Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Danny Jarvis returns to his roots after the death of his abusive stepfather, expecting to sell his mother’s house and get back to his home in Los Angeles as fast as he can. A surprise stepbrother and the childhood coward who’d thrown him to the wolves to protect his own secret disrupt his plans.
Todd Larson hadn’t ever expected Danny to return to town, but when his schoolboy crush reappears, he makes every effort to atone for his actions and convince Danny to give him a chance. With Danny’s stepfather’s will not quite making sense, Danny and Todd try to navigate their new reality. The unexpected arrival of Danny’s overly helpful friends test the fragile peace they’ve managed to achieve, but sinister events threaten both their lives and the child in their care.
The Review
Far from a straight-forward gay romance (was that a pun?), Brent Archer’s “Rediscovering Todd” is an interesting twist on the second-chance / closeted jock genre. Not only is there a complicated relationship to sort out, but the book is the set-up for a series.
Danny Jarvis has been forced to return to the small Wisconsin town he fled fifteen years earlier. His brutish stepfather has died, and now the house in which his miserable childhood took place is his. All he has to do is sign the papers and sell the house so he can return to his much happier life in Los Angeles.
The complication (announced by a chilling prologue) is that his childhood home is now occupied by Todd Larsen, the closeted jock who lied to the sheriff and got Danny chased out of town. Todd is a nurse, and was Danny’s stepfather’s caretaker for the last few years of his life. The second complication is five-year-old Joel, Danny’s stepbrother, who he’s never heard of before.
Selling the house and getting out of town is no longer an option, thanks to provisions in the stepfather’s will. Danny has to stick around and deal with Todd, who is no longer the scared jock who ruined Danny’s life. And, to be clear, the complications keep piling up, which makes the book a fun read and an engaging study of two young men suffering the aftermath of growing up in a homophobic small town. Romance wouldn’t be any fun if it was easy, would it?
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.
