Inman's Latest Only So-So

From The Romance Reviews today, my review of Head-On by John Inman:

One night of reckless behavior not only changes two men's lives but paves the way for them to remold themselves through love in this story based on unbelievable coincidences.

San Diego television weatherman Gordon Stafford is full of himself after winning a local TV award, and in a fit of incredible stupidity, not only is he driving drunk, but he's texting his triumph to all his friends. What results is a car crash killing one of the two people he hits.

Serving his minimal jail time, Gordon gets out on probation a broken man. He's working at a soup kitchen as part of his sentence, and there spies a beautiful short man whom people call Squirt. As broken and dispirited as Gordon is, Squirt trumps him, having forgotten his past including his name. One night as they duck below a bridge abutment, Gordon and Squirt watch as a group of ruffians set a homeless person on fire for sport.

This horrific act unites Gordon and Squirt because they realize together they are safer than alone. On this slim basis, they solidify a friendship and then a loving relationship, growing and prospering because of it. But trouble lurks around the corner when they discover a more troubling connection between them.
Read the rest of my review at The Romance Reviews.

Love and Angst in Britain

I can't image having a sister hit by a car and losing her identity the way Lyddie does in Sue Moorcroft's Is This Love?  Being the younger sister and witnessing a bright older sister regress to having the mind of a child for the rest of her life must be unusually difficult.


As the oldest sister in my immediate family and the oldest cousin on my father's side of the family, I've seen death come too many times among my contemporaries.  While death takes a chunk out of one's heart, the hole is less painful as the years pass although it never goes away.


But to see someone regress like Lyddie did in the novel, I'm not sure would be as easy to reconcile.  Lyddie's sister Tamara in the novel seems to be a saint in how she helps her parents work with Lyddie and how she keeps from getting totally frustrated and angry with her older sister.  I'm not sure I could step up and be as accommodating as Tamara.


Perhaps the real story in the novel is how yoga helps Tamara, who is an instructor, live life without having to run into a nearby green space and yell.  Maybe as my daughter has been telling me for years, yoga really is the answer.