Love is an Open Road #3
This week’s batch of stories should, as a whole, be embarrassed of themselves. I appear to have only managed to finish four out of ten, although I gave most of them a solid, fighting chance (and even those four weren’t all that great). Oddly, they were mostly poor in the same way; lots of flashbacks, blocks of irritating exposition (“telling”, rather than “showing”), and temporal dislocations stemming from those two things. Some of them also had asympathetic characters, too. And head-jumping.
Yeah. It’s just not the finest collection of stories I can offer you this day.
Not a Word by Dawn Sister: DNF An age-gap story where every time the older gentleman stated “I’m 43, for goodness sake,” I would snort in disbelief because he acted …25, tops. And that just because there were no rants about chickens or exploding microwaves. And he had a stutter, so that he could consider himself “broken” without actually being broken. To add drama, you know.
The Hanging of Hope by Chris C.: A weird, unhappy tale from WWII of a farmer and a runaway POW. I wouldn’t have finished it, but it was short. Like those godawful Gieco commercials. It did a pretty good job of being emotionally desolate, which is something you want in an ambiguous war-story.
Getting Us Right by Adan DePiaz: DNF A boy-toy/mistress situation (or a severely closeted one?) where the …master? was an asshole of the highest degree, but totally needed to be dominated in the bedroom, so then it was okay that he was an ass. Told with choppy flash-backs, temporal confusion, and too much telling.
Angles by Tripoli: It’s still not the best writing, but this one was sweet and had a few heart-wrenching moments. I enjoyed the twist at the end, and especially that the MC wasn’t an utter idiot about it. A decent short heart-warmer.
The Best Man by Olley White: Probably the best one of this lot; one man (a brother of many) is asked to be his best friend’s best man, and what occurs thereafter. It’s good and sweet and hot and clever (UST, oh my!).
Save Me Tonight by MP Wallace: The basic summary makes this a tale of “Soul mate” werewolves, but it has an original take on that, and does it’s own thing. The issues are the same troubles that this whole group suffered from, though it has them to a much lesser degree, and also the last…third? or so seemed almost entirely gratuitous. Like, “Oh, hey, we completed the plot, but I forgot to mention dragons and mpreg! Better tie that in now! And set it up for the sequel, too!” Still not bad, just…unnecessary.
Troubled Heart by Sammy Goode: DNF A man who recently lost his husband slowly begins to fall for his neighbor. I made it about 3/4 of the way through this before I just couldn’t handle the flashbacks, and doubling-up of scenes (where it’s told from Character A’s POV, and then when we switch perspective, we hear it all again from Character B’s POV). Also, it looked like they were heading towards a perfect union, and I felt no need to see it.
The Last Yeti by Tully Vincent: DNF One yeti-shifter, and one one-armed asshole meet in Alaska. The second character was like a slightly better-written version of the guy in the last story, but they both had issues with a recent lost love, and this guy was more of an ass. It might be more worth reading if shifters and yeti are your thing.
Stilts by Valynda King: DNF A dancer who has a speech difficulty and very long legs, and a detective who is so sexy the English language can hardly contain him. There’s a murder at the dance club, and then I lost interest.
The Things It Takes by Leisha Caine: DNF A long-term couple working through some things. If it weren’t for the temporal displacement of things (where the story chapters say “two weeks later” and the story text refers to something from the last chapter as being “last night.”), it might not have been so bad. Has an emotional distance that, had it been intentional, would have worked well with the situation in the story. Too bad it was really just the result of poor writing.
