Review: Beautiful Story!!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2013
This is another self-published book that I've been encouraged to read by friends and really awesome reviews on Goodreads.  It is very different from that book, of course, and not without it's own problems, but the awesomeness of the book and the characters outweighed my frustration with some of the writing issues, leaving me really excited and hopeful that this author will continue writing.Howie (never Howard) is stuck in his hometown.  He and his twin have forged different paths, leaving him perpetually feeling like the loser twin.  His brother is going to school to be a doctor, but he's stuck at home after leaving school to help his mother after their father died.  They've become quite close, but Howie is stuck feeling like a kid that never grew up.  He doesn't go to school, he doesn't have a job, and his mom still pretty much takes care of him.  But, in talking with his best friend, Howie comes up with what he thinks is a great plan -- he'll get a job at an Arts and Crafts store to meet women.  His reasoning is that girls love a sensitive guy, and knowing about all that knitting and crafts crap is sensitive, right?  His best friend, who is in love with his twin, is much more pragmatic.  Obviously, she tells him, they'll just think you're gay.But Howie is determined and lands a job at Artie's Arts 'N Crafts, run by Arthur himself.  He immediately sets his eyes on the bubbly and cute Kristy, but finds himself creating a strange love/hate relationship with Arthur, his gay boss.  Arthur is everything that Howie isn't.  He's stuck up, a complete do-gooder, and a nerd to the core.  But Howie soon finds that even if his love life is more complicated than he expected, having a job is helping him anyway, and the people whom he originally hated to work with become a new sort of family.This is really a coming of age story.  Even though Howie is in his early twenties (22? I can't remember for sure), his growth was stunted by his move back home.  Being in a rut is a rather simple way to put it, but the jealousy and hatred in having to watch his brother move onwards and upwards in life makes an already uneasy relationship downright difficult.  I finished this book feeling like I knew the secondary characters almost as well as Howie, and though the book is long, the writing is somewhat dense, with quite a bit happening in an economy of space.  In a way, reading this feels a bit like reading a long serial -- we get to know the characters so well because there is so much time and wealth of words to get to know them, not only in important scenes but in Howie's day to day life and interactions.  I didn't have a problem with this because I never felt like any of the writing was superfluous, and it creates a really fleshed out world with complex connections between the characters.I'm making a broad generalization here, which obviously isn't true for every book and author, but this book epitomizes my reasons for liking to read online original fiction and self published books.  Sometimes, when I read something like this, I feel like it's set apart from the m/m community, where the characters (or archetypes) and their actions tend to grow homogenized and feed off one another.  We often say or hear things like, we want more realism or more realistic characters, which in all actuality we don't literally want.  Maybe it is the absence of editors, or some other difference I'm not sure of, but this book actually felt more real to life.  The rough edges aren't buffed out, and while that may be somewhat annoying in the prose, it is pure gold to me in the content when done by an intelligent and talented author.  Sure, this author could have been reigned in at times -- the dialogue tends to spiral out of control at points, Howie can be rather infuriating sometimes with long periods of annoying behavior, and a few other things I've forgotten by now -- but in the big picture, they mattered less to me than the central core of the story, which was beautifully written and executed.I very much hope that this author continues to write and publish, in whatever manner, because I'll remain a reader for life, and I know that I'll continue to read and re-read this book.  So I definitely want all of you to read it as well.