Where There's a Will Deanes, by Sean Kennedy (GetOut 4)

[Ulysses]

Where There’s a Will Deanes
By Sean Kennedy
Harmony Ink Press, 2019
Four stars

In what feels like something of a finale to his GetOut series, Sean Kennedy focuses on Will Deanes, the third leg of the ongoing Micah/Emma/Will story, itself an offspring of the Tigers and Devils series that starred gay Aussie football star Declan Tyler and his beloved Simon Murray. Will, whose coming out was complicated by his fear, and consequent online bullying of Micah Johnson, has become a close friend of both Micah and Emma Goldsworthy, whose budding sports careers have taken them to distant places in Australia. The “parents” of this scenario, Declan and Simon, have become actual parents of twin babies, thus thrusting the younger trio into the forefront. What is so pleasing about this entire double series is that Sean Kennedy keeps all of the characters in the picture, reminding us of their interconnected histories.

Now that the trauma of his career-ending accident has simply become part of his life, Will, at twenty-two, nurses his healing body and relishes his job at GetOut, Declan’s organization that helps LGBT teens. His life is good, but has been thrown into some emotional disarray by the big news that Micah is leaving his Perth football team and has been tagged to come back to Melbourne. Finally, to his chagrin, Will must deal with his own feelings about Micah, long filed under the category of “best friend.”

As most of Kennedy’s books are, this is a simple one, without a great deal of business in the plot. It is a fumbling love story in which, as usual, young men refuse to communicate, or indeed are in denial about what they feel. Coping with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is one thing; coping with relationships is something else. This story has about as much action as a Jane Austen novel, and for devotees of Miss Austen’s love stories, that’s plenty. There is some clear-eyed study of promiscuity, something Kennedy does that flouts the unwritten rules of m/m fiction – and it’s essential to the emotional dynamic of the story. Watching Will and Micah, cheered on (something angrily) by Emma, Declan, Simon, as well as by Will’s gay uncle Henry and his partner Scotty, is entertainment enough.

Not surprisingly, the critical ingredient in this book is love – the fact of love, the absence of love, the idea of love in all its forms. It has always been fascinating for me that a book series initially focused on the playing of a rough-and-tumble manly sport like Aussie football would be so deeply concerned with love, but there you are, and that’s why I’ve read all of Kennedy’s novels.

Each chapter begins with a proverb from somewhere in the world, setting the tone for what happens next. My favorite is a long quotation from American advice columnist Ann Landers – one I remember reading in the newspaper sometime in my own younger years. I was so pleased and startled that Australians even knew who Ann Landers was, that it stuck in my head. “Love is a friendship that has caught fire” it begins. Indeed. Sean Kennedy gives us insight into human hearts, and that’s a subject of which I will never tire.