Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Unexpectedly, two-year college English instructor Joseph Rutledge gets a letter from Quentin Richards, the boy who sat in front of him at a charity school for wayward boys. Joe vividly remembers Quentin comforting him in fifth grade during an unprecedented earthquake. What could have been a lasting friendship with the boy he loved dissolved under Joe’s inherent shyness.
Little does he know Quentin too remembers the traumatic day of the earthquake and has relied on his memories of Joe’s comfort to buoy him during rough times. After recovering from a debilitating incident at the Olympics, Quentin’s keen to get together with Joe and writes to ask him out.
Will their memories of each other be enough to spark a relationship? Or do they each remember a person who never really existed?
The Review
A letter withheld out of spite brings Joey Rutledge news of a long-lost school friend, Quentin Richards. Joey’s own shyness and low self-esteem had allowed Quentin to slip out of his life a decade earlier, after they had both left the charity school in which they’d been raised.
It’s a simple, romantic story about second chances, but given a surprising twist along the lines of “the past depends on who’s remembering it.” A straightforward, big-hearted story in which a lonely man finds himself revisiting a teenage love that never quite happened.
Even with its short length, the author gives us what we need to understand the two young men and their disparate journeys. Joey and Quentin each remember their past in their own way. What their memories share is the certainty that they have unfinished business. A coincidence—or a twist of fate?—opens the door to a second chance in the most unexpected way.
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.
