Review: Sweet story, some minor quibbles
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 9, 2014
First & foremost—love the cover. It’s mesmerizing.Sweet friends to lovers novella with hot sex scenes, which is something I greatly appreciate. I had two quibbles though....The first is that Gabe, due to a traumatic childhood, avoids any and all emotions. This is fine as I generally find emotionally stunted males to be quite appealing, but does he have to compare himself to a girl every time he pops an emotion? The first time he did it was kind of amusing & gave some insight into his character, but 4-5 times in a 41 page book was a bit grating.The other problem I had is with the BDSM aspect. (If you're not into BDSM -- it's only mentioned & not really on page, so it shouldn't be a problem.) I’m weary of books that automatically assign a pain kink to anyone with an extremely difficult childhood. Saying the hero is into BDSM is the new, improved way of saying, “Dude's got issues.“ This has been done (a lot) & is an oversimplification of complex issues, especially when said issues are magically resolved by the insertion of the correct p*nis (in this case, Malcolm’s). However, I should point out that while Gabe’s sexual "issues" seem to be resolved by about the 66% mark, the author does deal with his emotional issues in a thoughtful way.Anyway, if issues like these don’t bother you as a reader, this novella is a nice short story and well worth the price (.99 cents at this time).