I’m over at Dear Author with My Top 10 list of 2022 – plus a non-fiction bonus book just because. I’d love to hear from readers what books made their own best of lists.
Tag: queer (Page 2 of 35)
Project Hero by Briar Prescott, narrated by Kirt Graves and Joel Leslie. Enjoyable story but it made me feel a little old!
Project Hero is my first Briar Prescott book. I’m starting to wonder if I may have aged out of college-set romance because this book felt a little young to me. Perhaps that was more down to one of the characters himself though – I lack additional data points.
Andy Carter is apparently a neurodivergent college student studying graduate physics. He believes himself to be in love with his best friend, Falcon, ( now that’s a name!) but is firmly in the friendzone. Andy is shy and has very little sexual experience. Andy has few friends and suffers from extreme social anxiety. The idea of “performing” in front of a crowd (this may be anything more than talking to 2 people at once, so “crowd” is doing a bit of work here) terrifies him.
Lawrence “Law” Anderson is also a student at the same college but his passion is hockey. He is the assistant coach for the college hockey team after a medical diagnosis meant he could no longer play. Law wants to coach hockey professionally – something which has put him at odds with his high-achieving and very business-oriented parents.
A number of rookies on the team are flunking physics and are in desperate need of tutoring in order to maintain the necessary GPA so they can continue to play. Law identifies that the best option to keep his guys playing is to convince Andy to tutor them. Andy’s social anxiety is such that this seems unlikely however.
Still, Law is persistent and comes up with a potential solution. In the meantime, Law has cottoned on to Andy’s infatuation with Falcon (a basketball player and “enemy” of Law’s for reasons).
Andy and Falcon and a couple of other guys on the basketball team share an apartment. Andy is staying at the college for the summer as he’s doing some work for his physics professor and Falcon is going home to work in the family business. Andy decides he needs to stop being the “sidekick” and become the “hero” while Falcon is away. Law volunteers to assist Andy with his project in return for Andy tutoring the rookies in physics. In that way, there is something that put me in mind of the set up Elle Kennedy’s The Deal. Project Hero is a very different book however, not least because it is MLM.
Over the course of the summer, Andy finds himself growing closer to Law and vice versa. When Andy learns that Falcon won’t become involved with a virgin and, realising that he’s come to trust Law, he asks Law for “sex lessons”. Law is already in deep with Andy at that point even though he thinks it’s useless given Andy’s feelings for Falcon.
But does Andy really love Falcon romantically or is it something else? Is what is developing between Law and Andy the relationship he’s been looking for after all? (It’s a romance so I probably don’t need to say where this is going.)
Andy often felt very young to me. I don’ believe it was his neurodivergence per se which gave me that impression; I’ve read plenty of autistic characters before and haven’t had that reaction. Perhaps it was something about his sense of humour. Which I liked – it was amusing – but which also tended to the hyperbolic and exaggerated.
Law, on the surface, was the more mature of the pair. He was more experienced in almost every metric but there were times when even he felt a little immature too.
Maybe it was just the set up. Maybe the entire concept of “Project Hero” was a little too young for me. This is where I wonder if it’s just me and I’m too old for college-set books now. I don’t know!
There were however plenty of things to like nonetheless. While I found my attention wandering from time to time, for the most part, I enjoyed the story. (Even though I rolled my eyes here and there.) The narration was very good and that certainly helped my listening experience.
Of the two performer I generally preferred Kirt Graves’ narration to that of Joel Leslie but that was more personal taste than anything skill related. I’m used to hearing Joel Leslie speaking with a British accent in audiobooks – even though his natural accent is American – so hearing him voice a US character feels a little weird to me. That’s unfair I know but there you go.
I have only a little experience with Kirt Graves’ narrations but each time I listen I know I want more. In this book I particularly liked the way that Mr. Graves delivered Andy’s catastrophising humour.
I enjoyed watching Andy “blossom” under Law’s attentions in all the various ways and the epilogue which takes place 10 years later showed just how successful “Project Hero” actually was – albeit not quite the way Andy had originally planned.
Grade: B/B-
Monthly Mini Review
A Thief in the Night by KJ Charles – B+ At just under 3 hours of listening time, this little delight was easy to squeeze into my listening schedule. Those of us who’ve read or listened to The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting may remember that siblings Marianne and Robin were missing a brother – Toby. He’d left home suddenly some years before after a falling out with their father and, while they understood why he’d left, they missed him and wondered what happened to him. We listeners need wonder no more as here he is.
Toby isn’t so much a thief as someone who steals things when “needs must”. He’s happy to work for a living but it’s not always easy to find work and there have been times where he’s stolen or sold himself to survive. While his preference would be not to do either of those things I got the sense that he doesn’t let what he has to do sometimes get him down too much. As the novella begins, Toby meets a handsome aristocratic man in a tavern. They have an enjoyable encounter in the dark and Toby has real regret when he later steals Miles’ watch and pocketbook – but, needs must.
Miles has just returned from the war and is on his way home. He had been estranged from his own father and had hoped they could reconcile but he’s found out he’s a week too late – his father suddenly passed away. When Miles, now the Earl of Arvon, does make it home, he finds a house in terrible disarray. The land has been sold off, there’s only one horse and the house is full of junk – his father was a hoarder of sorts. Continue reading
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Sailor’s Delight by Rose Lerner. Lots to like in this m/m romance between a navy agent and a sailing master set at Rosh Hashanah.
I’m over at Dear Author with a review of A Merry Little Meet Cute by Julie Murphy & Sierra Simone. Super hot, super funny and super sweet all at once. Recommended.
Tough Luck by Annabeth Albert, narrated by Kirt Graves. Even though this is a bodyguard romance, it’s light on suspense and fits firmly into the contemporary romance category.
Tough Luck is book one of Annabeth Albert’s latest series, A-List Security, loosely based on characters in and around a security firm of the same name, located in Los Angeles.
Ex-SEAL Cash Erwin is staying with his friend, Duncan, his former lieutenant and current proprietor of A-List Security. Duncan has made Cash a standing job offer but Cash is not looking to provide security services to the rich and famous. At 38 and after 20 years in the military, he’s at a loose end and is not sure what’s next for him.
Danny Love is Duncan’s younger brother (technically, they’re half-brothers). Danny was a child/teen star on a show which I imagine to be something like Glee. He’s retired from acting (he’s 25) and has battled substance addiction in the past but he’s clean now and trying to live his best life while also not really knowing what’s next for him. As well as all that, Danny has a stalker.
Duncan asks Cash to help look after Danny as Duncan has to go out of town on an important assignment but doesn’t want to leave Danny unprotected. Cash agrees but only as a favour – not as a paid employee. This does make it a bit easier to accept the relationship which develops between Cash and Danny as no money is changing hands. (That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker for me but it has to be dealt with in the story if there’s that kind of relationship. It wasn’t necessary here though.)
Danny, while young, has a lot of life experience and the age gap between the two didn’t seem all that big given their personalities. Both men are also deeply lonely. Danny, because he’s lost many of his friends and associates since he retired from acting and got clean. Cash, because he’s left the only life he’s known for 20 years.
Cash was the “tank” in his squad. The go-to guy who got things done. He compartmentalised his emotional life and his sexual and romantic desires while in the military and has had very little sexual experience. He’s not really considered his sexuality before but now he finally can. And Danny Love awakens feelings in Cash he’s never taken out of their box and peered at before.
I wasn’t really sure exactly what Cash’s sexuality turned out to be; it wasn’t labelled in the book exactly but the suggestion is that he’s somewhere on the ace/demi scale in addition to being gay (or possibly bisexual).
Given his lack of experience, it was somewhat surprising then how quickly he got into sex with Danny once they “broke the seal”. He had no hesitation to try anything and he took to it like a duck to water.
The age gap didn’t bother me – to me the difference didn’t seem marked, as I said above, but another way that the power differential was managed here was that Danny was the sexually experienced one of the pair and so Cash was his (very willing) “pupil” during the early part of their relationship.
Not much was made of the financial differences between them, other than that Cash wanted a job and refused to be a sponge and live off Danny’s substantial wealth. That could have been explored more. Cash’s eventual job felt more like an afterthought to wrap things up rather than something which had a meaningful arc in the book.
Even though there’s “security” in the series name, there’s not a lot of suspense in this book and I’d classify it as squarely contemporary romance. There is some threat from the stalker but mostly the police do the actual investigating. Cash is simply there to make sure Danny is safe. They take precautions, sure. In fact, much of their early relationship takes place at a remote cabin where they’re alone together (convenient! 😊) while the cops investigate. But there are only a few scenes where there is any real risk. Mostly the stalker is the reason the pair are in proximity and that closeness brings about the relationship. It’s more of a fluffy book than a suspenseful book overall.
The narration by Kirt Graves is excellent. I’m not sure I’ve listened to him before but I know now why Caz speaks so well of his talent. I was particularly impressed by the very different voices he gave to the main characters. All of the characters have a different tone to their voices but much of the dialogue was Cash and Danny (they spend a lot of time alone together after all). Cash has a deep, gruff, kind of rumbly voice and Danny’s is lighter in tone and younger-sounding. There was seamless switching between the two in conversation.
After this listen I know I’ll be seeking out more work from Mr. Graves because apart from his great delivery, emotion and pacing, he seems to have a very broad range of character voices – so many very excellent narrators seem to have only one or two “hero voices” and it feels pretty special to find someone who (at least from what I can tell so far) has even more to offer.
Grade: B
NetGalley Reviewer
Currently Reading
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
