Review: "Dreck!" I said out loud
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 08 11, 2011
At first I was sort of amused, because I figured this was the kind of book Barbara Cartland might write, if she wrote gay romance, sex scenes and omitted the ellipses. Then I realized just how unfair I was being to Barbara.The one hero, Will, is plucky, virtuous, and has the IQ of a turnip. As he is weaker financially and in a precarious situation, he is naturally also smaller in build and the bottom. The other hero is... well, I'm not quite sure what he is. Of course, he's tall, dark, muscular, strong, opinionated, unapologetically gay in a butch way, and a total top. I'm not sure if his name is Elijah or Eli (and yes, I know one is a shortened form of the other, but generally one picks one or the other form, and doesn't switch between them about fifteen times in a single scene). He  falls in love with Will over a phone call - as any man in his mid-thirties would, especially if he thinks he's talking to a gold-digger - and schemes to get him to Montana. Then, when Will arrives, Eli(jah) is tender, loving and slobbering all over Will one moment and stand-offish and angry the next. He's also stalkerish, and announces to all and sundry that he will marry Will before he's really proposed to Will, but apparently this is a sign of grand passion and taking charge in a manly won't-take-no-for-an-answer sort of way, rather than of being a bit unhinged and totally creepy.Mr. Stretke, even romance has to contain at least some concept of reality; I'm not sure you could have gotten away with the story you're trying to tell here if you had trasported the couple into Regency England and turned Will into the eighteen-year old daughter of an impoverished country cleric. (Also,just a small tip: if a character is alone and you suddenly enclose one of his sentences in quotation marks, most readers can figure out that he said something and that he did so out loud. You don't have to spell it out for us every single time it happens. Which is way too often.)