Review: Sweet, familiar plotline, wonderful characters, BUT....
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 22, 2014
I love Kade Boehem's books and characters, and I do not know who Piper Vaughn is or what her role was in the authorship, but this is a very familiar plotline with serious and hot sex, excellent writing and twists and turns you can see coming.The father-falls-for-his-son's-best-friend-and-vice-versa plotline is handled extremely well, and the unusual twist of the father being closeted all these years is nothing new.  But what is different about this scenario is that the news is old to everyone in the father's family--except his son.Now, we get to the BUT part: Notice I have not mentioned the three main characters' names so far.  That's because this book takes very seriously the ethnicity of all of them, and the authors have done a very good job in maintaining that identity EXCEPT for the characters' names.  Aaron is the father and Julian is his son.  They are from, and the plot is in, Wisconsin, and the authors go out of their way to develop a distinct Midwestern Italian-American psyche for both of them, and Aaron's parents, who may or may not have been born in Italy.  The family worked hard and is relatively well off and Aaron has built a respectable construction contracting business.  Julian's best friend, Malachi, is from Miami, but his parents were born and raised in Brazil before they came to this country.  They are struggling to keep ahead at all times and his father is a carpenter who taught Malachi well.Now, I am from the East Coast and am Italian-American and know Italian-Americans from coast-to-coast and can tell you one thing for sure:  There are no Aarons or Julians in that group, period, just as I am quite sure there are no Malachi's in the Brazilian-American community.  Tony, Joe, Johnny, Sergio, Sal, Daniel, Bobby, whatever--those are the names (and others) the authors should have considered for Aaron and Julian.  Paolo, Guillermo, etc., are perfectly fine substitutes for Malachi.  This may seem petty but quite frankly I was taken aback when the authors took so much time to make the backgrounds authentic but not the names.  It reduced my rating to four stars from what should have been five.  Still, I loved it and if you are not as anal retentive as I am with such matters, you will give it five easily.