Genre: Contemporary, Sports
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
What happens when a figure-skating pairs partnership runs its course? For Jason Huang, it’s a chance to consider the possibility of an open, honest life. For Laurent Fortin, it’s a series of crushing losses. When friends suggest he leave the scandal and speculation behind in favor of graduate school, he seizes the opportunity.
Jason calls his former rival to offer sympathy, but when he hears that Laurent is coming to his own city, he offers a house-share. It’s only natural that they begin training together; they both still love to skate. A half-serious suggestion becomes a dedicated effort to take pairs skating far beyond its conventional limits.
They master unique challenges in a quest to compete at championship level. Along the way, their friendship grows through flirtation and dating to something much deeper. Once they’ve taken their skating partnership as far as they can, will their unexpected love stand on its own?
The Review
I’m one of those people who can’t watch figure skating live. Too much anxiety, which has grown over the years, probably due to increasingly skilled media coverage in which no error or fall or injury is missed. Only after it’s all over can I watch the taped versions of whatever happened.
I’ve also read quite a few hockey-based romances, and let me tell you, I learned to respect the art and science and skill of hockey by reading these.
Hockey has nothing on the grueling physicality of figure skating. Alexandra Caluen’s “Totally Thrown” gives the reader a special insight into this well-known but also mysterious world. The skating drives the plot and the characters.
The story opens at an important moment in the lives of two twenty-something figure-skating pairs: Jason and Jenny Huang of Colorado Springs, and Laurent Fortin and Marie Bernier of Montreal. All four of these young people have been skating since before puberty, and none of them has any sense of what real life is outside of figure skating.
On top of this, both Jason Huang and Laurent Fortin are gay. Or, at least, Jason is. Laurent, at twenty-four, has no “empirical evidence.” But he has his suspicions.
The catalyst is that Laurent is forced out of the pampered hothouse of the Bernier estate in Montreal when his contract with Marie ends, and decides to attend a master’s program in Colorado, where he knows there is a figure skating community. Then he meets Jason Huang and his large, enthusiastic family.
Covering the course of two years, Caluen’s story quickly focuses on the relationship between Jason and Laurent, but expands to bring the larger world of figure skating into the foreground. These are two young men who have known almost nothing but skating their whole lives, and now must build a new life together that merges things like work and higher education with their love of the ice. The author pulls her focus back from the abrupt set-up of the opening chapters and gives the reader the big picture of the complicated, intertwined lives of these two skating families. At the center is the intense training that Jason and Laurent maintain in order to participate in the even more intense testing and competition that underlies all figure skating.
The physical nature of the sport becomes enormously important, both athletically and emotionally, as Jason and Laurent learn to become true male partners in a sport that requires one skater to literally throw the other into the air while speeding across the ice. Issues of sexuality, gender norms, and sports bias all come into play. Caluen manages all these different threads with great skill, weaving a vivid tapestry of young athletes who love their sport as much as they push against the limitations it imposes on them.
Five 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.
