Genre: Contemporary, Interracial
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
Get It On Amazon
About The Book
A M/M romance novella about finding the future you want.
Once upon a time, Ashley Wong pledged the same fraternity as Justin Landau. They weren’t friends. The last time Ash saw Justin was the first time he realized the other guy was gay, too.
Fast-forward to 2018: Ash is back in L.A. after nearly a decade away. Starting over with everything, except his job; that’s only a new location. Which happens to be in the same building as the law firm where Justin works. They still aren’t friends.
But Ash belongs to an online chat group, and he’s friends with someone there. They both use aliases. At Christmas, they open up enough to discover they’re both in L.A., and they decide to meet.
Justin has a moment of OMG No when he sees Ashley at the rendezvous. Things happened back in college. Those things weren’t Justin’s fault, but he didn’t exactly help, either. Should he walk away? Or should he trust that one kind of friendship could become another?
Adult situations, themes, and language; 34000 words and a happy ending.
The Review
Easy-as-pie romantic novella, “Hush” nonetheless manages to breathe fresh life into a perfect m/m story line. The only real anxiety is at the beginning, when Justin Landau and Ashley Wong meet in person, having been longtime friends online in pseudonymous chat group (made up, I was tickled to know, of m/m novel readers).
Caluen moves back and forth pretty quickly between Justin and Ash’s points of view, forcing the reader to follow closely, as a potential friendship is interrupted by circumstances and pragmatic choices when both young men are in college. It raises the somewhat chilling question (at least for romantics): “what if I’d never met my One?”
Instead of drama, Caluen gives us character studies, letting us know who Justin and Ashley really are, and why they’re where they are in their lives. The whole story is a reminder that the path to happiness can depend on a very few choices, a couple of lucky decisions.
These are not men who have no romantic back-story, just men who would have had a very different history had they only gotten to know each other when they first met. Perhaps the moral of this gentle, emotionally soothing tale is just this: maybe you don’t meet the right person until you’re supposed to.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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