Rating: 4 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance
Length: Novel

Before I begin this review, can we talk about what is quite possibly my favorite m/m cover of all time? It’s sexy without being a headless torso, and it captures so much of the passion and emotion found in Dangerously Happy. I absolutely love it, and I applaud Varian Krylov, since so often a self-published book ends up with a cover not worthy of the story.

I will begin with this warning about Dangerously Happy: It is not for everyone. It is different than anything I’ve read in the genre and, while this can be a very good thing for some people, it can also be a big turn-off for others. I lie somewhere in the middle there, though more on the positive side than the negative. There is not much plot to share, since this is a pretty simple story about a musician, Aidan, who works a day job and plays with his band by night. Dario is a critically-acclaimed author who has an amazing space for bands to practice and perform, and he does it just because he’s bored and because he can. However, it becomes clear quickly that Dario has always harbored a thing for Aidan, who is supposedly a very straight younger guy.

When Aidan stays late after rehearsal one evening, he starts to feel the spark between he and Dario, and it’s obviously confusing for a man who has only loved women. Slowly, the two begin a relationship together, though there are many obstacles standing in their way.  Aidan is still not sure what he’s feeling, since he has never seen himself as gay, and Dario is dealing with demons from his past that threaten to derail their relationship.

Other than that, what you have with this book is a lot of sex. A LOT of sex. To the author’s credit, Krylov does a good job of keeping the sex from becoming boring. There is about every sex act you could imagine in this book, with every combination of people, including MMF menage. All of the sex scenes are very descriptive, and the m/m/f scenes are no exception. I, for one, am a huge fan of sex between men and women and other men and every combination that exists, so I found this particular part of the novel enjoyable. In fact, I found it really appealing that the author wasn’t afraid to go there.

The problems I had with the novel had more to do with the writing than anything else. Sure, there wasn’t much plot, but I enjoyed this book for what it was — a very erotic, intense description of sexual pleasure, with a small dose of character development and plot on the side. The book itself, though, was much too long. It did start to drag on in the last 100 pages, and I think was a weaker book due to the length.  he author also has this tendency to use phrases and words repetitively. For instance, one character refers to the other as “Darling” and calls him that what feels like 150 times in one scene. Same again when one character develops a nickname of “Sweet” for another character. At first, it’s cute and endearing. After the first ten times, I wanted to punch a hole in the wall if I heard the term used again. These are the kinds of things that I think would be picked up in an edit, but it bothered me so much, I could hardly read the scenes. Overall, the writing was fairly decent, but tended to border on the flowery and overly emotional, which makes sense seeing as a good portion of the dialogue takes place as the characters are having sex.

I think this is the kind of book you will either love or hate, with very little in between. If it sounds interesting to you, pick it up. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. If any of these things are triggers for you, though, you’ll definitely want to avoid it. If you want a book with a lot of sex between characters who have good chemistry and enjoy experimenting in every possible way, give it a read.