Something Like...a Classic

I was hooked on Jay Bell's writing midway through Something Like Summer.  His prose is moving and he knows how to frame a story so that readers become hooked and stay hooked as he reels them in closer and closer to his characters.

In Something Like Autumn, Bell pushed all my buttons as I read about Jace's past.  I'd saved this book for a flight from California to Italy, knowing that I'd have hours of uninterrupted reading time.  I would have been wiser to remember the effect Bell's writing has on me and saved the book for home when I wasn't planning to go out in public.  As it was, I ended up at 30,000 feet or whatever the cruising altitude is and sobbing over the poignant story.  I'm sure the man next to me thought he'd gotten the seat next to the lunatic since my rose-covered Kindle doesn't look menacing at all.

At any rate, I'm happy that my DIK review of Something Like Autumn has been added to the AAR database and might lead others to read this great gay romance.

Rick R. Reed Reigns

The first Reed book I read, Chaser, was refreshing in that it didn't idealize gay men's perfect bodies, handsome (always handsome) faces, and generally perfect physical attributes.  In fact, Kevin's chubby, not svelte or built, and Caden, his eventual lover, is turned on by chubby.

The roadblock to their HEA is a thoroughly unlikeable guy named Bobby, who my mind's eye saw as the kind of guy Matthew Lillard played in the movie She's All That only with a mean edge.

So when I read that Reed was going to use Bobby as his next hero, I knew Reed had his work cut out for himself.  I also knew that Reed has been writing for quite a while, so meeting the challenge might not be as daunting as it first appeared.

Consequently, when I read Raining Men, I wasn't so much surprised that it was such a spectacular book as much as I was pleased.  Like a lot of gay fiction, Raining Men isn't an easy story to digest, but it's an honest and hard-hitting one, and I'm proud to be able to bring it to romance readers' attention with a Desert Isle Keeper review today.

Pour It On

Marie Sexton's Never a Hero, while nicely written, seemed to be reaching as if there's a writers' contest to see who could come up with the romance hero with the most challenging personal problems to overcome.  So Sexton invented Owen Meade whose congenitally amputated arm and debilitating stutter make him a tough sell as romantic hero.

But since this story is set in Tucker Springs, Colorado, where romance's least likely heroes live, Owen is a shoe-in for love.  That's not true of Nick, the guy who falls in love with him.  Nick, a veterinarian, seems to be fairly low-key and easy going.  Unlike the gay bar bouncer Denver Rogers in Heidi Cullinan's Tucker Springs novel, Nick isn't beefy enough to run interference for Owen.

So I was confused as to why Nick is attracted to Owen, even though Nick has a ballsy sister with the same type of amputation.  Sometimes it seems to me in gay fiction, the gay hero finds another gay man and whether they like one another or not, it's a match made in heaven.  But from my viewpoint, it's just a like-minded warm body to stave off loneliness--not what anyone wants to confuse with true love.

Grime, Punishment and Love Hypothetically

I'm not sure why Z. A. Maxfield felt compelled to begin a new series since her St. Nacho series, especially the first one St. Nacho's and the last one The Book of Daniel, is so good.  But she has with Grime and Punishment which has an interesting premise in a former firefighter sidelined by a serious injury starting a crime clean-up business.

I can see where the adventure of fleshing out a new environment is enticing for a writer, but still, I'll miss the ambiance of the St. Nacho crowd, particularly the older guy who owns the motel and the odd collection of people at the gym.

Still, Maxfield is the kind of quirky, readable author who will pull me in no matter what she writes, so I guess in the end, all is good.  Maxfield will keep writing and I'll keep reading her writing.

On another note, my review of Love Hypothetically ran at AAR, and I didn't make note of it.  Love's a really quirky book, speaking of quirkiness.  It's a sequel to Frat Boy and Toppy, my nominee for good book with the worst title.  Frat Boy bled into my interest as a former college instructor because the frat boy of the title plagiarizes a paper in order to get the teaching assistant's notice.  As a person who's dealt with her share of plagiarized essays, I loved to see this novel and nearly sympathetic excuse for cheating.

Like Maxfield, Tenino, the author of Frat Boy and Love, is a writer I'm watching.  And also like Maxfield, I expect Tenino will do really well when she finds her niche.

No Fire Inside

Readers either love or hate author Kristen Ashley's work.  I was on the fence with her motorcycle gang quartet, the last of which was my favorite, Motorcycle Man.  In it there was a strange character named Hop Kincaid who was kind of an enforcer for the Denver gang.  An even more disturbing character was Lanie Heron who got shot defending a boyfriend who had gotten in too deep with the mob and wasn't worth the effort to stand beside.

Bringing them together in Fire Inside was definitely a risky proposition, a risk that didn't really pay off for me.  In fact, the further into the book I got, the more I realized that the story was merely a short story which had been blown up to novel size through repetition and inane plot twists, two ploys not up to Ashley's previous standards of writing.

So I've got to wonder why Ashley felt compelled to write the book.  Did fans want to see Lanie finally get a guy worth defending?  Did fans like Hop so much that he needed his own book?  Considering that she drew Hop in Sam Elliott's Fatal Beauty image, I feel that she does both Hop and Elliott a disservice.

While I Was in Rome

While I was away, my reviews of The Unforgiving Minute by Sarah Granger and A Shot at Forgiveness by Cardeno C ran on the AAR site.  Both are easy reads and pretty good books, the first about the world of tennis competition and the second revolving around a school bully ashamed of his actions as an adult.

In the Granger book, I learned a lot about the psychology of winning and the importance of a winning attitude that I've never thought about before.  For some reason I thought the younger the competitor, the less stress in competing.  I thought that the parents were the ones driving the competitive spirit, not the competitors themselves.  Granger makes it very clear that I was wrong.

The Cardeno story illustrates how the sins of the past can weigh very heavily on the present, especially when the sins of the past were committed as a cover-up, masking the perpetrator's real nature at the expense of an innocent party.  Cardeno deftly handles uncomfortable moments and makes protagonist Rafi Steiner believably resistant to former bully Isaac's advances.  All the angst of whether to believe a guy who was relentless in his harsh treatment in high school makes the reader squirm, just as Rafi did when he was the victim.  Cardeno has just the right touch to make me believe that Rafi could and should change his mind about Isaac and be willing to see him now as romance material.

For a quick summer read, I recommend both.