Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Caspian Pumkin-Watts is at the end of his rope. Facing a career crossroads, when he’s offered a chance to spend nine months filming a reality TV show on a French holiday island, he grabs it with both hands.
There are only two problems. His co-star is his ex-husband, and the producer is Caspian’s replacement in his ex-husband’s bed.
Max La Forge of La Forge Oyster Farms knows he’s peculiar.He has a penchant for blue rubber, for instance, and only drinks from a blue mug. He loves driftwood and seashells and hates being touched without his permission. Living alone in his little hexagonal house suits him perfectly, until his dog discovers a young Englishman unconscious on his driveway. Inexplicably drawn to the lonely, complicated stranger, Max garners courage to set out on his first ever romantic exploration.
Author’s note: as always, I write with a light touch, but please heed the trigger warnings for anxiety disorder and deliberate self-harm (on page).
The Review
This is the third book set on the Ile de Ré, north of Bordeaux on the west coast of France. Aside from the salt flats and the oyster beds of Ré, there are the vineyards, and it is in this locale that the third romance takes place.
I loved the premise of this: a popular English cable-TV series called “My Big Gay Adventures,” has zeroed in on a five-acre vineyard that has not been harvested in a while. Having followed a gay couple—Caspian Watts and his husband Leigh Pumkin—for several highly successful years as they undertake a wide range of skill-building adventures (French chef, Formula 3 racecar drivers, master plumbers), the show’s producers have decided that Caspian needs to become a vintner. The unseen premise of the show is that Caspian and his husband have divorced over Leigh’s adultery with Jonas, the show’s main producer and Caspian’s former best friend.
The flip side is Max LaForge, who, unbeknownst to the Brits, owns the vineyard. We met Max in the earlier two books, but never learned much about him. Here the author lets us get to know him well. Max lives in one of the gatehouses to the property, and works with his father and brother managing the family’s generations-old oyster beds. But Max is also on the autism spectrum, and copes with the challenges of life among the “normal” in various creative ways.
It’s a great set-up. Almost predictably, as Caspian seeks to distance himself from his ex-husband and ex-friend, during what is intended to be the reality show’s final season, he manages to quite literally stumble across Max late one rainy night.
These two oddly-matched men forge a bond—Max huge and powerful, but with a brain that works differently from everyone else’s; and Caspian, petite and fragile, with profound anxiety and an addiction to cutting himself. We move back and forth between their two perspectives, rooting for them all the way.
There is painful darkness in this story, but not a huge amount of suspense—and that’s fine by me. There are some plot twists, mostly due to the unexpected nastiness of a couple of the characters—a distinct lack of candor is revealed most painfully, and it adds a sharpness to the otherwise charming arc of the romance.
It’s a wonderful series from a very fine author.
5 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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