Rating: 2.5 stars
Buy Links: Amazon | All Romance
Length: Novel
Soren Wilkenson is a part-time student and works at Starbucks. As Dawntreader, he has an online relationship with his friend, Tru. When Tru suggests meeting up after a few months of friendship via on-line communication, Soren is hesitant. Turns out, he had a right to be. His date, much to his surprise, is Lucas Daye, his extremely attractive supervisor at Starbucks. Lucas is a known womanizer who spends his days in college and his nights at whatever nightclub he chooses to frequent. So it isn’t surprising that, when they meet in person, Soren and Lucas part ways quickly. They both feel let down, having lost a really close friend.
Lucas, who identifies as bisexual, realizes that he is, in fact, attracted to Soren and wants to pursue a relationship. Soren is still nervous, since he’s much less experienced and doesn’t want to end up another of Lucas’ victims. They tentatively agree to start dating, which only opens up the doors to a myriad of issues, including Soren’s homophobic mother, Lucas’ homophobic roommate, a Starbucks employee who won’t leave Soren alone, and dealing with quickly growing feelings that neither person knows how to deal with.
The thing that I enjoyed about this book was Lucas and Soren and their budding relationship. I thought they were each sweet characters who genuinely had each others’ best interests in mind. Soren especially, with his inexperience that quickly grew to an insatiable, experimental sex drive; his beautiful, delicate good looks; and his shy, eager to please personality, was really endearing.
However, that’s really the only good thing I can say about this book. It had some good elements, such as likable main characters and good chemistry that led to erotic sex scenes, but the story was much too long. It could have been cut by 2/3 and been a much stronger book. Everything was spelled out. Every conversation, every action of the day, until I truly felt like the book was in real-time. I had a very difficult time forcing myself through it, quite simply because it dragged on and on.
You would think, with a novel of this length, that it would include a lot of terribly important plot points. In fact, it was quite the opposite. A few bumps in the road were thrown at us. The extremely homophobic mom caused a bit of trouble. The admirer at Starbucks was also a nuisance. But none of them went anywhere and without any gravity to the conflict, it stayed on a steady keel of boring.
I cannot recommend this book. I was disappointed, since Talya Andor wrote a book that I quite enjoyed and reviewed earlier in the month. I expected more from this author and was disappointed, especially from an editing standpoint. I hope that she’s able to recover from this book and display the talent that I’ve seen from her in previous efforts. As for now, don’t waste your time on this one.