Review: A Very Unusual Book. In A Good Way!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 8, 2014
"Just Like This" is a rather unusual book that avoids the tried and trite memes and themes too often found in the M/M Fiction genre.Adam is a Canadian TV and movie star. Connell is his new next-door neighbor who turns his home into a veritable fortress within a few days of moving in with his three children.Adam falls into insta-love with the hot Connell. Connell falls into insta-hate, or more accurately, insta-fear, with Adam. How can this possibly work out? Well, Adam is nothing, if not persistent, and he spends the next year ingratiating himself with Connell and his children. Much to Adam's surprise, he's falling in love not just with Connell, but with his entire family.Something about this all rings true. I won't spoil it by telling you why Connell is so afraid to even be friends with Adam, but I laud Adam for his commitment and patience, for his easy willingness to risk his career by coming out publicly to be part of this family. One of the things that impressed me most about this book is that there was almost no angst involved in the coming-out - Adam was more than willing to trade whatever hit his career might take to become an important part of this family. He's got his head on straight and never even questions his decision.Perhaps this is just a Canadian thing, no great weeping, whipping or being tossed out over coming out. The only real challenge here is becoming a unified family with two dads and working out the problems that stem from some fairly terrible events that happened before Adam knew any of them.And love does, indeed, overcome.The writing is universally excellent, the characters all drawn in great depth, with distinct voices, and the children, particularly, are entirely credible - something that's hard to do and not often done successfully. This author nails it.I might have given this novel five stars were it not for some of the sloppy editing. This book is nowhere near as bad as some of the embarrassing stuff I've seen in other books in this genre (sometimes to the point of making the novel unreadable), but still, I strongly believe that it is the job of the author to ensure that he or she delivers a finished, polished product.I must admit that I was bumped out of this engrossing and moving story more than once, whenever I encountered lines like: "I need some errand ran [sic]", "He still loved him despite of [sic] this", "The children...might have been spilt [sic] up" and "He fought much harder than he had too [sic]. I mean, don't these writers and editors even turn spell-check on? Even as I quote them here, in a review, they're being highlighted by my browser's spell-check! A word to authors: why are you willing to risk your reputation, reviews and readers by delivering a product that has not been fully edited? It's insulting to the reader who paid for the book, and it makes you look bad.But the editing notwithstanding, I do recommend this book and this author most highly. In fact, I just bought the only other full-length novel of his that I could find on Amazon, and will start reading it as soon as I finish writing this.