HOW TO CATCH A VET
ANA ASHLEY
Self-published
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: The first thing I learned at Vet school was to always expect the unexpected.
Well, I sure never saw Santiago Torres or his adorable Great Dane coming.
Santi is everything I’m not. Tall, confident, overbearing, and if I’m to believe his advances, he’s also very experienced in...well, you know what.
I always play safe, but it’s time to ditch the v-card. We couldn’t be more different, but that doesn’t matter because this is just a one time thing.
I’m not going to want more, right?
I’m not going to fall for him, right?
How to Catch a Vet is the sixth book in the Chester Falls series and features an opposites attract story between a virgin and a player, a Great Dane with a tendency to rescue- read kidnap- other people’s pets, and a small town like no other.
I RECEIVED THIS AS A YULE GIFT. THANKS, ANONYMOUS ELF!
My Review: Author Ana Ashley was brand new to me, but this entry is in a series of connected gay romances that wasn’t at all new...it’s the sixth in an all-from-one-town trope of small-world-building interconnected stories. In this case it’s called “Chester Falls, Connecticut.”
An Army veteran and a small-town veterinarian from the same little town get tangled up...literally...in a meet-cute that got my smiles. Hot guy falls for ordinary one works, too. The fact that it’s in an interconnected series detracted a little bit from my enjoyment because I didn’t get the in-jokes; the way they’re presented I couldn’t miss them being in-jokes. I definitely think the author relies on them being familiar more than is entirely wise.
It's worth mentioning that Santi's got a very real medical condition. It's very interesting to see it used in this way. He's going blind due to Retinitis pigmentosa, a very odd and specific irreversible sentence to a long disabled life for this vigorous, active studly man. It's a very surprising and, to me at least, humanizing choice. The perfect Godly Studly Hottie is changing into a somewhat more dependent, instead of dependable, man. It's a guarantee that he will be making big, big changes in everything about his life. I love the fact that he knows this; he sees (!) that he needs to make changes now instead of being forced to later; and he elects to offer his heart, for the first time in his life, to a regular, good, decent man. I do think it was a good choice. I don't think it was as impactful for me, this reader, because I'm starting the series at book six.
I do mildly recommend the read though with the reservation that there are eight (8) w-bombs and none of them were in any way needed to make any kind or sort of point about the characters doing it or having it done at them.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
BRIARLEY
ASTER GLENN GRAY
Self-published
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: An m/m World War II-era retelling of Beauty and the Beast.
During a chance summer shower, an English country parson takes refuge in a country house. The house seems deserted, yet the table is laid with a sumptuous banquet such as the parson has not seen since before war rationing.
Unnerved by the uncanny house, he flees, but stops to pluck a single perfect rose from the garden for his daughter - only for the master of the house to appear, breathing fire with rage. Literally.
At first, the parson can't stand this dragon-man. But slowly, he begins to feel the injustice of the curse that holds the dragon captive. What can break this vengeful curse?
I KINDLE-BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM MY FRIEND TEAL. THANK YOU!
My Review: One thing no one tells you about being an adult is that there are no unmixed emotions.
None.
The world is so much harder to navigate without Certainty as your guide, either that you...or your leaders...are Right, Correct, Blessed By Gawd; or that you are damned, doomed!, hopeless and irredeemable! because that is also freedom from the murk and misery of figuring it out step by step, bit by bit, holding as much of a candle as you possess to illuminate annihilating blackness.
What They also fail to mention is: that blackness, the awful weight of it, the airless suffocating relentless gravity? That is the presence and substance of Them, the expectations and blames and angers and recriminations...black is the presence of all colors, weight is the sensation of gravity from so much mass, like a black hole.
White is what you see when there is nothing there. When you scrub off, slip out from under, refuse to pick up their shitty, rotten-souled, stinking cruelty, you lose their weight and your eyes clear the darkness...but unrelieved white is blinding no less than pure black.
So learn this, grasp it, hold it up in front of yourself like a sword: There is no purity in the real, honest world. There are no unmixed emotions. And that is how you learn to navigate and identify the places you are safe. They have your mix of black and white, they match the colors you've chosen and blended, the ones that give your eyes the right shine and your heart the right lift. Drop the purity filters, learn how to see in as many shades between black and white as you can find.
When you will dare anything, anything at all, for someone else, to save them and create the world they want, you are closer to that clarity than at any other time.
You'll never be so brave, so sure, so certain of your actions, as when you rise to serve the ones you love. Nothing, literally no thing, can stop that purity...except nasty old Reality. And that's why we need stories like this one.
Why, I suppose, we need all stories...they provide endings when dank, dismal Reality insists on hauling up the fucking Sun again to glare at you and highlight your crow's feet and shine blindingly on your bald patch.
But sometimes, in the gray place your shadow makes, comes that voice: "did you make the coffee?"
So do it again, Hero.
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