Gotta Love Them Good Old Boys

In Mathew Ortiz' Love and Salvage: Eli's Three Wishes, Eli Gaither is a good ole Georgia boy in the best sense of the description. He works hard, plays hard, and loves even harder. But Ortiz is quick to remind readers that even good ole boys who look like they have life by the tail need true love, and sometimes it's harder for them to find it than it is for us lesser mortals.

Big, brawny, and bald Eli works at the Gaither family salvage company and despite a huge family and friends has been a loner since his divorce. His younger son, with whom he bonded more than his other two children, refuses to speak to him, and lately the family pretty much avoids him because Eli's been acting like a bear with a thorn in his paw.

The only one who doesn't seem even the least bit intimidated by grouchy Eli is Oscar Hernandez, a tall, thin Hispanic man who isn't afraid of yelling at and teasing Eli. At first annoyed by the interior designer, Eli mentally bats him away, trying to walk away from Oscar's taunting, until Oscar suddenly kisses him.

However, Eli only wants three things in the world: For his son to talk to him, for someone to love who loves him back, and to become a family man again. He's embraced the fact that he's gay and that getting married in the first place because it was expected of him was a stupid idea. Now he wants the love and happiness that so many of his extended family have, not just another roll in the hay.

Fortunately, Oscar is just the right guy to take on Eli. Coming from a loud and lively Hispanic family, Oscar immediately understands the Gaithers and reads Eli as just the man he wants and needs to complete him. And Oscar is just the bandy rooster to get what he wants.

When Eli's son appears, having been kicked out of the house by his mother after he announced that he was gay, Eli greets him with open arms, only to realize that taking care of the boy, who is hurt and confused, will probably end his burgeoning relationship with Oscar. But how can Eli walk away from the son he loves so much or from the man who is stealing his heart?

Read the rest of my review at All About Romance.

A Gay Romance for Coffee Lovers

I'm a tea drinker myself, so the overall setting of B. G. Thomas' Hound Dog & Bean, Bean's coffee shop, isn't really my cup of....tea.  (Sorry!  Had to do it.)

But Thomas' book is a lovely romance in the true sense of the word, a bringing together of two hearts.  That they're brought to together by coffee and dogs is something foreign to me and something that should have put me off the story.

But Thomas' nearly lyrical passages and the magical realism when Hound Dog and Bean visit a special tree won me over.  Lyrical passages and magical realism aren't what appear in any other gay romantic fiction as far as I'm aware, so I wasn't really prepared to have both qualities pop out at me.

The book didn't make a coffee drinker out of me nor did it tempt me to adopt a puppy, but the story has stayed in my mind for months.  Every once in a while I remember a particularly beautiful scene and smile.

Comic Book Illustrations and Love

On the same day that the San Francisco Chronicle ran its BatKid special edition, with byline by Clark Kent (about time he wrote a news story!), my review of Damon Suede's Bad Idea, a novel that has fun with comic books, ran.

Suede's book dovetailed with all the wonderfully dorky things I've loved my whole life: larger than large characters, elaborate costumes, wonderfully garish makeup, and people who think outrageous thoughts and then put them into being.  I was so afraid that Bad Idea would turn out to be just that: a travesty of everything I love about comics and the edges of creativity.

Fortunately for everyone, Suede's Bad Idea is not only a Good Idea, but a Great Idea.  His take on the highs and lows of pure creation and soul-searing marketing make for wonderful reading.

Is this the book for you?  Read my review and find out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Another A for Thomas

As far as I'm concerned author Jodi Thomas just keeps getting better and better as a writer.  Her Harmony, Texas, novels are particularly intricate and engrossing.  Take Can't Stop Believing the latest book I've read and reviewed.

Cord and Nevada are two of the most unlikely lovers on the planet, but Thomas not only makes their paths to love believable but sympathetic.  Both desperately need someone to love and to love them, but both are so resilient and strong-willed that they need someone with a pickax and dynamite to break through the walls they've erected around them.

In addition to their tumultuous journey to love, Thomas pits the strange, oddly satisfying liaison between a mousy postal worker and a dying man of the world.  Again, these are unlikely lovers who manage to find a time out of time moment for love.  Theirs, unlike the love of Cord and Nevada, isn't physical, which is a bit jarring in this age of sex scenes on every page.

And finally, there is the burgeoning love of the busy-body rooming house owner and the dying man's manservant.  Talk about unlikely lovers!  But Thomas makes the reader see that there is a definite possibility that these two might make a match of it also.

Altogether, the interweaving of these stories makes for a deep and satisfying romance novel, the kind of book that stays with readers for days, weeks, and months after the last page is read.

Jo Goodman Shines in the Old West

Jo Goodman has always been a good writer, but she's outdone even herself in True to the Law the review of which went live today at AAR.

The previous book in this series concerned a legendary gunman who is hired to protect a woman in Bitter Springs, Wyoming.  When a train passenger, the author of the novels starring the gunman, witnesses the death of the man proclaiming to be the legend, the author decides to go to Bitter Springs and check out why someone would hire the retired gunman in the first place.

That book, The Last Renegade, was charming and funny, so I was looking forward to reading True to the Law, the next book in the series.  I definitely wasn't expecting what I got: an even better book than the first one.

Schoolteacher Tru and reluctant sheriff Cobb are the couple of dreams.  And now, knowing that Goodman can surpass herself, I can't wait to read the next one in the series,  Nat Church and the Runaway Bride.

Review Ran during My Vacation--I Didn't (Run that is!)

I read Meljean Brook's A-rated Riveted during the summer, wrote a review of it, turned it in, and then as I do with most reviews, forgot about it, presuming that it would run at AAR whenever the editor put it up on the site.  Wrong, so wrong.  Somewhere in between the pushing of the "send" button and the review getting to AAR, the cyber gremlins ate the review.

The story gets even worse.  In the fall, my computer glitched, choked, and rumbled to a stuttering near-halt.  I bit the computing bullet and got a new machine with more memory and (gasp!) Win 7.  I tried to transfer my files, but being impatient with file transfer (and thinking that most documents on the old machine weren't needed, especially reviews that had already run), I didn't fill the new machine with the old machine's content.

A second gasp!  Meljean Brook's Riveted fell through so many cracks.  But fortunately, not was all lost as you can see from the review that ran while I was away on a Southern California vacation.

(It seems that another book fell through the same crack, but it's not as big a loss since it's a D grade romance and the author would probably not be as excited to see the review.  But watch AAR and you'll see when it appears.)

Religion and the Gay Lifestyle Do Mix

The over-riding theme of the Tucker Springs gay romances seems to be getting together two guys who are as different as possible and make the match believable.

The first one I read, Second Hand, pitted a guy whose female fiancee ran off with someone else and an Hispanic pawnbroker with a heart of gold.  El Rozal comes from a large, loud extended family and has inherited his grandfather's pawn shop.  When Paul Hannon comes in hoping El will buy the trendy electronics his girlfriend just had to have, El is nonplussed.  But because he kind of feels sorry for the guy, he buys the chi-chi kitchenware, and a friendship ensues.  How seemingly straight Paul comes to realize he's gay and how he helps El come to terms with his family make a wonderful romance.

The second Tucker Springs romance I read, Dirty Laundry, was more raunchy, but just as sweet as Second Hand.  In Laundry, a gay bar club bouncer gets together with an obsessive/compulsive entomology grad student.  Talk about polar opposites meeting.  But again, the author creates a believable romance around the two.

Covet Thy Neighbor, the review of which goes live today at AAR, so far is the best of the series.  A gay Christian youth minister and an atheist tattoo artist come together not only in a believable manner but also in a way that makes a statement about beliefs and others' tolerance for them.  While this book, as all in the series, features gay sex, the sex takes a backseat to the more important issues of God and religion.

Tucker Springs isn't over, as far as I'm concerned.  I've recently read an upcoming Tucker Springs romance and will review it for AAR.  Stay tuned.

When the Flame Meets the Tinder

SJD Peterson's Whispering Pines Ranch series is gritty, down-to-earth, sometimes horribly brutal, and always enjoyable.  The men involved are older and battling their friends' and neighbors' prejudices in a small ranching community.  I've followed each installment since the beginning, often appalled at what I was reading and sometimes wishing I could smack one of the characters upside the head for his stubborn silliness.

So when I saw that Peterson had a new non-Whispering Pines Ranch novel out, I quickly latched onto it.  Plan B, reviewed today at AAR, connects two guys from the opposite ends of the gay continuum, one a football player, the other a flamboyant drama major.

Peterson uses her writing magic to engross readers in a small slice of life that, while written by other gay fiction writers, carries her own special stamp of reality.  This is a small story done really, really well, which grabbed a Dessert Isle Keeper review from me--and very well will earn one from other readers too.

Dancing Their Way to Love

This weekend my review of Dance with Me by Heidi Cullinan is featured on AAR.  If there'd been a little more information about one of the characters, I would have happily given the book an A rating.  But even with its B+, I'm glad I've got it on my Kindle and will have it read again wherever I go.

Actually, there are a few of Cullinan's books that I've enjoyed.  Her men act and sound like real men, and not feminine parodies.  I especially like the Tucker Springs books and I can't wait to read Family Man even though I'm bummed that neither Amazon nor Samhain Publishing have a page count for it.  I'm staying away from novellas and short stories these days.

In other news, while we were away celebrating my mother's 90th birthday last weekend, AAR ran my Desert Isle Keeper review of After the End by Alex Kidwell.  The story revolves around how one man gentles another back into the world of the living and loving.  Brady is a caterer and top-notch chef, and uses his talents to lure Quinn in a non-threatening way back from his grief after Quinn's partner of ten years dies of cancer.  It's a solid, compassionate book about a touchy subject.

Love Is in the Air

It's spring--or at least close enough that we can begin to feel the hope seeping from the ground in the Northern Hemisphere.  What better way to celebrate than to read a romance novel?

Steve Kluger's Almost Like Being in Love might be a gay romance novel, but even those who don't usually read gay romances will adore the story of Travis and Craig since the book is about romance and not sex.  Of course, since the book is a collection of correspondence (lists, diary pages, memos, etc.), there's little room for graphic sex scenes, which is brilliant for this book about lost and found love.

I'm happy my latest be another AAR gay romance review on the weekend.  And I'm happy to bring this Desert Isle Keeper romance to readers' attention.

The Romance of Football (Australian Style)

My review of Tigers and Devils by Sean Kennedy went live on AAR today.  Not only is the novel a really nice romance, it also brought back lots of childhood memories for me.  Because these dovetail so nicely, Tigers and Devils is one of my Desert Isle Keepers, a book I'll read and cherish forever, even though Tigers and Devils covers Australian football (an unknown to me) instead of American college football.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to Cornhusker football games in the fall.  For those not in the know, the Cornhuskers come from that Midwestern giant, the University of Nebraska, now with a slash at Lincoln.

But in the days when I was a on-site fan, it was just NU with no "/ Lincoln."  The games were rarely played in warm temperatures, but usually in gray, over-cast, often sleety conditions on real turf.  My parents had 50-yard line seats in the lower section under the overhang, so when the serious weather started--the wind, sleet, and snow--they were protected.

My brother and I, however, were "treated" to knothole seats in the end zone.  There, sitting on boards over a steel framework, we bundled in our coats, sweaters, hats, gloves, and cups of hot chocolate as the wind whipped around us.  Knothole benches are lousy seats.  We couldn't tell where anyone was on the field and just reacted with the crowd around us, everyone dressed in as much red and white (the school colors) as we owned.

I thought we were crazy.  I still do.  But when NU plays football and the game airs on TV, I'm still right there, yelling at the players and cheering when the team scores.

Much More Than Nothingness in Boney's Book

Opening a book by an unknown author is a little like opening an unmarked chest.  Inside could as easily be a nest of snakes or inert sand as a hodgepodge of unique and interesting artifacts.  Finding the boxes with the fascinating treasure, a story that transports readers into another time and place with characters they will come to know, love, and cherish, makes reading for review worthwhile.

My most recent find is The Nothingness of Ben by Brad Boney, the review of which went live on AAR today.  This is one of those books that when readers finish reading the last word, they wish there were another hidden hundred pages still waiting to be read.  This is a book where the identification of being part of the family is so strong, that finishing the book breaks the ties so completely that readers will be rudely awakened to the real world around them.  This book is definitely a Desert Isle Keeper, a book to read and enjoy over and over again.

As I say in my review, I can't wait to read his next book.

(With any luck, Boney's next book will feature a cover without chopped off heads!)

A Bloated Penny

My review of Catherine Anderson's Lucky Penny appears at AAR today.  This was another book I really wanted to like because I've enjoyed Anderson's work in the past.

Unfortunately, this one doesn't have a very likable female protagonist.  This shouldn't bother me since I've read a lot of books that begin with unlikeable primary characters who, thanks to a sympathetic love interest, mend their ways and become very likable.

I'm reminded of Anthony in Mary Balogh's DIK The Temporary Wife, who starts off very unlikeable since he's out to hire a quiet governess to marry and present to his family as his wife.  Fortunately, Charity, the impoverished woman he hires, helps Anthony become less self-centered and less tortured about his past.  Anthony ultimately is one of my favorite Regency heroes.

But while David in Lucky Penny is a terrific guy, Brianna never made me like her at all.  Considering that divorce was pretty much unheard of in the Old West, I can't help but think that David's life won't be as happy ever after as he deserves.

A Writer Writes about Love

Okay, I'll freely admit it:  I love Lisa Kleypas' writing.  I think I first fell in love with it when I read Suddenly You, which to this day is one of my top 10 favorite romances.  Kleypas doesn't make life easy for her lovers, and often bringing them together comes a little too close to real life.  Jack in Suddenly You isn't always the nicest of guys, but when he falls, he falls hard and will do anything for the one/s he loves.

But Jack is purely Regency as were all the other books I'd read.  So I was surprised when Kleypas ventured into contemporary country.  Sometimes authors who go from one to the other show facility in one but become clunky in the other.  Not Kleypas.  Sugar Daddy begat Blue-Eyed Devil, and while neither is an easy book, both are beautifully written and worthwhile reading.

Now comes Rainshadow Road, which I reviewed for AAR.  Kleypas adds a bit of magical realism that enriches the story and makes what might have been just another women's romance tale about an idyllic small town a memorable waltz between two people who discover that love is a mystical binding agent.

Sam from Rainshadow is my newest Jack. 

Austen Love

Can I quote from my own review?  Oh, sure, why not?  As I say in the first paragraph of my review of Victoria Connelly's A Weekend with Mr. Darcy:

"As Jane Austen might write if she were here to see the industry her works have propagated: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a female reader in possession of a copy of Pride and Prejudice, must be in want of a Mr. Darcy. Or so today’s publishers would have us believe."

This is an absolutely delightful book that goes beyond the same old, same old romance tropes.  Connelly's characters are not only immersed in Austen and her works but they also are fully aware that Austen herself would be amazed at her present-day following and aware that there is something in their lives that makes them obsess the way they do over her books.

The cover, obviously, doesn't do the book justice not to mention it makes the content look like it might be aimed at high school girls when the protagonists are in their early thirties!  Really, Sourcebooks covers are pretty much always a disgrace to the writing they enclose.

A Desert Isle Christmas Anthology

As I say at the beginning of the review for A Texas Christmas, an anthology of Christmas stories, I'm not very excited about holiday-themed novels, much less holiday-themed anthologies.  But I'd read the last anthology by Jodi Thomas, Linda Broday, Phylliss Miranda, and Dwanna Pace and really liked it.  So when I got a chance to read another of their collaborations, I jumped at the chance.

Consequently, I ended up giving it a Desert Isle Keeper grade of A- (only because one of the stories wasn't in the A category), which is another first for me.  Who would have thought I'd give an anthology an A?  Not me, that's for sure.

But this is a marvelous collection of stories, well deserving of its A ranking.  It's indeed a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year gift to readers.