Emotionally Satisfying and Incredibly Thought-Provoking

I haven't been completely blown away by a romance novel in a while, so reading The River Leith by Leta Blake was a joy.

My review of it was posted today, and here's a sneak peek at my All About Romance Desert Isle Keeper review:

Get out your tissues for this incredibly moving and superbly poignant gay romance that explores the lost and found qualities of memory loss on two men in New York City.

When Leith Wenz is dealt an illegal blow to the head during a boxing match and goes into a coma, his lover, friends, and family are devastated. They rejoice, especially lover Zach, when Leith awakes.

The good news is that he'll live. The bad news is that he's can't remember the last three years of his life - three years in which he got out of prison, his father died, and he met and fell in love with Zach.

In fact, he doesn't remember Zach at all.

Told with interludes of Zach's on-going vlog posts, the story is one of grieving. Leith is horrified that so much of who he is has been stripped away. He's lost and terrified that he'll never find his way back to being a whole person again. Fortunately, he has a loyal brother and a good psychologist to help him along the way.

His lover Zach also wants to be supportive, but Leith's memory loss is akin to Leith's death as far as
Zach is concerned. Every time Zach sees him, Zach is hit by how much he's lost, how much they've lost. So in a sense Zach is also grieving, just as Leith is.

For those like me who don't know, the River Lethe in Greek myth is the place in the underworld where the dead drank the water in order to purge the memories of their lives before they crossed the River Styx into the afterlife. The name Zachariah, on the other hand, translates to mean "memory of the Lord.” But before Leith's doctor tells him of the myth and the definition, Leith must rediscover that he's gay and his friend Zach is in fact his lover since all of these revelations came to Leith in the three-year period he's lost.

Read the rest of my review at All About Romance.

Another Winner from Josephine Myles

I was talking to a friend this week who was saying that she read the review of a gay romance novel she was interested in getting.  Since I thought of Janene almost constantly while I was reading Stuff by Josephine Myles, I thought she was talking about it.

But, no, that wasn't the book Janene meant since my review hadn't been posted at All About Romance yet.  Here's an excerpt from my review that was posted today.  (Janene, I'm telling you you'll love this book!)

Stuff, The second Bristol Collection novel after Junk, celebrates the artfully quirky as an ultra-outgoing optimistic British commoner and an upper-class recluse find love over an odd collection of stuff.

When Tobias “Mas” Maslin ducks into Perry Cavendish-Fiennes' Cabbages and Kinks hodgepodge emporium in order to elude a another store's security guard bent on capturing him, Mas is immediately struck by the racks of vintage clothes and other intriguing artifacts.

Perry, who has inherited the store from an aunt and must keep it open for a year in order to get his inheritance, has a more proprietary air about his inventory; for example, he shuns price tags because they mar the items.

The jobless Mas strikes a deal with Perry: If he can organize the shop and make a profit on the stuff for sale, he can have room, board, and a share of the profit. Reluctantly Perry agrees, mostly because Perry would rather spend time creating his art than running the shop.

Each man in his own way is delightfully fanciful. Mas is the irrepressibly out-and-proud gay man who luxuriates in his joie de vivre. He loves sex and sexual innuendo, irrepressibly tossing suggestive bon mots into his conversation like so much confetti.

The much more conservative-looking Perry sparkles through his metal sculptures - strange, often mechanical, animals and hanging fairies. His assemblages are part steampunk and part Day of the Dead, using skulls and vintage metal bits and pieces as fodder for their exoskeletons.

At first Perry is suspicious of the sprightly, boastful Mas, but soon learns that while Mas is a British P. T. Barnum, he's also a hard, determined worker. Soon the slender, shorter Mas has organized the bits and pieces in Perry's shop and is planning an open house event to announce the new, improved Cabbages and Kinks to Bristol.

Read the rest of the review at All About Romance.

Grey Comes Home to Gentle Romance

I've been a reader of Andrew Grey's gay romances for a couple of years now and have no idea why it's taken me this long to review one of his books.  Here's an excerpt from Love Comes Home which was posted at All About Romance today:

A love story about a father and his son as much as one between two men, this is a superb example of Grey's command of the extraordinary in the everyday ordinary. For readers who wonder what gay romance is all about, this is an excellent place to start reading.

Single father and Pleasanton, Michigan, architect Greg Hampton is particularly proud of his 10-year-old son Davey who's excelling in Little League baseball, especially since a Greg played ball in college. Greg was even courted to become a pro, so seeing his son engaged in the sport is particularly enjoyable for him. But when Davey's batting is off and he seems to be having trouble on the field, Greg is heartbroken to learn that his son has a degenerative eye disease and will become blind soon.

As Greg and his supportive group of friends deal with Davey's situation, Greg starts dating wealthy Tom Spangler, who has a soft spot for the frustrated but plucky Davey. To help Greg, Tom, who runs a charitable organization for his family, researches sports for the blind, coming up with beep baseball.

As Greg and Davey start to adjust to Davey's blindness, Greg's former wife, who rejected Davey during the divorce, reenters the picture, demanding visitation rights. While Greg is at first suspicious that she is trying to get more money from him, he's appalled when she brings a holistic doctor with her when Greg agrees to her visit.

Greg is a wonderful father who is truly devastated by his son's condition. He runs the gamut of paternal emotions from anger that his son must deal with his blindness after having seen for ten years to over-helpfulness, wanting to wait on the boy hand and foot. Fortunately, Greg has a supportive group of friends and a caring new boyfriend who all want the best for Davey. The children of Greg's friends are particularly impressive because they continue to treat the boy as they did before his blindness set in.

Read the rest of the review at All About Romance.

Best of the Blacktop Series

I really enjoy Lorelei James' Blacktop Cowboy series, mostly because the cowboys in it ring true.  I'm indirectly related to cowboys on a working ranch in Dime Box, Texas, and the handful of men and women who work on the ranch whom I've met line up perfectly with the hardworking, rough and tumble group James features in her books.

Her latest, Turn and Burn, however, is a cut above the rest since the main character is an award-winning rodeo barrel racer whose last competition resulted in multiple injuries for herself and even worse the death of her horse.  To city people this might not mean much, but since Tanna had traveled the rodeo circuit with her horse as her only constant companion, having to put down the horse was like having to kill a close friend.

While the book has James' signature steamy sex and a one-night stand that morphs into true love, the larger story is how this tough woman rider manages to overcome her fear of horses and get back in the saddle again.  The road is long, and it isn't pretty, which makes for an excellent ride on the reader's part.

As a reviewer, I'm happy to see such a strong series coming together in equally strong books.  And as a lover of Western romances, I'm ecstatic to see James perform at her personal best.  If there were belt buckles for authors, James certainly deserves one with this book.

Wonderful First of Series

I'd never read anything by T. A. Webb before I got a review copy of The Broken Road Café, so I didn't really know what to expect.

What I found was like opening a Christmas present: an engaging, delightful story that warmed up the cold weather and was delightful.  Broken Road is the sort of book that reviewers dream about getting in their stacks of books, but so often don't find.

Pitting a city lawyer against a small town police chief with an interesting collection of peripheral characters is genius in the hands of Webb.  I was so happy to know that this is the first of a series when I finished the book because it was one of those reads that I hated to see end.

I can't wait to read the next book.

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.

Goode Is Great

The more books I read by John Goode, the more I enjoy his writing style and his adept depth in writing gay romances.  In Taking Chances, his latest, he's commenting on love in general, not just in love in one particular case.  He's also making a statement about whom one decides to befriend.

We all have destructive friends, and Matt and Tyler seem to be relying on exactly the wrong people for advice.  One of the many facets of this wonderful novel is the struggle both the guys must go through in order to realize how their so-called friends are holding them down and are making their lives miserable.

Recognizing and then breaking the bonds of what seems to be supportive friendship, however, is only a tiny part of a story that applies to both hetero and homosexual relationships.  And it's only a tiny reason for readers to enjoy the book.

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.

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.

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.