Sins of Yesterday by Romeo Preminger

Title: ⟫ Sins of Yesterday

Author: ⟫ Romeo Preminger

Blurb: ⟫ The first book in Preminger's Southern Gothic, family secrets epic: the Arizona series.

It's 1984, and fifteen-year-old Arizona is doing his best to take care of his younger brothers and sister while their daddy drives a truck cross-country and spends his pay-check on booze and gambling. In small town southeastern Louisiana, his family is known as the lowest of the low, and they say it's on account of a family curse that's so ugly, no one would dare speak of it.

Then Arizona's daddy loses his job, and things go from bad to worse. He baits Arizona into a fight, and their brawl results in him and his brothers and sister being split up by Social Services. Arizona is determined to make a better man of himself and take care of his siblings, but he's up against a world controlled by adults, small town prejudices, and unfathomable family secrets that will change everything he thought he knew about himself.

Review: ⟫ I had no clue what I was getting into reading this story.

It sucks you in with it’s almost casual telling of events, events so horrific that there were a couple of times I had to go back and re-read what I had taken in. This poor boy goes through so much it’s just awful, and it seems like every single time he gets a break, things get worse.

When he finally found love, real love, my heart lifted. Even when it became apparent that Nicholas wouldn’t be able to follow Arizona out into the world, the fact that Nicholas was happy for him to fly and thrive, trusting that he would come back, made it all worthwhile.

School was just how I imagined it to be – perhaps because Arizona is only two years older than me I could imagine just the type of thing he faced. But to find that school wasn’t the worse thing that was going to happen to him – I didn’t expect that. And perhaps I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t.

It does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, which I think people should be warned about, but I am heading into the second book once I’ve taken an emotional break.

The writing is engaging – almost slowly hypnotic in that you can ‘hear’ the accents and how people spoke. I haven’t read any Southern Gothic books before so didn’t know what to expect. Depending on how this trilogy ends, I may dip my toe further into the genre.

A very solid 4/5 for me and I am looking forward to reading more.

I received an ARC from GRR in return for an honest review.

Daddy's Boy by Romeo Preminger (Arizona Series Book #2)

Title: ⟫ Daddy’s Boy: Book Two in the Arizona Series

Author: ⟫ Romeo Preminger

Blurb: ⟫ Arizona started a new life when his birth daddy, Gaston Bondurant, found him living with a foster family and facing criminal charges for assaulting his abusive stepfather. Plucked from the squalor of rural Acadiana, Arizona was thrust into New Orleans high society and an elite New England boarding school.

Home for the summer, Arizona sets out to find his younger brothers and sister, who were scattered to different places when their family was torn apart. Along the way, he reunites with his tenth grade sweetheart, Preston Montclair, who still holds a torch for him.

But Arizona is struggling to figure out the man he’s supposed to be. He’s got an obligation to his daddy, who wants to mold him as his heir, but he’s also got a responsibility to his wayward siblings. It feels like he’s swimming against the rapids, trying to do both while figuring out if he belongs with his boyhood love or an educated man who can help him with his dream of being a famous writer.

Review: ⟫ After reading the first book, I was quite eager to get to the second so I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get into it. We start from where the first book ended and follow Arizona to college, where he struggles to fit in with boys who have lived a privileged existence from the time of their birth – nothing at all like him.

I picked this up and put it down numerous times, before finally determining that I was going to bull through. And I finally realised why I couldn’t get into the book. I don’t like Arizona – like, at all. In the first book, I sympathised with his plight and supported many of his decisions – or at least, understood them. In this book, I found Arizona to be reckless, uncaring and selfish. Even the things that were happening to his ‘siblings’ all seemed to be based on how it made him feel – little about what they were suffering through.

His behaviour at school – the lack of empathy for what his actions could cause – really annoyed me. Admittedly, he’s a young man and there were times when he tried to show maturity and responsibility like when he and his friends went out to clubs, etc, but I just couldn’t find anything about him to like. And that meant that my investment in the story dwindled until I finished it because I felt like I should rather than because I wanted to.

It is a very well written story, evokes the era extremely well, and the writing style is engaging, but my feelings towards the MC, how he treated Preston, some of how he behaved at school meant that I lost any inclination to read further. I completely understand that this is a ‘me’ problem rather than anything to do with the book, and perhaps it was written intentionally to create this feeling. Either way, for me this book was a 3/5 and I’m not sure if I care enough to read the third and final book.

I received an ARC from Gay Romance Reviews.