Genre: Contemporary, Romance, Gaylit
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
A group of coastal Californians battle wildfires, racism, and their own demons in five distinct narratives set in late 2019 and 2020.
First Born Sons is populated by a cast of LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies who struggle to find love, comfort, and fulfillment. As the novel progresses, characters interact across the separate narratives and are brought together for a birthday and a disastrous Black Lives Matter demonstration.
A man returning to the horrors that made him leave Mississippi, a blind gay man flirting with love, an FTM transgender starting hormone therapy, a woman struggling to protect her sons from her ex-husband’s surge to right-wing politics, and a teenager with two gay dads searching for his Black surrogate mom paint a disturbing tableau of modern-day America.
The Review
This is a splendid, moving, epic book. It is not a romance, but there is a lot of love in it. It is not only about gay people, but there are several gay and bisexual folks in the extensive cast, all of whom are central to the story. There is also a trans-man making his journey, and at least three cross-cultural and interracial families dealing with the realities of racism and cultural prejudice in the modern world.
The first-born sons of the title are Byron, George, Lamar, M, Jason, Colton, and Devlin—but they are not at all the only important characters, not by a long shot. These men—husbands, sons, brothers, lovers—are at the center of five distinct plot narratives, but the women in these stories are just as important and just as vividly portrayed. The various plot arcs wind through the book from the summer of 2019 to the fall of 2020. And you know what happened then, right?
Thus this beautifully textured book follows the five storylines as they interconnect and overlap before and after the pandemic engulfs the world. Every issue you can imagine that affected all of us during the first pandemic year is brought into play, and done with grace and emotional power.
Personally, I was overwhelmed by so much that resonated with me (one half of a gay couple with two non-white adopted children). It really is a book that will touch any compassionate soul. Meis is a good writer and not afraid to get complicated—but he manages to keep his stories clear and well-defined, guiding his reader through the ins and outs of these intersecting lives.
Five 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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