Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Transgender, MF
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Low tides threw up all kinds of unexpected and random treasures. Wedding bands, hauls of driftwood, old bones worn smooth.
Jaded oyster fisherman, Nico La Forge, had seen them all.
Or so he believed. Until one night, a cold, bedraggled, and beautiful Éti Salvador washed up on the shore.
Nico had never been in love. Wasn’t even looking for love. With the body of a revolutionary hero and a face like the devil, Nico was the sort of guy your mother warned you to stay away from. But then, Nico had never come across anyone as extraordinary as Éti Salvador before; divebombing the emotional wasteland of his heart, shaking it like a maraca.
And, overnight, like the turning of the tides, everything changed.
Oyster is an MF queer romance.
The Review
Fearne Hill puts her heart and soul into her books, and she also does everything in her power to make each of her stories a different experience. They don’t just entertain; they inform and make the reader think. “Oyster” has that in spades.
Once more we are on the beautiful little island off the French coast where “Salt” took place. Instead of salt farmers, however, we’re with a family of oyster farmers—a father and two sons who carry on a tradition going back over a hundred years.
Nico is a tatted bad boy-turned-dutiful-son. In his late twenties, he is something of a player, but mostly because no woman has ever struck him as “the one.” It is a familiar trope, and a comfortable one for readers like me.
At the end of a long night of harvesting oysters with his father and brother, Nico rescues a young woman who is staggering around in the chilly surf at dawn. There is something rather mythological about this scene and its setting—a sea nymph in distress? A goddess in disguise? The woman is very drunk, and Nico helps her back to her luxurious beach house above the dunes. Then he recognizes who she is.
Well, to start, this isn’t technically an MM book, since it is about a man falling in love with a woman. In fact, with the whole LGBTQ+ rainbow, there’s no G in this book at all except for Nico’s lifelong best friend, Florian, the subject of the first book in this series, “Salt.” I (a lifelong G) was glad to have Florian on hand, even in a supporting role, since his presence gave me a sort of an emotional anchor as I ventured on this journey with Eti and Nico. As Eti herself says in the book, the G and the T are totally different. This story covers a lot of unfamiliar territory and stretches the boundary of what MM fiction is.
Nico, an insistently straight man, is the revelation here. Hill digs deep into his heart to find a romantic hero that nobody—least of all he himself—has ever seen before. Both Nico and Eti have traumas hovering over their lives. Interestingly, Eti herself says that her trauma, which will be life-changing, is nothing compared to what Nico faces. “Oyster” is the tale of a man becoming more.
I can’t really say more about this because I am avoiding spoilers. This was not an entirely comfortable book for me, but I have learned to trust authors to know where they are going and where they want me to follow. Fearne Hill knows what she’s doing, and surprises us along the way.
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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