Review: I really tried
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 01 20, 2014
I purchased this book on a recommendation as I had never heard of the author (I believe it's his first book) and I seriously tried with this book. I made myself get to 31% before I finally had to stop because I kept telling myself "I can't read this anymore" as I was reading the book.I am going to start with what I liked about this book. I really liked the concept. Major league pitcher meets rock star at a baseball game and they fall in love instantly. This could have made for a fantastic story.However it veered off badly.First most of the book (up to the 31% I read) was written in third person, but present tense. You may not realize how distracting present tense is until you realize that you never read present everything is past. It's hard to keep focused with that, and then the jumping into past tense for a short time.My next big issue. This story is about a pro athlete and a rock star. I do not know any, but I would venture to guess that those two professions would not lend to those people speaking exceedingly polite to one another, over the top polite. No cuss words, no dirty talk, lots of thank yous, and that would be great, etc. That did not seem realistic to me at all. Here is a perfect example. Through the first several chapters they went on and on about each other's butts, but not once did the word a$$ make it in. Every other synonym but that. What pro athlete or rock star would actually use the word "toukis"?Writing style. I felt like I was reading a book by Walt witman with all the flowery prose (which I actually thought was written nicely, but this was not the type of book for it). I compared reading all the metaphors for their eyes, or the color of the ocean, etc to reading a m/f historical romance. Again, I felt that piece was written well, but wrong book, wrong timeframe.And lastly, and this was huge for me, and probably a big part of why I couldn't connect with the book from the beginning. These two supposedly fell in love at first sight. As the singer sang the national anthem he sang to the athlete. Yet, that scene wasn't written into the beginning of the book!!!!!!! It was mentioned as something that happened but the opening scene has the ballpark announcer announcing the players and the organist playing, and some guy in the strands mentioned twice as having three hot dogs. The first you know of the characters is when the athlete tells his friend in the dugout that he connected with the anthem singer. Give us that scene!!! It's vital to connect the reader to the characters.I wasn't sure whether to write this as I normally would not want to write a negative book review. But the book is 4.99.I would give this 1.5 stars if I could because it had potential and the prose could be well done. But this is not where the authors strengths seem to lie. Maybe gay historical???