Review: No Way!
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 29, 2014
I really wanted to like this book. I loved the premise - a young billionaire escaping his family and the soulless responsibilities of big money, buys a ranch. Another damaged young man, Andy, is an undercover cop looking for the drug dealers who murdered the man he slept with on his last assignment - and the ranch is his target. The potential for fireworks drew my interest, right off the bat.But I didn't like the book, at all. In fact, I returned it for a refund. I am giving it two stars only because the author seems to have a good amount of talent and promise, but I just couldn't continue after reading approximately 135 pages. And for me, that's highly unusual. I normally complete even dreadful novels in the hope that they redeem themselves through some miraculous insight or writing in the latter part of the book. In the case of "If Wishes Were Horses", my level of annoyance overwhelmed any hope I might have had of any kind of redeeming virtue.There were two issues that kept me from liking this book.The first is its endless absorption with dominance and submission, despite that fact that this was NOT a BDSM book. So many really good female authors simply nail male same-sex relationships. I don't know how they do it, but they seem to "get" gay men together, and assiduously avoid turning them into negative female fantasies. Not so for Ms. Violet.In this book, the two men are constantly vying for dominance over the other - despite the fact that both want to top and bottom. Her idea of foreplay just turned me off completely. One character rhapsodizes about how he'd like to punch the sh*t out of the other before taking him, against his will. The first sex scene was appalling (despite the fact that a number of reviewers here found it "hawt", which astonishes me). What kind of foreplay is it to slam your lovers head against a hardwood floor until he sees stars???? That's not foreplay, that's abuse and assault. There's nothing sexy about that criminal act. Nothing at all. In fact, I found it repugnant.I'm a gay man, and I'm not at all uncomfortable with a certain amount of kink - I can, in fact, get off on it. I'm hardly a prude. But slamming someone's head into the floor as an act of love and lust? What was the author thinking? She characterizes gay male sex as mindless brutal violence. Perhaps that is her fantasy, but it certainly isn't mine, or that of any sane gay man I know.The second problem was the execrable editing. Though this book is not riddled with spelling and grammar errors (like some I have read in this genre), there are enough that it distracts from the reading experience. She repeatedly repeats phrases, such as "he needed he needed to....". What's up with that? Sometimes misspellings confuse the hell out of the text - "this is what he's going to to" (I assume she meant "to do", but that's not what she wrote).But then she makes the unforgivable editing error, the one there's no coming back from. She forgot the name of her character. In a paragraph describing Andy's actions, she says something along the lines of "Ken walked down the hall past Ken's door on the right..." How can Ken walk down the hall to Ken's door, especially when it was Andy doing the walking?It is very rare that I lose patience with a novel. I love books, I love good writing, and I love the M/M Gay Romance genre. Sadly, this book doesn't meet even my most basic criteria for excelling at any of them.In all good conscience, I cannot recommend it.