Review: Moving, authentic, heartwarming and heartbreaking all at the same time
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 2, 2014
I am a relative newcomer to m/m romance novels and Dreamspinner Press. However, I am a lifelong fan of Southern novelists and Southern novels.  Perhaps because my mom was born and raised in the South until the Great Depression forced her family to immigrate to California where her father found work and where I was born.  But there is some Southern blood running in my veins and this type of novel calls to me in the familiarity of a phrase, a way of experiencing  the world and a way of expression.  I have found several novels like this one hiding at Dreamspinners Press.  Novels that are actually top drawer literature and would be at home on the New York Times Best Sellers List if the world of publishing weren't still so slow to receive stories with gay protagonists. Stories written by gay men with the ability to express the inexpressible.  Mr. Wilgus has such a talent for articulating his character's struggles while raising a special needs son, as a gay man in the South. The interview that the lead character gives the cameras after a gay rights march at a hate mongering radio station is worth the price of the novel. It so succinctly sums up what baffles me most about the religious right's approach to equality for LGBT folks.This book also called to me on many levels as a retired social worker as I have worked with special needs children and their families, I have worked with folks who are underemployed and reliant on public assistance and I have worked in the child welfare system with meth moms. I was blessed a number of times to find the long lost dads of the children  who gladly then stepped up to the plate as wonderful, single dads, once someone allowed them to.  I am a cradle Catholic with a mom who, though a Catholic as an adult, was raised as a Southern Baptist and I could more than relate to the church scenes in the book.  So, again, this novel touched me on so many levels.  I would certainly like to see it find a wider audience than those of us who read m/m romance.Thank you Mr. Wilgus and Dreamspinners Press for publishing this gem.