Fun And Love

When fun and games turn into fun and love, a vacation after a breakup veers into love in Jacob Z. Flores' When Love Takes Over, reviewed today at AAR.

Flores delves into all the craziness of Provincetown, Mass, in this flamboyant look at getting away from it all.  Zack is distraught over being dumped, so he heads to a resort he finds on the back of a gay magazine.  There he meets porn super-bottom Hart Throb (aka Van), whom Zack doesn't recognize presumably because he doesn't watch online porn.  Right.

That's only the first of moments where I didn't believe.  Fortunately, Flores is a good enough writer and his writing style is light enough that it was easier to go with the flow than over analyze all the plot twists that rivaled a Coney Island roller coaster.

Although the subject matter is deeper than the writing style, readers who are lying on a beach hoping to get the perfect tan can spend enough enjoyable hours reveling in the antics of P-Town inhabitants and visitors to fill out a lazy day.  A few alcoholic beverages and a passing parade of beautiful young bodies might even cover over the plot holes that would otherwise make a reader's brow furrow.

So lie back and enjoy this book on its own terms.  The cover says it all: Relax.

Cullinan Hits All the Right Notes

I've loved Heidi Cullinan's writing for quite a while.  Each of her books is a joy, and I find something new and different each time.  Her Dance With Me, for some reason, is one of my all-time comfort reads.  Why?  Who knows?  The book just makes me happy every time I read it.

Her latest book, Love Lessons, is another in her string of winners.  Again, she's taken two guys who really shouldn't ever have anything in common and not only made them flesh and blood people but people who are absolutely perfect for each other.  But you can read the review at AAR to find out why I like the book so much.

In the meantime, here are the books of hers I've read and enjoyed in the past, just in case you're just like me and can't get enough of her writing:

• Family Man: Between a big Italian family and a forty-year-old protagonist who's only starting to think he's gay, this book should stretch anyone's suspension of disbelief.  But it works, and works well on a number of levels.
• Dirty Laundry: A bouncer at a gay club and an entomology graduate student meet in a public laundry....yeah, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but again Cullinan brings together these two very unlikely Romeos in a completely believable way.
• Second Hand: This to me is the funniest of the books with a hapless man selling off his girlfriend's weird collection of small appliances after she splits with Mr. Wonderful.  The laid-back Chicano proprietor of the second-hand shop and his marvelous family make this the perfect lemons to lemonade story.

I'm eagerly awaiting Let It Snow coming in November and Special Delivery publishing after the first of the year.

Cloyingly Sweet Young Thing/Thang

The thang, uh, thing about Anne Tennino's Theta Alpha Gamma gay romance series is that it has such promise.  However, I was dubious about Sweet Young Thang from the get-go, even before I read it for these reasons:

The cover art: Was it the purple underwear, the guy's meh look, or the Polaroid-looking print in what seems to be a girl's hand?  Since the blurb about the book talks about gays and bisexuals in the TAG house, bombs, exploding water heaters, paramedics, and househusbands, I was having trouble reconciling a cover with purple undies and photography.  All very strange.

The title: The twangy title didn't help any in making me feel like this sequel was going to live up to its predecessor.  In fact, written across the guy's back like it is, the words have sort of a predator feel about them.  It's like the guy's been caught peeing in the woods and the wolf has crept up behind him trying to alleviate his terror by calling him a sweet young bite to eat.

So going into this book, I had misgivings.  You can read my review this weekend or anytime at AAR.

How Could I Forget?

I saw this cover on AAR this morning and thought, "I'd like to read that book.  Wasn't the sample on my Kindle recently?"  As I read the review, the book sounded familiar, really familiar, like I'd discussed the plot with my husband in the last couple of months.  Then I saw the review signature.  I was reading my review of The Final Line by Kendall McKenna; that was my signature at the bottom of the review!

And that's the life of a book reviewer who reviewed a huge number of books in a couple of weeks in order to take non-review books on vacation.

I currently have nine print galleys and five e-galleys on my Kindle to read and review.  Four reviews have a due date of October 1 while the others will be written as I finish reading the galleys.  I also have two samples on my Kindle of books that I might review.  We'll see.

When people ask me what I'm currently reading I often don't know.  Titles don't stick with me, but plots do.  After the first two paragraphs of my review of The Final Line, I fondly remembered the book since I was intrigued at how McKenna would resolve his soldier's PTSD issues.  And because the book doesn't paint a "love conquers all, especially PTSD" picture, I highly recommend it to readers.

Oh, How I Want to Love This

I usually read the dedications and forwards of review books, mostly because they often give me insight as to what the authors were thinking when they sat down to write.  This insight helps me decide whether books are successful representations of their creators' visions or not.  Of course, not all authors provide this peek into their brains, but those who do often make their books more enjoyable.

That's in part why Michael Murphy's It Should Have Been You was a disappointment.  Murphy's notes about how the book came to be written were compelling and made me eager to read the fictionalized account of a story he'd heard from other sources.  But Murphy's too much of a reporter to give the fictionalized account a fictional, rather than journalistic, edge.  That's fine in a news feature article, but doesn't work for romance.

Like I said in the review and here, I really, really wanted to like this book, but in the end, while I'd made the intellectual investment, my heart wasn't engaged as the story warranted.

During Our Alaska Vacation

While we were away visiting Anchorage, Vadez, Fairbanks, and Denali, three of my reviews ran on AAR with another one running today.  Here's a recap:

 Kade Boehme's Don't Trust the Cut is one of those strange stories that seems as if the author is stretching the opposites attract theme, but in the end works well thanks to a good writer.  Who would think that a former Marine (hence one of the cuts of the title in the service haircut) and an insecure young man (who resorts to self-mutilation, the other cut of the title, when his stress levels go over the top) could actually get together?  Boehme made me believe it's possible.

Carter Quinn's Out of the Blackness gives a step-by-step look at how a group of close friends can bolster and guide a young man from merely existing into a full life and happiness.  Although Quinn says he's not a psychologist and the book is fiction, his argument that love and gentle handling can make a difference in a person's life is compelling and totally believable.

SJD Peterson proves what an excellent writer she is in her latest, Beyond Duty, about a gay Marine couple about to retire at age 42 on the eve of the repeal of don't-ask-don't-tell.  Not only do they not know what they are going to do in their retirement since the military has been their lives up to this point, but they can't decide whether to come out to their families and friends.  Peterson gives a compelling look at a loving couple who must rebuild their lives.

Another loving couple, but on the other end of the sexual spectrum is the one at the core of Marta Perry's Lydia's Hope.  Happily married with two sons, Amish Lydia accidentally discovers she has two living sisters, one Amish and one not.  In the traffic accident that killed their parents, the girls were split up, but not told about one another.  Now Lydia is making it her life goal to be reunited with her siblings.





And that's what was happening with me while I was on vacation looking for moose and bears.