Description from Goodreads: Simon is jaded. His bookstore is failing, his personal life is nonexistent, and he’s tired of the local scene. He’s desperate for a change, and hopes to find it at Escape, the hot new BDSM club in town.
What he finds there is Gavin. One look at the sexy submissive is all he needs to know that his trip to Escape was the right decision. And their night of no-holds-barred kinky sex feels like only the beginning . . . until his promising new sub vanishes with the dawn.
Then Gavin walks through the door of Simon’s bookstore—for business, not pleasure. To both of their surprise, he’s the consultant Simon hired to help save the store. As they work together, Simon realizes that he might have another shot at happiness, if only he can convince Gavin that he’s worth sticking around for.
Review: (slightly spoilerish)
Not much to this one, but what’s there is enjoyable enough. Really, I could end this review there, as it pretty much encapsulates my feeling about the book. We have a lonely older Dom, who happens to be a very good at what he does. (We’re reminded of this several times.) And we have his perfect sub who can’t commit. Overcoming this refusal is basically the plot (the saving his bookstore bit is just framing) and the presumed HEA comes after the inevitable ‘yes.’
I enjoyed it all, but I do have to admit that the solution comes off screen. One page the sub is all, I can’t, I just CAN’T. Then, on the next page he’s explicably back saying, I want to give this a try. But we, the reader, aren’t granted access to what made him magically change his mind, which honestly (in my opinion) was really needed. In fact, I would almost argue that it should have been the backbone of the book; so having it left out was extremely frustrating.
All in all, for a bit of fluff it was a fine read.
Description from Goodreads: Will broke Dusty’s heart their senior year. One unexpected moment of passion between them, and Will freaked out. Not only wasn’t he gay, but he wasn’t kinky either—or so he insisted to Dusty. Their long friendship ended, and Dusty was left with only bittersweet memories of their last movie night together.
Ten years later, out as gay and a Dom, Will auditions for membership at Club Deviant, only to find that he’s been assigned an all-too-familiar submissive. His scene with Dustin feels like fate, and he’s determined to get back what they once had—and more.
Dustin had buried the pain of rejection deep, but playing with Will conjures all his memories of that one electric moment they shared and the friendship it destroyed. He’s built walls around his heart high enough to keep out the Trojan Army, but together, he and Will may find the courage to move beyond their past and face their future together.
Review:
OK, to start with, until I sat down to write this review I didn’t realize this was a fourth book in a series. I would never have picked it up if I had. I generally avoid latter books in a series, even if they are stand alone. But it’s read now and, who knows, maybe I would have liked it better if I’d read the previous three books. Maybe not, because I don’t know that my complaints resulted from anything related to the series itself.
Now, I don’t want to infer that I didn’t like the book, just that I had complaints. First, the characters are paper thin. Seriously, with the exception of the flashbacks, over the several weeks of the book, we don’t get a single scene outside the club. So, the book is wholly focused on Will’s pursuit of Dusty and Dusty’s avoidance of giving in. Meh.
Second, I didn’t think what happened between the two as teenagers deserved all that much angst. It just wasn’t that big a deal. They certainly never had a relationship, so claiming Dusty’s heart was broken seems a little extreme. We’re told they’d been friends for years, but we’re given one scene in which Dusty awkwardly invites WIll over to his house, as if they’re just becoming friends. I didn’t buy it.
Third, I get that wax play was supposed to be a big part of this, thus the title. But almost every single sex scene was a wax play scene. For an elite BDSM club they seem to have a very limited repertoire. The thing is, even if I found it super sexy, I’d have been bored with it. But really I thought it was pretty bland, especially Will and Dusty’s big climax scene. Meh.
I hated the Dom-talk. Why do all Doms in these sorts of books have to talk in stiff, complete sentence, call every one ‘boy’ (which just squinks me out, like something that should be uttered only in Deliverance) and never use contractions. Meh.
So, in conclusion, while this was an ok book and some people might be thrilled with it, I remained only mildly interested throughout.
I picked up a copy of Partners, by T. L. Stowe from the Amazon free list. At the time of posting it was still free.
Description from Goodreads: When two gay policemen, both desiring each other, finally discover the other is also gay, sparks fly, long time erotic desires are fulfilled, and questions of unrequited love begin to hang in the air. Will a heart be broken or will lust blossom into mutual love?
Review:
I’m afraid this review is all about the numbers. I didn’t plan it that way, but it turned out that way.
I picked this book up because I recently wrote a blog post about how much it annoys me when authors put tags in book titles on Amazon. I chose this book as an illustration of this, because it went one step farther. On Amazon it’s titled as such: Gay Romance: Partners: Gay Romance by T. L. Stowe (Author), Gay Fiction (Foreword). Seriously, did they think I’d miss that this is a book about gay men? And if I did, did they think I’d miss the first “Gay Romance” or the second? Better throw it in as an author too. And just in case I did somehow miss it, they use the word gay a further 13 times in the two-paragraph book description. The whole blurb is only 134 words long, so a full 10% of it is the word gay! I love m/m, but surely I’m not alone in thinking that’s overkill. Just how stupid do the authors think their readers are? I was astounded.
But then, I thought it might be parody and as parody I thought it might be a little funny. It reminded me a bit of Daffyd Thomas (Little Britton) who, despite being questionably gay, repeatedly insists that he’s the only gay in village, while remaining oblivious to the fact that everyone around him is having copious amounts of gay sex (unlike him).
So, I decided I’d best just read the book. Well, it’s not a parody. It’s a serious novel, yes, about gay men. And other than having two points that irritated me, it could have been an ok read…except the numbers. The author’s tendency to overuse words, as noticed in the blurb, haunted me throughout the book. And because I read on a Kindle I can show you just how much. These words stood out, not just because they were used so often, but because they were also unnecessary. I get it; these men are cops and thus, a bit dude-bro like. But the use of direct addresses tacked onto the end of sentences was vastly overplayed.
They called each-other buddy 28 times. And it felt like soooo many more. As soon as they kissed the first time the baby & babes stared. They used those endearments 40 times. But it was man that really stood out. It was used 245 flipping times in this book! Granted, some of them are obviously used as a standard noun, as in ‘The man turned around.’ But the vast majority were used as a direct addresses, as in the last comment of the book, ‘Me too man. Me too.’ And they’re all just like that, with no comma. I would really like to know what a me too man is. You can probably imagine what the combined effect of all these extra words was. Could someone maybe lend me something to pry my eyes from the back of my skull?
With a decent editor to address the repeat words, typos (come on, there’s one in the first line of the book, the fourth freakin’ word), missing words and grammar mistakes (commas, people, commas) this might have been pretty good. It’s a very sweet, friends to lovers, first time gay, maybe GFY book…except the wife.
Now, this is a personal niggle but I have never figured out why so many MM books have to create some false competition between gay men and straight women. I didn’t like that the author went to such lengths to highlight how much better sex with Alex was for Rick than with his wife. Prefer one to the other, but don’t make it about debasing the woman just because you have a preference. Similarly, I disliked that she was made out to be such a witch because she was always suspecting Rick of sleeping with other women. Fair enough, he wasn’t and that would get old, but he was fucking a man, so it’s kind of difficult to claim the moral high ground here and this dichotomy was never addressed. Really, the wife was hardly even considered as anything other than an obstacle to them moving in together and this wasn’t fair to her. Such selfish callousness (ostensibly excused because she’s supposed to be a b/witch) made it hard for me to respect the men or their HEA.
Lastly, Alex is gay. Rick is attracted to women and men, but by the end of the book he’s calling himself gay instead of bi (his attraction to women doesn’t seem to have died or anything) and this felt a bit like…is there such a thing as gay washing, like white washing in race relations, where everything but the dominant categories are glossed over and downplayed? I don’t know. While everyone is obviously entitled to their own sense of self-identity, it didn’t feel quite right to me.
All in all, a sweet enough story but, objectively speaking, it’s a pretty rough draft.
I received a copy of The Dom Around the Corner, by Christine D’Abo, from Netgalley.
