Author: ⟫ Skye Kilaen
Blurb: ⟫ Falling in love with your best friend is wonderful… until tragedy means fighting for the romance and the friendship.
Bisexual event coordinator Simon Novotny thrives on connection. He cherishes his large, queer-friendly family and his friends—especially his cute, brilliant work bestie, gay IT geek Ziah Holdaway.
It’s taken forever for Simon to to coax Ziah out of his shell.
Time and again people have let him down, especially those who should have loved him unconditionally. But Simon would do anything for Ziah: text him jokes when he's down, bring him home-made lunches, change his tire in the rain. Heck, if Ziah needs a kidney, Simon’s got two.
Minor crush? Maybe, but Simon’s not a make-the-first-move kind of guy.
So when an unplanned hookup with Ziah proves their chemistry is off the charts, it also shakes Simon to his core. Because for Ziah, it's not casual, it's love.
Before Simon can fully process his feelings, a life-altering tragedy upends Ziah's world. Simon throws himself into helping and also rallies his family.
But for Ziah, family means rejection, and Simon's uber-helpful clan sets off major alarm bells.
Can they find a middle path through the storm, or will this crisis cost them both their romance and their friendship?
A high-heat contemporary M/M romance novel with a guaranteed HEA.
Tropes: friends to lovers, hurt-comfort, grief, nerds in love, bisexual disaster, single parenting.
Detailed content warnings will be available in the book's front matter and on the author's website.
Review: ⟫ This was a well-written story, with careful and considerate descriptions of anxiety and depression, as well as one of the main characters dealing with feelings of rejection from family due to their sexual orientation.
The characters were well defined, clearly distinguishable, with very human reactions to the situations they found themselves. The background characters were also well written, with issues of their own that didn’t overwhelm the main story but made them defined as more than just ciphers for the main characters to play off of.
Which is why I’m really confused as to why I just didn’t like the story. I didn’t like Ziah at all – I sympathised with his plight but didn’t like the way he handled things at all.
I found Simon annoying and slightly wishy-washy, and some of the background characters struck me as far more interesting.
I didn’t feel the connection between Ziah and Simon and found their sex scenes to be perfunctory and lacking in real heat.
Perhaps it was just the frame of mind I was in when I was reading the story? I felt a distant sympathy for both men, but apart from that I didn’t really engage at all, which is a shame as the subject matter, the struggles they were both experiencing and their story was a very good one.
3.5/5 from me. I received an ARC from GRR.
