An Endearing Love Triangle

So many people I know can relate to Sam (in Taboo for You by Anyta Sunday) who is about to turn 30 and feels as if he hasn't lived in his 20s.  Sam's the responsible guy who became a father at 15, dropped out of school to get a job to take care of his wife and new baby, and didn't look back even after he and his wife divorced.  Sam's wed to responsibility, but as his son is about to turn 15, Sam is suddenly struck with how many years he hasn't lived that his son Jeremy will have.

What to do?  Sam makes a list of 10 Things I Want to Do Before I Turn 30.  The list isn't remarkable, for the most part including things like "get drunk" and "change my appearance."  Only a few things are remarkable enough that Sam has no idea how he will fulfill them, especially "swim with sharks" and "have taboo sex--or any sex."

Into the ring steps Sam and Jeremy's gay neighbor Luke, who's just outed himself to his family and is feeling a little shaky about declaring himself gay.  But if there's one thing Luke loves, it's Sam and Jeremy, so Luke's willing to go to the mat for them.

Anyway, my latest review for All About Romance conveys how much I loved the book.  Sunday has been an up and down author for me in the past, but this book convinced me to take her much more seriously in the future.

A Complicated Premise Done Well

I wonder why Brad Boney decided to write such a complicated story for his second outing as a novelist.  No matter the reason, however, he does a very good job keeping the characters and plot lines easy to follow in The Return, reviewed today at AAR.

There are so many places where the two sets of four gay friends (eight characters in all) could have been so entangled especially since the pivotal character of Stanton Parrish is so critical to both groups.  Not only that but having Stanton's love interest in both stories named Christopher could have become such a tangled mess despite one being nicknamed Hutch and the other Topher.

When I was writing my review, an image of a juggler riding a unicycle came into my head for some reason, and I realized this is the literary feat Boney pulls off without dropping the balls in the air or falling off the unicycle.  Nice!

As an aside: AAR has been running the reviewers' Top 10 romance lists since the beginning of the summer.  Today my Top 10 list ran.  Check it out.  Have you read any of the books?  Hope so!

Often Laugh Out Loud Funny Romance

Let's start with a quote this time, shall we?  This from In Pieces by Alexa Land, the book review running on AAR today:

At one point in the story the porn star is amazed at how accepting the friend's family is at the Christmas party and says that if his family had ever seen him dance with a guy, they would have held a gay exorcism. When Christopher asks what a gay exorcism would be, the porn star says, “Oh, you know: the whole lot of them donning mullet wigs, which for a large percentage of them would be redundant, and then playing sport fishing videos while reading from the Sears catalog. That’d drive the gay right out of ya.”

I laughed until I had tears in my eyes.  Having been born and raised in Nebraska, I could just envision the scene.  It was so NOT California where I now live.

What I don't say in my review is that In Pieces is one of those fairytale romances--even the premise hinges on an unlikely situation.  But like any happily ever after fairytale, Land's story is engaging enough to stick to the mind and the heart, and brings a smile when it's remembered.

I really am looking forward to the sequel to this book if it's about the porn star with the wonderful attitude, but reading the short synopses of the previous books in the series, I'm not interested.  Neither sounds like my kind of book, and all the characters in the previous books didn't engage me in this one.  I'm glad I caught the series when I did.

(Oh, yes, I'm also on the AAR After Hours blog talking about our recent car-buying experience.)

Be Prepared to Weep and Weep Again

I had Jojo Moyes' Me Before You on my Paperback Swap wish list for a year and still was on the waiting list when I spied it on the review list for All About Romance.  To say that I snarfed it right up might be a slight exaggeration--okay, totally not an exaggeration at all.  I couldn't wait to read it since I'd read so many wonderful things about it.

Then I read the book.  Well, Moyes definitely has a handle on pulling out readers' sobs.  I cried and sniffed through the whole book.  What a wonderful book, I thought.  Sigh.

As we usually do, my husband and I were discussing books over lunch one day.  I had a new review book to read when he asked me about the Moyes book that he'd seen me sniffling over.  What was it about, he asked.

Glibly I started telling him the plot, and as I did so, I found my initial enjoyment of it turn to rage.  Why in the heck should Louisa love Will?  What was lovable about the guy?  As I told my husband the story, I wondered why no one had just driven Will to Switzerland and offed him.

As I kept recounting the story--before I'd finished writing the review--it suddenly occurred to me that it wasn't a love story at all, but a tale of class differences and just another way that Britain differed from the States.  Moyes' genius wasn't in writing a love story for the ages but in explaining once again what the upper class is all about to America's middle class.  We are not like them.  Still.

Essentially, Will is an unlikeable git who pawns off his idea of an ideal life to a well-meaning woman who knocked herself out to make him happy.  Throwing money at her after he was gone was a nice finish, but in the end it was his way of turning her from her working class sensibilities to upper class snobbishness.  In effect, he cloned himself onto her and "gave" her his shallow life.

Was she better off now that he was gone?  We're all supposed to think she was much better off and had a chance of leading a much broader life.  But like everything else in the book, that's debatable.

Sidelined in More Ways Than One

Stories about gay football players, especially those who have been rivals for years, are high on my "like" list, and Mercy Celeste's newest is no exception.  After reading the first book in the series, Six Ways from Sunday, and watching the MIA soldier go from the dead to alive lists, I was ready for another weeper from Celeste.

Sidelined, however, doesn't have angst and sorrow underpinnings like Sunday did even though at first glance with the false rape charges against Levi, the pro football player, there might seem to be some angst.  Rather this is the story of high school rivals who should have been high school lovers except that male athletes didn't hook up romantically in the Deep South then--and possibly not even now.

Since the next book is about Levi's attorney brother Jude, I'm wondering how Celeste is going to work the football angle into the story.  Are any of Levi's former teammates closet gays?  Or is Celeste veering from the football field?  Can't wait to find out.

Not So Casual Weekend Fling

Cops and more cops, that seems to be a trend these days in M/M romances.  A cop with a pedophile brother, however, is something a little new.  Pairing that cop with the deputy who cut down his brother's body seems a little extreme, just like almost everything in A Casual Weekend Thing by A. J. Thomas, but oddly enough everything pretty much works in the story and didn't seem outrageous when I was reading the book.

Interestingly, the story isn't as much about peace officers doing their jobs as it is about families and the strength of bonds between family members.  That sounds benign, right?  But the two primary families in Casual Weekend are anything but benign.

Instead the story is about overcoming the road blocks families put in the way of personal fulfillment and coming out on top.

And while my review of Casual Weekend is running on AAR's front page, my grandmother's recipe for yellow potato salad is running on After Hours.  How's that for family links?