Review: What a Wonderful Experience!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 1, 2009
A fabulously complex, richly drawn, and character driven love story that cements Z. A. Maxfield as one of my favorite authors across all genres of books. This book was an absolutely delightful experience!I was extremely impressed and pleased with the depth of character and emotion in this book. Maxfield has penned characters with complex motivations and actions. I very much enjoyed my time with them.Kelly is a funny, caring, wonderful man who struggles with agoraphobia and OCD related quirks, bears the brutal and hopeless weight of a mother with Alzheimer's, and has spent years keeping himself segregated personally AND professionally from everyone in the world, save one, his right hand (in ALL things), Will. And Will is a splendidly fantastic, deeply caring, funny, sharp-tongued, and protective young man who has deep emotional scars and bears his own crosses. His childhood and adolescence was a painful, heartbreaking experience that understandably still affects his actions and personality.They live together, love together - and yet they aren't destined for each other. They each know it, so instead of being tragic, their relationship is...wonderfully complicated and delightfully simple as well. Maxfield has shown us the depth of a different sort of love two men can have for each other, and it's comforting and good.And then there's Jae. Tall. Half-asian. Hot. And a journalist for a rag that makes its bread and butter from the sort of stories that rip privacy away from people in the public eye. A guy who's dealing with his own loneliness and guilt for the actions not taken with a boyfriend in the public eye who kills himself.Jae's sort of got the worst POSSIBLE job, not to mention his own inherent curiosity, to have any hope with the massively reclusive Kelly - and while he may not get the depth of just how bad it is when he first meets Kelly, he realizes it relatively quickly, and is so torn between his interest in the man and the job he's got to do that he makes mistake after mistake in trying to walk the line between both. Not that he's the only one to make mistakes, by any means. Kelly's human too.And actually, that's one of the things I loved most about this book - everyone was so wonderfully and wildly human. ePistols at Dawn is at turns funny, heartbreaking, surprising, loving, and erotic.Enjoy!