Brandon Witt's Mapping the Forest

[Ulysses]

Mapping the Forest
By Brandon Witt
Dreamspinner Press, 2016
Cover by Anne Cain
Four stars

Brandon Witt is a big romantic sap. It had to be said.

The book is proof that classic gay romance can do what it’s supposed to do, and also take you someplace new. Gabe Rice is a part-time park ranger at the Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado. It’s a real place. Gabe loves his job, and loves working with his best friend Jordan and her grandmother Rosalind. Gabe’s even got a tight coterie of gay friends, men who are (thankfully) not all young. Gabe also has a crush on one of his friends, and it’s been going nowhere for years. Ouch.

Luis Martinez runs a peculiar national park institution called a steak ride. It comes with a charming but faded lodge for tourists, and Luis only bought it because he thought it might restart his life. Luis is grieving, and is beginning to realize that his new career isn’t really solving the problem. Then Luis meets Gabe on one of the steak rides, and things begin to get messy. But in a good way.

Witt establishes the setting fully and embracingly, and it gives “Mapping the Forest” an authenticity that pulls it away from cliché. We understand why Gabe loves his job, and how he feels about the various people who fill his life. We also come to truly know what makes him unhappy, why his life feels unfulfilled. The same goes for Luis. With each quiet reveal, we draw closer to this smart, talented and loving man. We hurt for him, we grasp what his conflict is to him as he begins to see Gabe as something that both offers him a future and threatens his past.

Witt’s romance is about real men in a situation that is as plausible as it is exotic for many of us. The place matters to the characters, and the characters matter to us.