Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Falling in love with your best friend is wonderful… until tragedy means fighting for the romance and the friendship.
Bisexual event coordinator Simon Novotny thrives on connection. He cherishes his large, queer-friendly family and his friends—especially his cute, brilliant work bestie, gay IT geek Ziah Holdaway.
It’s taken forever for Simon to to coax Ziah out of his shell. Time and again people have let him down, especially those who should have loved him unconditionally. But Simon would do anything for Ziah: text him jokes when he’s down, bring him homemade lunches, change his tire in the rain. Heck, if Ziah needs a kidney, Simon’s got two.
Minor crush? Maybe, but Simon’s not a make-the-first-move kind of guy. So when an unplanned hookup with Ziah proves their chemistry is off the charts, it also shakes Simon to his core. Because for Ziah, it’s not casual, it’s love.
Before Simon can fully process his feelings, a life-altering tragedy upends Ziah’s world. Simon throws himself into helping and also rallies his family. But for Ziah, family means rejection, and Simon’s uber-helpful clan sets off major alarm bells.
Can they find a middle path through the storm, or will this crisis cost them both their romance and their friendship?
A high-heat contemporary M/M romance novel with a guaranteed HEA.
Tropes: friends to lovers, hurt-comfort, grief, nerds in love, bisexual disaster, single parenting.
Detailed content warnings will be available in the book’s front matter and on the author’s website.
The Review
Not a smidgen of paranormal in this, but surely a different kind of normal than we often get in romances. We’re in Texas, of all places, and Skye Kilaen presents us with two best friends who really ought to be more. How will we get there? That’s always the most fun question. Kilaen makes it both fun and anxiety-inducing.
Simon Novotny is half Czech and half Mexican. Trying to imagine the food and the language in his life made my head spin. And his family. What a family!
Contrast that with Mosiah Holdaway, known as Ziah, who is anglo and Mormon. I can’t say much about his family, other than he hasn’t seen or talked to them since he came out.
Simon’s wrinkle is a constant presence of depression, and a brain that tries to undermine his well-being at times. I mean, Ziah’s depressed too, and for good reasons; but it’s nothing like what Simon has struggled through—with his best friend Ziah at his side.
This fairly simple tale of love found (at last) is complicated by issues of identity and recovery—being abandoned by your family can be as emotionally damaging as surviving addiction or mental illness. This book also offers the best expression of how to truly understand bisexuality I’ve ever read. All of that is simply part of this book’s gentle, consistent, and remarkably eloquent attempt to deliver a message of acceptance of who people are and where (mentally, emotionally) they live.
Ziah and Simon are wonderful characters, but they’re not alone. All of the players that we meet on this stage are rich, amusing, believable. At the very core is the truth that love matters. It is not the solution, but it is essential for the solution.
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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