Caught Running by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

[Octobercountry]

Just finished Caught Running by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban:

Fifteen years after graduation, Jake "the jock" Campbell and Brandon "the nerd" Bartlett are teaching at their old high school and still living in separate worlds. When Brandon is thrown into a coaching job on Jake's baseball team, they find themselves learning more about each other than they'd ever expected.

High school is all about image - even for the teachers. Brandon and Jake have to get past their preconceived notions to find the friendship needed to work together. And somewhere along the way, they discover that perceptions can always change for the better.

I thought the premise of this story sounded interesting, even though I’ve never been one to take part in sports in any fashion whatsoever. It’s a testament to the skills of the authors that their account of the details involved in coaching a high school baseball team was quite involving, even to someone like myself. No problem if you have no background in sports; you won’t have trouble following this part of the story.

The book began well enough, with the first half showing how Jake and Brandon got reacquainted (they were aware of one another in high school, but didn’t really know each other well at that time). I enjoyed seeing them embark upon a tentative friendship, which gradually turned to an irresistible attraction, though both men were very much in the closet. The fact that the pair live in rural, homophobic Georgia, where it could be a real problem for a schoolteacher to openly gay, adds some drama to the proceedings. (The fact that they were both coaches would only compound the problems, if their secrets were discovered.)

However, at the midpoint of the novel everything fell apart. This was when the two men decided to act upon their long-repressed longings for one another. Okay, no problem---time for a scene of “an intimate nature,” as is par for the course in these books, right? Well, yes, but unfortunately that’s ALL we get for the rest of the novel. The plot goes completely by the wayside, and the entire second half of the book is basically one sex scene after another with little further development of the plot or character.

Oh, this is fine if that’s what you’re looking for, I suppose---but after an excellent beginning, I was expecting a real plot for the rest of the story. And, I have to say—the sexual content was only okay in my opinion; not really exceptional. (Could have used a LOT more descriptive content. In situations like this, I truly do believe that adverbs and adjectives are an author’s friends, if said author wishes to pull the reader into the heat of the moment.)

There were so many lost opportunities here. The authors could have explored what coming out as gay (whether on purpose or by accident) would have meant to the men, their fellow teachers, the students who looked up to them, and the community at large. As I said, setting the novel in the American homophobic south means that there would definitely be issues to overcome. Or, by contrast---what would NOT coming out have meant to their relationship? How would they have pulled it off?

A few characters were dropped---Brandon’s relationship with his fellow teachers, explored just a bit in the early chapters, was never mentioned again after the two men jumped into the sack. Likewise, we have a rather shrewish cheerleading coach pursuing Jake, but this plot thread is abandoned as well. It's like, once they became intimate, none of the other characters mattered, none of the plot mattered. Okay, we all know what it's like when you're starting a new relationship---you just can't keep your hands off each other---but do we have to hear about this over and over and over again in this book, with no heed paid to any other elements of the story?

Even the subject of Jake's continued struggle with the aftermath of the sports-related injuries he received during his college years was ignored in the second half of the book. The subject had all been set up early on, and I was wondering exactly how it would all play out---but in the end NOTHING was said about it. The plot thread was dropped entirely and not resolved one way or another---very odd.

It’s really rather perplexing, the way this book turned out. It started out so well, and then..... A few scraps of plot are wound up on the final pages, but not in a particularly satisfactory manner. I can’t say the book is badly written, but it was a huge disappointment to me. I really am surprised at the number of good reviews this has gotten on Goodreads.