Miltantly Romantic

This is an MMM, so we have three male leads.  Our first is Josiah, our second Mateo, our third Tristan.  We meet Josiah and Mateo when they are teenagers and are being fostered in the same home.  Josiah knows he's gay and evidently presents as gay enough that he's bullied for it at school, but his foster parents don't seem suspish.  Mateo also knows he's gay, but doesn't present that way and has had some pretty intense toxic masculinity beaten into him by his dad, who's currently in prison. 

The way race is handled in this book is pretty interesting.  I've seen people identify Hart as a WOC.  Honestly, I have no idea if she is or not, I've never seen a picture of her, I've never seen her say one way or another, etc.  And even if she is a WOC, I have no idea WHAT color she may or may not be, which means I can't identify whether this is an #ownvoices book or not.  Idek if Hart identifies as queer or not, to be honest.

Mateo's father runs a gang, and his uncle is running it in said father's stead.  Mateo is positioned in a lot of ways as someone who is a victim to his circumstances.  The problem is, he often valorizes Josiah's willingness to acknowledge his own queerness, where Mateo hasn't been allowed to do such, in a way that doesn't recognize the class/race privilege difference.  E.g., Mateo loves Josiah because he's so "brave" to be "out" (I put out in quotes because it felt less to me that Josiah was out than that he wasn't lying about his gayness, which are actually two different things.  Both are valid options, but for queer persons for whom the difference is one of safety, the difference is hella significant.)  The problem is, Josiah can be "out" in a way Mateo has never felt he can be because, well, his safety has never been threatened by it.  Josiah clearly comes from like...white suburban parents who loved him and it's unclear it they would have accepted his gayness or not, but we don't get the feeling he would have been unsafe telling them.  Mateo is very pointedly from a culture in which machismo/toxic masculinity is incredibly significant and being out WOULD have been unsafe.  I don't necessarily think it's wrong for Mateo to find Josiah brave, in a certain manner, but the underpinnings of that bravery are never really explored and I think that might be part of why I had a hard time hooking in. 

Add to this, teenage love is something you have to convince me of pretty heavily to begin with--teens are, well, teens--and Mateo seems to love Josiah because Josiah is the first person who has looked at Mateo like he was worth something.  That's not actually a reason for lifelong love.  Meanwhile, it honestly feels like Josiah loves Mateo because Mateo protects him and is a boy, and attractive, and they have access to each other.  In other words, I'm never really convinced that these two like each other as PEOPLE, so much as concepts in each other's lives.

There's a lot of somewhat predictable melodrama at the midpoint of the book with the foster mom getting cancer and Mateo getting kicked out mostly because they Nice White Foster Parents defs think the Mexican Kid is perverting the Nice White Kid, but Josiah runs away with Mateo, and then they go back to Mateo's uncle because that's how Mateo knows how to make money.  Josiah ends up almost being assaulted seemingly because it's a rough area and Mateo does the whole "oh, if he's with me he'll never be safe" and rejects Josiah.

Then there's this long period of time where Josiah gets a job at a coffee shop in the PNW and eventually learns to make a friend despite himself, and finally starts going to college and you know, learning to be a human?  This was the point where I was like "I realize this is supposed to be an adult romance, but if there's a whole section on learning how to be a single human, I honestly cannot."

Enter Tristan, the rich attorney (who...seems to maybe be a prosecutor??  Idk, it's very unclear what kind of law he does, but this was one of the most hardcore "wow, this person really doesn't understand how lawyers who make serious money make serious money" book I've read in a looooooong time) with Damage, who sees Josiah feeding ducks (because of this whole thing with Mateo about how they'd go feed ducks together and here his ass is, still feeding the ducks, which I'm guessing is meant to be romantic.)

On the plus side, Tristan and Josiah's romance made...more sense to me?  Tristan is one of those "I had a crap upbringing, and all I care about is taking care of my mom and being rich" people, who has a single friend who he treats like crap and yet, of course, that friend is in love with him for reasons that are beyond imagining, but there you have it.  In any case, he likes Josiah because Josiah is (at this point) sweet and optimistic, and makes Tristan do things that aren't work.

Tristan is of course all "I can't love you, I'm not made like that."

Josiah is like, "welp, I like you, so I guess this works for now, at least you're upfront about it."

And then they have lots of sex.  *shrug emoji*

I will say, I love how Josiah's easy acceptance of Tristan's mom and her mental illness/trauma reach Tristan and get him to come out of his dumbassity.  (It's a word now, I made it one.)  Tristan's mom might have been the one part I really liked about this book.

Re-enter Mateo who has just gotten out of prison and somehow gotten free of his gang situation (how, you ask??  yeah, no, it was super unclear to me, but in fairness, I might have checked out by this point).

The last part of the book is Tristan and Mateo getting to know each other to see if they can make it work because they both recognize that making Josiah choose is a Bad Plan, and both of them want Josiah.  The funny thing is, there's actually a fair amount over which these two could have bonded, given their upbringings/experiences.  But again, it never feels like they like each other for each other, so much as because they need to for each of the to function with Josiah.  Now, here's the thing.  IRL poly?  This is when you recognize each other as non-hierarchical metamours and move the eff on.  And I realize this isn't IRL.  But the writing never convinced me of the HEA or even the HFN.

This book was highly, highly recced on one of the comms I'm on, it clearly works for a lot of people.  It just fell flat in pretty much every direction it could for me.

I went back and forth over whether to even talk about this book.  I want to support this author.  She comes out of fandom, she has poly titles, POCs, other stuff I want to see in romance, and particularly in histrom.  And in general, my experience with her on panels is that she's a smart, fun human. 

This is an f/f histrom, which is pretty rare.  It's basically her, Olivia Waite, and Jenn LeBlanc in that camp.  I REALLY want to like this book.

That said, it just doesn't work on a number of levels.

The first problem is that the characterizations are pretty flat, as are the motivations for the characters.  Mary James, our protag #1, is the daughter of widowed Sarah James, whose foremost characteristic is that she's a money-grubbing bitch.  I like a problematic parent as much as the next person who lives and breathes for h/c, so in theory, this isn't a problem.  However, that's really all Sarah is.  She's written as nothing more than a caricature of a gold digger. 

Mary, who is our POV character, is grieving her father, a merchant who was lost at sea.  She is also pregnant, apparently because Sarah forced her to have entrapment sex with a wealthy male character from a former book.  There are...a lot of pieces to this part of the book missing for me. The guy clearly doesn't know, as far as I can tell, because nobody knows, since they're trying to get Mary married off before anyone finds out.  There's no suggestion that the father is a bad person, which leads me to question whether he might want to KNOW that he has a child on the way, but setting that aside, okay, pregnant, needs a marriage before child comes.

Mary then meets Alex, our protag #2, who, within the space of a conversation a) figures out that Mary is romantically interested in her, b) that she's in trouble and needs a spouse, c) offers to be that spouse for reasons that seem to amount to "paying it forward" but what she's paying forward is unclear, d) explains that marriage of all kinds are perfectly legal in this particular town, and e) comes up with a plan to trick Mary's mother to allow this.   

So.  I have a lot of problems here.  First, as a lesbian, who knows other lesbians, and has on many occasions spoken with even more WLW, it is actually intensely hard to tell when a woman is hitting on another woman.  We're not socialized to see it.  When I say to another woman, "you look great in that dress," she can rightly assume that I mean, "you look great in that dress," and I might absolutely mean that.  But I might also mean, "You look great in that dress and I would like to peel it off you with my teeth."  There are VERY few WLW I know who haven't had this dilemma.  Which makes it incredibly hard for me to believe that at a time when the word "lesbian" wasn't yet a term, that it would take a few minutes for these women to figure out they are romantically interested in one another.

Honestly, I need more than "someone did something nice for me once and now I'm helping you."  Uh.  You're offering to MARRY her.  Presumably to intertwine all your holdings, which we, as readers, are led to believe are at least decent, with this woman you've just met.  At least tell me what that person did for you.  Something.  Anything.  (Nor is this followed up on.  We're never given the reason Alex does what she does.  At best, I am left to presume that she finds Mary TEH HAWT and so is like "aw yaaaaas" and figures she gets a kid in the bargain, too??  I have no idea.)

Perhaps the legal marriage thing is explained earlier in this series, as to how that came about in this town.  But it's nutballs?  Like, even in frontier-times, there was SOME level of state control?  Or federal, if it was a territory.  And I get that romance novels are about escapism, except that I personally want something to anchor that escapism.  I don't care if you want to come up with a whole alternative timeline of the States.  I mean, PLEASE, tell me stories where European settlers never come, or other things.  But give me the necessary narrative underpinnings for it.  Here, I feel like the answer to everything is "why not" which, yes, is an author's prerogative, it's just not one that works for me as a reader.

Finally, I'm not sure WHY there needs to be a whole "tricking Mary's mother" plot.  On the face of things, Mary is legally an adult.  Her mother has no ability to stop her from getting married.  Furthermore, the way things roll out, Mary and Alex end up getting married spur of the moment anyway, which makes it doubly unclear why close to a third of the book is spent without Mary and Alex having any interactions, and instead it just being about this plot to trick Sarah into letting Mary marry Alex.

The last third of the book is stronger than the first two.  Mary and Alex are married and they go back to Alex's farmstead.  There's some cute flirting and then we end on some sex, which seemed perfectly passable to me, I'm not really into sex scenes and this one didn't blow me away, but I think if you are someone who enjoys sex scenes, it probably registers as a sweet one.  I think, possibly, if the middle third of this book were taken out, the open shored up a bit, and the ending expanded to really establish these two, this might work better for me?  I still didn't really have a great sense of who either of these women were--although, admittedly, I knew Mary much better than Alex--by the end of this book, nor was it clear to me why they loved each other.

There were some interesting ideas here, and fun tropes to be explored, but in the end this felt like a first draft to me, and one that needed a bunch more in order to flesh out the main characters, what they see in each other, and the ins and outs of the marriage-of-convenience aspect of the book. 

This is written in a tight POV from one of the main characters, Tom.  Tom grew up incredibly wealthy, the child of a widower.  It's not clear how his mom died.  Possibly in childbirth?  Illness shortly thereafter?  Anyway, she's not in the picture.  Tom's sophomore year of college, his dad gets charged with running a huge Ponzi scheme.  This first leads to Tom being barricaded in his house with his father while the press surround them on every side until they run out of food--delivery services have proven unwilling to deal with getting through the press--being betrayed by one of his friends to the press, catching his father having tried to commit suicide and having to call the ER, and then, when the charges are actually set, all of the assets being frozen.

Tom basically decides that he desperately needs his college degree to dig himself out of the mess, but not having any financial help, he starts living out of his car and driving it as a gypsy cab in the hours when he can't drive a legal cab.  He does this the entire summer and then shows back up at school to find out he has a roommate, Reese, who Does Not Want a Roommate, and was specifically promised by the school he would not have one. 

We later find out why Reese is so het up about this issue, and frankly, it does not come as a surprise that his previous roommate stood by and watched as Reese was assaulted by some of the roommate's friends the year before, largely for the crime of being out and gay.  Reese's father, also a single parent, is super in Reese's corner, and when he finds out about it, bullies the school into making sure Reese will be at least slightly more safe.

Which the school promises to do and promptly drops the fucking ball on.  Reese embarks on a campaign to run Tom off with his Gayness, including regularly bringing back hookups, even when Tom is in the room.  (Something that Reese does without any type of discussion or consent on Tom's part and despite the fact that Tom finds it hot, that honestly bothers me a lot.)

Tom, however, already has a pretty good idea that he's bi, or, as he often calls it "equal opportunity."  It doesn't work out the way Reese wants it to.  Or, arguably, it does, because after about six misunderstandings caused by the fact that Tom has trust issues from here to Siberia, and Reese is doing his best to fuck his way past his trauma, the two of them end up getting together.  It's actually from there that things get particularly interesting, as Reese is out and Tom is not ready to be, for a whole slew of reasons.  There's a lot of compromise on both parts, and working through things, and fights, and working to be better for the other person.

One of the things I particularly liked about this book was the frank acknowledgement that being bi means a person is capable of dating the other gender, and that doing so is simpler not just in terms of prejudice but in terms of meeting partners.  I also appreciated that it called out the problem of bi invisibility when bi persons enter into relationships, and the way both the het and queer communities have issues with the identity.  Worthwhile as well was the unpacking of the struggle of being out even in an environment where Tom is aware that it's most likely to be easily accepted.

I was pleased that the two of them genuinely broke up and were apart for a chunk of time.  I think it's true of a lot of relationships that begin when people are young that a break is often necessary to define who you are as people apart from each other and if the relationship works if you are those people in it.  

I didn't love that while we know Tom is an unreliable narrator, it's not clear just HOW unreliable until pretty late in the book, and then it's a little bit harder to grapple with how much you can support his motives or not.

In addition, I felt like the climactic moments were all weirdly placed.  I appreciated that Reese didn't wig when he figured out a secret Tom had been keeping because he was ashamed, but at the same time, it's been this huge thing for like three-fourths of the book and then it's just neatly resolved in about a page.  Or, when they break up, we don't find out that Reese has officially done so until Tom thinks about it in a flashback.

I suppose I just felt like a lot of time the real heft of where the emotions should be isn't where they end up, or maybe that there's just not enough of them, period.  I didn't mind the book, but it never really grabbed me, either.