Review: enjoyable
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 05 31, 2014
I'm a bit torn on this one. In some ways I thought this was a fairly middling read, enjoyable but nothing to sing about. In other ways, I found myself surprisingly happy with it. I thought the plot was ok. I thought the characters were ok. I thought the sex was ok. I wasn't displeased with any of it, but I didn't find myself falling in love with any of it either.However, somewhere in there, among the shallow character portrayals and weak plot, drug out over 100+ pages by copious amounts of sex (there is A LOT, so much that I thought the guys could probably have rescued the girls a lot sooner if they'd stopped shagging and got on with investigating) I found a series of touchingly romantic moments. Yes, almost all of them occurred in the middle of a sex scene and there is a bit of a sex=love correlation going on that I find a little disturbing. But regardless of their literary surroundings, I found Tryg's slow change of disposition sweet, for lack of a better word.Since there was sooo much sex, I should probably talk about it. None of it was overly graphic. It didn't foray into kinky territory or anything. It was all fairly straight forward. My only real comment would be on the ridged roles. This never used to bother me. I came to reading M/M by way of yaoi manga, where I would call it the norm rather than the exception. But the more m/m I read the more often I find myself bothered when there is no flexibility in who gives and receives, asks or demands, etc. And I found it particularly notable here. It was emphasised and I found myself uncomfortable with it.Speaking of uncomfortable, I didn't care for Tryg calling Luke 'boy' all the time. Luke's 25 to Tryg's 32, so there's no pedophilia or anything, but the use of 'boy' or, even worse, 'the boy' in sex scenes just felt hinky. Plus, it just seemed to be one more way to emphasise the power disparity between the two of them.Lastly, I want to address the cover. I know this may seem irrelevant, especially since covers can so easily change, but this one hit a pet peeve of mine so I'm going to indulge myself by griping about it. If a book is going to have one of its characters on the cover (a dangerous proposition to start with), every effort should be made to ensure that the picture used matches the character it's representing. As an example, I once read a book in which the main character was meant to be a natural blond and the bleach blond on the cover had an inch and a half of dark roots--obviously not natural then. (I can't be the only person who notices this kind of thing.)Here the narrator goes to some effort to describe the way Tryg keeps his hair short and his face cleanly shaven to avoid the cliché lion-headed appearance (which is probably exactly the impression this particular picture was going for). This means he would likely be displeased with the very image used to represent him on the cover and if the character would be irked by it so am I. Mostly, however, I find it disruptive to look at a cover and be forced to notice discrepancies instead of consistence with the story. The cover is still part of the book, after all.