Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
An age-gap M/M romance novella about making beautiful music during lockdown.
When all three of his roommates moved out, Davy Sun’s living situation was a mess. Then friends of a friend offered their pool house for the duration, and it was an offer too good to refuse.
The last thing Davy expected while he was living in some random rich person’s backyard was to meet the man of his dreams. But it turned out the rich guy was friendly with guitarist Barry Teller, who came over to give an open-air lesson.
The lesson turned into a picnic dinner, and then some playing and singing on the patio. Turned out Barry really liked Davy’s voice … and he wanted to hear it from up close.
Content alert: this story is set in the real world of 2020.
Adult situations, themes, and language; 30,500 words and a happy ending.
The Review
Like Alexandra Caluen’s other books, Come to Me is gentle, a bit lyrical, and sweetly tender. It is not filled with angst or trauma, although one of the central characters, Barry Teller, has something of an unhappy past. It is not a past so different from many gay men of his (or even my) age.
What made this book a particular pleasure for me is the fact that it is written, with intent and care for detail, as a document of the 2020 pandemic year. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for someone to do this, as it gave me an odd sense of relief. In its own way, it’s a perfect jewel of a romance.
Barry is a semi-successful musician, making his career in the entertainment world in Los Angeles. And then COVID hits, the world shuts down, and performers of all kinds are pushed to the edge. They scrabble to adapt and survive.
Davy Sun, on the other hand, has a steady job and quite readily shifts to working from home after lockdown. His problem is that, working for a non-profit means he has to share an apartment with other young professionals. As his roommates peel off to return home or otherwise seek shelter during the pandemic, Davy finds he can’t afford the rent and casts about desperately for a new place to live.
In Los Angeles, it’s all about who you know, and Davy knows Ro, with whom he used to do a little light drag for fun. Ro’s boyfriend in England knows people in Los Angeles; and they know people. This leads Davy to Charlie and Sacha.
Charlie and Sacha lead Davy to Barry. This is no spoiler, because it all happens very early in the book. The point of the short book is these two men—one 35 and one 46—meeting each other because of a global crisis; but more than that, it’s about how this pandemic (in which we’re still living, although less fearfully now) changed the world. It’s also about how we all adjusted to it, in spite of death and economic upheaval. Good things happened during the plague year of 2020, and this book is about one of those things.
Come to Me is not a big book. It is a little love story set in a dark time. It is like a bright little blossom blooming in a desert. This is not the first plague gay men have faced, and both Davy and Barry offer us insight into the legacy of resilience that has always been part of our shared history.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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