The View From A Rusty Train Car - DeeJay Arens

[PaperMoon]

There are a couple of things I appreciated about this book and quite a few others that I did not like.

Let's start with the positive:

There were some nice tear-jerker moments between our two MCs, sweet declarations and romantic gestures that tugged at the heart-strings. These mostly occurred in the first half of the book when Luke and Jared were growing up and discovering aspects about themselves and their sexuality, all the while living next-door to each other and being 'besties'. A couple of high emotion 'showdown' scenes were tear-jerkers for me.

OK - now the not so positive:

After the boys have their cute-meet, then comes the high drama and angst, once puberty and hormones kick in. Amy Lane and Con Riley are writers who write angst and drama well. For Luke and Jared however, their attraction/tensions/pulling away hi-jinks started to annoy me midway through the book and after all manner of roadblocks to their relationship (view spoiler)[(kidnappings, moving away to college, internalised homophobia, gay 'reparative' therapy/bootcamp, small town repressive societal norms, non-supportive parents, isolation, substance misuse, physical ill-health, international terrorist abduction, marrying straight partner to avoid dealing with the gay etc etc etc (hide spoiler)], I tell you I was exhausted and really 'over it' with these guys.

By the end of the book, I was ready to throw both of them to the wolves. I know they had a lot of baggage from their background and upbringing to deal with, but I've experienced other tortured / broken / wounded characters and not felt so 'meh' towards their predicament as I did these guys. I wanted to smack Jared for his emotinal tantrums and whininess. Likewise for Luke - his indecisions and barely believable GFY stance regarding Jared. To top it all off, even though I could anticipate where these two would end up (in relation to each other), the less than romantic HEA ending left me with a sour taste in my mouth; not that I need a HEA ending to like a book - Kergan Edwards-Stout has a book Songs for the New Depression which definitely has a downer of an ending but that book ending stayed with me for days.

Final complaint here - some gay-rights/equality 'preachiness' are inserted in various places throughout the book (especially at the end) which jarred me out from my reading immediacy.

There are plot elements similar to those from movies such as The Object Of My Affection, The Way We Were and Kiss The Bride; lots of fodder for a really engaging read. But by the time my perseverance took me to the end of this book, I had little emotional investment in any of the characters. I appreciated the secondary character of Derek the most, but even then I have things to gripe him. Personally, a much better job of this sort of tale can be found in A Map of the Harbor Islands.

I realise there are lots of glowing reviews of this book out there and I'm glad they found enjoyment and satisfaction from it; the book just didn't do much for me. Final rating - two and half stars (rounded down to two stars in the end).