Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Slice of Life
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
Get It On Amazon
About The Book
A slice-of-life M/M Hollywood romance novel about growing into yourself.
Victor Garcia and Andy Martin had known each other for eight years. Been in love for seven and a half. Been together – really together – for six, and married for two. So many milestones, so much change. Victor looked at his life sometimes and thought, this can’t be for real.
Going into 2020, they had a full year of work scheduled. Then life got weird, and for a minute it seemed a lot of things wouldn’t happen. It took some ingenuity and a ton of paperwork to make sure all those projects didn’t evaporate. It also took stepping up. Victor knew those two movies could be salvaged with a few changes, so he sent in spec rewrites. Not much later, they were in Europe for career-changing roles.
Andy was thrilled, not just because both movies were going to be better this way, but because he loved Victor’s new confidence. Every time the guy tried something new and it worked, he opened up a little more. Andy had to match that, because it was only fair. Even when the things that spilled out hurt.
Adult situations, themes, and language; 89300 words and a happy ending.
The Review
To read one of Alexandra Caluen’s LA stories is to be dropped suddenly into a world full of everyday life that you know nothing about. At first disorienting, Caluen’s great skill at writing fiddly detail of the mundane and bringing it to life eventually brings the inchoate swirls of facts and names into something like focus. From that point on, the reader becomes part of the story, invested in the shared life of Andy Martin and Victor Garcia, even while sometimes barely grasping the big picture of who they are.
The title is doubly potent. Set in the year 2020, it chronicles the life of a hotshot Hollywood industry couple during the first and worst pandemic year. The second meaning of the title relates to the complicated backstories of the main characters, and the gradual unmasking of painful truths that these men, together as a couple for six years, have never voiced to each other.
The nearly claustrophobic intimacy of pandemic lockdown doesn’t derail the loving relationship that has grown between Victor (43) and Andy (53) in the years since they met on the set of a successful TV series. As they negotiate the messy world created by the pandemic, from real estate to concerts to European film shoots, Victor and Andy never lose sight of each other. They begin to dig through the fog of celebrity that began with their rise into A-list celebrity. Caluen wants us to understand that, in spite of their age difference and the complicated beginnings of their relationship, they have something that will survive and thrive.
A large part of Victor and Andy’s reputation is tied to their coming out as a couple publicly, with all the attendant buzz—positive and negative—that this created in a world as two-faced as Hollywood is. The dark side of celebrity—and eventually the unshared traumas of their past lives—get brought into the story, providing moments of emotional intensity and shocking revelation.
All of this intricate interweaving of action and detail includes the broad professional kinship network that people in “the industry” carry with them. You have to simply let the plethora of names wash over you, understanding that in the end you’ll know who everybody is and how they fit into Victor and Andy’s life. It is a reminder, beautifully expressed, of how enormous “Hollywood” is, and how far beyond the brightest lights in the media papers the industry goes.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is the fact that Caluen infuses the whole narrative with a Latinx accent—Andy is a half-Puerto-Rican chorus boy, and Victor is a late-bloomer from Mexico. They not only act, but they dance (tap and tango), and sing (showtunes and more), and Andy is a successful photographer.
On top of this, they both have fertile imaginations that come up with new things they can do together on a daily basis. It is remarkable to see how, when the distractions of the world are forced aside by lockdown and isolation, these two men begin to see each other more clearly, to truly understand what they have known all along.
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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