REVIEW: American Fairytale (Dreamers #2) by Adriana Herrera
Fairy-tale endings don’t just happen; they have to be fought for.
New York City social worker Camilo Santiago Briggs grew up surrounded by survivors who taught him to never rely on anything you didn’t earn yourself. He’s always dreamed of his own happily-ever-after, but he lives in the real world. Men who seem too good to be true…usually are. And Milo never ever mixes business with pleasure…until the mysterious man he had an unforgettable hookup with turns out to be the wealthy donor behind his agency’s new, next-level funding.
Thomas Hughes built a billion-dollar business from nothing: he knows what he wants and isn’t shy about going after it. When the enthralling stranger who blew his mind at a black-tie gala reappears, Tom’s more than ready to be his Prince Charming. Showering Milo with the very best of everything is how Tom shows his affection.
Trouble is, Milo’s not interested in any of it. The only thing Milo wants is Tom.
Fairy-tale endings take work as well as love. For Milo, that means learning to let someone take care of him, for a change. And for Tom, it’s figuring out that real love is the one thing you can’t buy.
Review:
I had trouble writing this review – as if it would not write and I had trouble grading it, so please take this into account. This is the second book in the series about four friends, who built their lives in the United States, but whose roots are also in different countries of the Carribean. I liked the first book in the series well enough to continue reading and in this one Cami\lo Brlggs gets his dream of a happy ending. It was mentioned in the first book I believe that Milo wanted Romance with the Capital R or something like that but he also was burned more than once and basically he frets about what could go wrong and very often his fretting about his hook ups/boyfriends does come true, becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Milo is also a social worker who works in a non profit with survivors of domestic violence. At the gala which he and his colleague Ayako attended from their agency, Milo meets Tom and they have quite memorable sex (for them – I say it because I really don’t think sex was anything to write home about, but as long as they enjoyed it, I guess I rolled with it). Milo tries to forget Tom, only that does not quite work out that way.
When the next day at work starts, the director of the his agency Melissa excitedly tells him about a wealthy donor, who wants to finance the renovation of the shelter and can do a whole lot of good for their agency and by extension for their clients and since Milo was responsible for whatever small renovations they were planning to do before the donor came in with the promise of a lot of money, Melissa makes him a point person to meet with the donor and to give him all the updates he wants as to how the project will be moving along.
Ooops, Tom and Milo are both surprised to see each other again. They both behave honorably and Tom frets about not taking advantage of him and Milo tries to keep himself in check too, but of course the romance cannot move along that way. I did appreciate that the characters at least gave thought to possible issues, and Milo specifically mentioned that he did check and there was no rule about not dating a donor, so eventually they start to date.
Tom is a millionaire, or maybe more than that and I have to say that I am not very familiar with the trope “lets date a millionaire and see what happens”, or whatever the correct description of that trope is. I really don’t read about romancing millionaires – not interested much, but on the other hand it also means that I was not too tired of such plot development.
The author does everything possible under the moon to show us that Tom is a good person. He made his money from hard work (organizing the start-up with his friends which was an awesome thing to help immigrants). He gives millions to charity and to the projects which he intends to follow through on helping. He is humble and beyond generous. I had no problem with Tom as a character to be honest .
Having said that, the source of tension between them was their different economic situation in life which made sense to me, I thought it was quite real that even when people try to do their best sometimes they make mistakes and let me be honest once again – while I understood what Milo wanted from Tom and with Tom, I absolutely could not blame Tom for attempting to help at the end. I thought Milo was not behaving rationally because no, I didn’t think that in that specific situation his “plan” worked or that he even had a plan that made sense. Again, I totally get that Tom went against his wishes, but I had sympathy for him.
But since I felt for Milo throughout the story a lot, at the end it kind of balanced it all out for me . Man I could relate to him worrying about the worst and then it becoming true. They felt like real people who made mistakes and while I was a bit indifferent to the sex scenes as I mentioned previously, I thought that overall the guys had more tension between them than the couple in the first book and that it was a good thing.
Grade: B
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