Gilded Gay Romance

Once upon a time in a place far, far away, when I was younger and my hands were steady as rocks, I took up calligraphy and loved it.  There's something so soothing about the building of strokes to make letters to form words.


Rowan Speedwell in Illumination hints at this nearly mystical creative feeling when he describes the pages his character Miles pens and decorates.  Of course, the book, a gay romance novel, doesn't dwell on Miles' ability to create one-of-a-kind manuscript pages and other artwork, but instead how this agoraphobic, whose mind has betrayed him, breaks out of his cloister.


I'm thinking that next I need to read Speedwell's Ghosts of Bourbon Street in order to get ready for the Romantic Times Convention in May that's being held in New Orleans.  That should help put me in the mood!

Unburying the Buried Treasures

 Today All About Romance is running one of my favorite yearly columns, the AAR reviewers' picks for Buried Treasures, those books published during the year that didn't get as much publicity as we think they should have.

My picks are three gay romances (go figure!):

* Sex and Sourdough by A. J. Thomas:  I'm not much of a hiker, or walker for that matter, but this book made me want to lace up my hiking shoes and get out on the trail.  In addition, Thomas is the kind of quirky storyteller that I enjoy.  I'd read her A Casual Weekend Thing and was blown away by how different it was in a sea of gay romances that are beginning to look cloned.  Both books are unique, each with its own style, so I can't wait to read Thomas' next one and have been telling my friends about her.

* Beyond Duty by SJD Peterson:  Peterson's not an easy author for readers who like their books with little or no sex, but the themes she grapples with are important and worthy of discussion.  In Beyond Duty two career soldiers are retiring and still in prime condition.  They've been lovers for years, meeting up between deployments, and have even bought a house together.  But now they're at a crossroads that will determine what could possibly be the majority of their lives.  The questions aren't easy, and the answers even harder to decide.  Since the troops are coming home and our fighting forces are being cut, this is a book that applies both for hetero and homosexuals.

* Something Like Autumn by Jay Bell:  Our older daughter lives in Italy with her husband, twins, and dogs, and we were going to visit for the first time since they moved there.  I knew the flight from California to Italy would be long, so I saved the third in Bell's Something Like series for the long trip.  What better way to wallow in a favorite author's work?  But sometimes I'm so stupid that I despair.  I knew what happened to the main character before I started the book since he was a character in the previous book.  I knew.  And I read it anyway, over the entire flight.  It's my favorite book, and I will never forgive Jay Bell for not changing the story.  Read it and you'll know what I mean.

Returning as a Better Person

No Such Thing by A. M. Arthur, the review of which you can read at AAR, has an interesting premise.  A hellion returns to the tiny town where he grew up and routinely caused havoc as a teen, only he's changed drastically.

No, he isn't a multimillionaire bully who runs a corporation like a sweatshop.  Instead, the anger and belligerence have left him, and he returns in order to help his wonderful, patient foster mother who is raising two children alone now that her husband has recently died.

The guy realizes that without this couple's help, he would probably be in jail now.

What the book doesn't go into is how the foster mother feels about this young man returning.  As someone whose students were often troubled young men and women, I can imagine she feels like I did when students returned to tell me how well they were now doing in school or in their jobs.  My pride in them and their accomplishments was staggering.  When they'd been in my class, I'd believed in them, and now they believed in themselves.  It was wonderful.

So while No Such Thing is a wonderful gay romance and well worth reading for its plot, teachers, former teachers, and foster parents will probably find a little more in the book than just the surface story.

Very Little Behind the Curtain

Usually I love Amy Lane books and can't get enough of them.  I was really excited about reading a book of hers about the theater, especially the behind the scenes people because I was once a costumer at the Alley Theatre in Houston.  Also I live in Sacramento near where the story is set, and I used to teach in a community college just like the one the protagonist attends.  As far as I was concerned, Lane's Behind the Curtain should have been the best book I've read this year.

So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when it fell way short of my expectations.  Lane's made a career writing about lonely, lost gay boy/men who are struggling to find their way in this mad world of ours.  In almost all of her books, she gets to the heart of the men, and each story is an individual study of how one person's demons either help or hinder him in attaining happiness.  The Johnnies series of porn stars in Sacramento is a case in point.  Each man's story, while filled with angst and past unhappiness, is a story of overcoming adversity and discovering who he is in order to be fulfilled.  There's no mistaking David/Dex for Chase or Tommy or Kane.

But in Behind the Curtain even the mega-talented Jarod is nothing more than an anonymous ballet dancer who's seen the world but never lived in it.  Dawson and Benji, while joined at the hip as friends, never break apart and become living, breathing entities like the Johnnies sex machines do.  In fact, at times Dawson-Benji became so intermixed that I lost track of which one I was reading about.  When I have to remind myself Dawson = gay and Benji = straight just to differentiate the characters, I know the book is in trouble.

So what's going on, I asked myself.  I have to wonder if Ms. Lane has lost the passion for writing that she had a few years ago.  I hope not.  I believe in her and her talent.  But I think that readers and publishers and especially all her fans should just give her a little breathing room to write at her own pace and let her become rejuvenated by her passion for writing.  In this age of instant gratification, we should all give our favorite authors space to create and thereby produce their best work.

Not So Offside This Time Around

Reading Challenge 2014: February--Pick a book from a series you're behind on

Grade: A

Offside Chance by Mercy Celeste is the third in the Southern Scrimmages series and the author suggests that the books be read in order: Six Ways from Sunday, Sidelined, and finally Offside.

The books deal with professional American football players and homosexuality, a combination that was popping up in the news during the season and will probably be cropping up fairly regularly now that pro athletes are coming out of the closet.

Six Ways from Sunday has to do with an NFL tight end and a career Marine who fall in love even though they can't be together as much as they like.  When the Marine is captured and presumed dead, the football player thinks his life has ended.  But has it?

Not answering that question but moving on to book two, Sidelined.  In this book, a successful quarterback is cut from his team and decides to go back to his hometown where he hopes to figure out his twisted life.  Jude, his lawyer brother, persuades him to help coach the new high school's football team, made up of students from previously rival high school teams.  The head coach?  Once the quarterback's high school rival.

Celeste constructs interesting and elaborate plots, and Offside is no different from her previous books.  Here Jude, the lawyer, moves back to New Orleans to look after Levi's house, but is surprised to find a hulking football player, Levi's best friend, already ensconced there.

William Slater is standing on the edge of a breakdown since his house burned down, his contract is about to expire, and Levi has turned out to be someone he barely recognizes.  His refuge in Levi's house is compromised, however, when Levi's brother Jude appears.  Initially, the only thing they seem to bond on is how perplexed they are about Levi declaring himself flamboyantly gay.

As they're holed up together during a freak snowstorm in New Orleans, the self-declared low-brow Slater and the decidedly upper-brow Jude must make compromises in order live without killing each other.  That they do, only to discover two surprising things: they're sexually and eventually totally attracted to each other, and someone is trying to kill them.

Of all the Southern Scrimmage characters, I like Slater and Jude the best.  Both of them are no nonsense guys whose worlds have changed dramatically in just a few months.  Unlike the high maintenance Levi or the first book's couple, Slater and Jude try to roll with the punches and then figure out where to go from there.

But these new rounds of punches have nearly KO'd them.  They can't rely on Levi or his boyfriend for support, and since they're boxed in the house in New Orleans, they are sitting ducks for the killer.

In addition, Celeste brings up the very real question of what guys in their thirties who are kicked out of their careers are supposed to do with the rest of their lives.  Slater has no idea, and his quandary and floundering are probably typical to all pro athletes whose bodies can't sustain them more than a decade.  Having someone like level-headed Jude in his corner makes the transition less debilitating.  Slater for all his physical strength definitely needs Jude for his mental and emotional support.

Fortunately, unlike in the previous books, Celeste is more grounded here, and the book doesn't rely on a dramatic (and somewhat unbelievable) surprise.  Instead this is the totally believable story of two guys burdened with family who must play the hand they were dealt or walk away from the table.  That they both play and play well makes the story totally enjoyable.

The Mystery of Romance Fiction

One of the biggest complaints about romance fiction from people who don't read it is that romances are so predictable.  You know that the couple are going to get together in the end, which makes the books boring, say the detractors.

That's true, as it is in mystery fiction, biographies, and a number of other genres.  But I contend that romance readers are into the genre for the ride, and in order to get the most out of the ride (watching person A get together with person B), we go into the books thinking in this one romance the unthinkable might happen: There won't be a happily ever after.  And it's this self-deception that makes the book even more enjoyable.

Lane Hayes in Better Than Chance destroys even that little bit of self-deception by making his first person narrator tell the ending the of the story before relating the story itself.  If you'd asked me before I reviewed this book, if I thought revealing the ending of a romance book would bother me, I would have said no.  But it did.

All the way through I kept waiting for something to surprise me, but nothing did.  And when I finished reading, I kept wondering why the book felt so blah to me.  I finally figured out that I like the little bit of suspense when I'm not quite sure that person A really will end up with person B or if this time, there will be no happy ending for anyone.

Romance in a Musical Family Amid Bullying

John C. Houser's The Music Box is an amazing romance on so many different levels.  For one thing, it's the touching story of two men who are settled in their careers as opposed to the buff, young twenty-somethings that a large proportion of gay romances feature.  Both are battling big problems in their careers--problems that must be settled soon or they might be unemployed.

One is a high school music teacher who is watching his program shrink because of budget cuts.  How can he make the program more viable to the students?  And should he agree to teach history as well in order to keep his job?

The other man manages the music store his musically-talented family owns.  His mother is a world-renowned soprano and his brother in a string quartet.  What they don't know since they are away touring is that the store is losing money and the building need therapeutic maintenance badly.  But where's the money to come from?  Should he start charging family members to keep the business going?

When both men see an extremely gifted teen being harassed by another boy, they rush to his aid, thereby causing their worlds to change.  What results is not only a satisfying romance but also a triumphal story of people reaching out to make someone else happy.

Houser is the kind of uncommon writer whom everyone should read.  I know I can't wait for his next book.

A Good Romance Makes Me Want to Hike

Reading and reviewing as much as I do has formed me into the couch potato that I am.  While others may find "the burn," I'm perfectly happy without it.  But A. J. Thomas' Sex & Sourdough is such a delightful romance that I actually longed to go hiking.  And not just any hiking.  No, I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail, even though I heard about Micah Goldfus' trek and the misery he went through to make the climb.

Nevertheless, while Thomas doesn't make it sound like a walk in a park--any park--the author does paint readers an image of often unimaginable delights.  She also contrasts the Appalachian Trail with the West Coast's Pacific Rim Trail, with the western hike fairing poorly beside its East Coast counterpart.

Be warned that this isn't a guidebook but a gay romance novel, so even though hiking the trail takes up a large part of the plot, the romance, which is beautifully written, holds the center of the stage.

This is the second Thomas romance I've read, and I can't wait to read more from this interesting, skillful writer.