie and trying to investigate her. There is a sexual marathon that takes place in the middle of the book and goes on and on and on. I couldn’t decide if you have to have a certain percentage of your story full of sex else it doesn’t qualify as a Brava or what. Additionally, your characters tend to be either nice or evil. They are fairly one dimensional. The flaws don’t hamper my enjoyment of your story. It was an easy, light hearted read with an oddly placed sexual marathon. I enjoyed all of it, in spite of myself. B.

Best regards,

Jane

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store and other etailers.

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