Genre: Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Ace, Gay, Lesbian, Non-Binary, Poly, Trans FTM, Trans MTF
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Longtime friends Jack Riley and Juliette (aka Jules) Baxter are now partners in a new breakfast café, but they are surprised to be confronted by a wave of homophobia in a town known for its inclusive and diverse LGBTQA+ community.
Their romantic lives are just as uncertain. Jack, a gay former actor and fashion model, has failed at committed relationships due to his unsavory past – until he meets Reese Baxter, his partner’s handsome, closeted cousin. Jules juggles several polyamorous relationships due to major trust issues, until she’s drawn to an intriguing artist.
However his jealousy of her bestie Jack is getting out of hand. Is the vandalism against their café from conservative hate groups, or is it a focused personal attack?
The Review
A lot of people don’t “get” m/m romance. I do, and in fact I make it a specialty after fifteen years and well over a thousand romances (read, not written). This winning example of the genre, by a big-hearted author who seems to be trying something new, warmed my heart and had me nodding in appreciation.
Our two heroes in this romance about a breakfast café are Juliette Baxter (known as Jules) and Jackson Riley (known as Jack). Best friends since they met in culinary school in Austin, Texas, they decide to open a breakfast café in Jules’ hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, figuring that the liberal university atmosphere will be good for their very pro-LGBTQA+approach to life and business.
Of course, complications of all sorts arise. This seems largely tied to Jules’ and Jack’s personalities. Jack is gay and proud—but still feels deeply the insecurities of an sometimes grim childhood in and out of foster care. Jules has the opposite background: a pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Her own complexities arise from emotional damage due to men who have treated her badly, resulting in an inability to trust.
Aside from the establishment of their café—charmingly called Here Comes the Sun, Jules and Jack’s parallel stories track their romantic lives. Jules favors non-monogamous relationships with carefully defined parameters while Jack is a Grindr guy with an eclectic taste in one-night stands. Both young people really want love, but aren’t sure how to find it. (You’ll note that both the title of the book and the name of the café refer to Beatles songs. There is a reason for this.)
Jack’s answer seems to appear early on, in the person of Jules’ cousin, Reese Baxter. Reese is a corporate kind of guy, and deeply closeted due to his vocally religious parents. On the other hand, the very nature of Jules’ relationships leaves her vulnerable to doubts and uncertainty.
While Meg Macy’s prose style can be a little too much “tell” rather than “show” at times, she digs very nicely into the inherent contradictions in the two (really three) young main characters’ personalities. Jack is strong and brave, but emotionally exposed in ways his friends don’t fully understand. Jules is fierce and fearless, but a little prone to taking her horoscopes too seriously as life guides. Neither one is close to flawless, and that makes both of them appealingly human, if sometimes frustrating (they’re younger than my actual children, so I also had a parent’s feelings often while reading this).
Even Jules’ big loving family is not entirely without its less-than-perfect aspects, and that’s a nice bit of realism that makes the story authentic. The bad guys in the book are not particularly subtle, and yet they don’t feel contrived or implausible. The author doesn’t shy from unpleasantness, and handles it with honesty.
I was surprised that the action keeps going nearly until the very end of the book, and Meg Macy does a good job of pulling off a very messy finale and making it work.
4 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.
