Review: I just play one on TV...a Hollywood romance that goes beyond formula
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 18, 2011
A. L. Turner's romance "I just play one on TV" is everything a good m/m novel ought to be.  Vince Cantavespri (gorgeous name, BTW) is a twenty-something actor on the verge of TV bigtime; Alex Gallegos, with whom Vince auditions for a role in a Dr. Who-like sci-fi series, is a little older, more experienced, and deeply scarred - literally and figuratively.Vince is gay and comfortable, and runs up against the unwritten Hollywood law that gay is good as long as the public doesn't know it.  Alex is...something else. He is largely in denial, but his attraction to Vince overwhelms his carefully constructed barriers, and this, needless to say, creates the driving force of the romantic drama when they are cast as alien-hunting allies in a TV series. As the series emerges as a hit in the national audience, and the two men's relationship on screen becomes the subject of scrutiny, Vince and Alex's opposing personalities begin to cause trouble. Both of them have past traumas they don't discuss, which only makes things more complicated, and underneath the surface, their stories have a commonality that ultimately saves them.I give Turner huge credit for giving us a story that, like "Entourage," offers an astute insider's look at the world of popular television and the repercussions that being gay can engender. It is a riveting story, the television series becoming another character - sort of parallel relationship - for Alex and Vince.  But the secondary characters are all wonderfully drawn, giving dimension, emotional depth, and authenticity to the book. The reader becomes part of this shared drama with everyone else - and Turner manages to pull of the necessary m/m requirements while surprising us along the way.Interestingly, Vince's surname means "Sung Vespers" - the twilight services sung in a church...while Alex's surname, Gallegos, implies fear or lack of courage.  I suspect the names are not accidental, and it's just one of the nice details that make Turner's book a pleasure to read and get weepy over.There is a persistent grammatical problem with the use of "I" as the object of a preposition in m/m literature that I cannot fathom.  Turner is a very good writer, clever, amusing, nuanced...but why editors of these books can't grip this one detail ["it was all about him and I"]...of course, this also appears in virtually every current TV show from Glee to Modern Family...so maybe it's a cultural shift?