T. L. Bradford

It’s not often that I struggle this much with a review. I considered not posting my review but then I realized that was a bit of a cop-out and I’ve decided to try and put into words what bothered me about this book.

The plot begins as a “gay-for-you” type of m/m romance. Then it becomes anything but a m/m romance in my mind. To be fair, the author says there are “darker themes” in the book…but I don’t think that warning quite covers it.

Noah and Josh meet on set. They both seem to consider themselves to be heterosexual at the beginning of the book. They are to play lovers on screen and almost immediately feel an attraction to one another. They are forced to share a dressing room for some reason and that really seems to bring out the differences between them.

Noah deals with panic and anxiety and OCD. There are darker things at play in his past but it’s a very long time before everything is revealed.

Josh is straight, happy, carefree and seems to be Noah’s opposite.

After a blow up regarding their shared space, the two men begin to spend more time together and become close. That’s about the time when things began to go wrong for me.

First of all, I felt as though a lot of the conversations the characters had contained really outdated language about sexual identity and orientation. There was a lot of biphobic and homophobic language. There were too many jokes about who would be the wife in a gay relationship, not being “that” type of gay, being gay means being “one of the girls”. It was pretty hard to read. I mean, a joke is a joke, but there certainly can be too much of it in one book.

The relationship between the main characters is one of the most confusing and unhealthy ones I’ve ever read in a novel. They are together and they break up a few times, they are cruel to one another, they are vindictive, jealous and possessive.

At one point in the book when the two men are not seeing each other, they use a female friend in a sexual encounter to prove a point about them belonging to one another. It’s a horrible scene and has dubious consent… and is then swept aside as though it wasn’t an incredibly horrible and invasive things for them to have done.

They fight so much that they eventually end up breaking up and moving on to other people. It’s very angsty and yet the relationships that both men move on to seem a good deal healthier that the one they have left behind.

As for their sexual orientations, Noah has events in his past that seems to have blocked out the idea that he could be gay. He resists it at every turn. I can see that happening if a person’s past was traumatic enough. Josh says he is straight at the beginning of the book, but he later tells someone that he’s probably always been bisexual. I understand that a part of what the author was trying to do was portray the idea of coming to terms with one’s identity, but it came off as much more unclear than that.

The next time the men get together, it’s because one of them is injured in an accident. Partners are dropped, feelings are hurt again, and the two men reunite.

When the men finally get together, their friends (some of whom have been involved in their idiocy) simply remark that it’s been “fun watching their relationship progress.” Fun? Clearly these men need different friends, or the friends need to find something better to do with their time.

There is jealous that results in one of the main characters assaulting a friend. There is an actual crucifixion of a character (no I’m not joking). But the thing is that it’s all so over-the-top, unhealthy and unbelievable that I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief at all. One of the characters does something extremely cruel to his abusive father… and although I would imagine there are some who might think an abusive person “deserves” that, I found it to be really too much.

I was supposed to review this book and the next book in the series. But after struggling all the way through the 500 pages of this one I could see that the next book was going to be more of the same.

The female characters in the book, with the exception of Josh’s twin sister are throwaway characters. They do unforgiveable things, they manipulate, they hurt, they plot, and they keep secrets. There’s an almost misogynistic feel to the book.

I’m not going to say that no one should read it, there is an audience for everything. Some people might truly enjoy seeing something completely dysfunctional and harmful, I’m must not one of them. I have to feel as though the couple is “worth” the angst. and all the way through this book I kept thinking that Noah and Josh should be separated.… (más)