HOME GROWN TALENT, second Creative Types series M/M rom-com

HOME GROWN TALENT
SALLY MALCOLM & JOANNA CHAMBERS (Creative Types #2)
Amazon Kindle (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 4 singed-by-profanity stars of five

The Publisher Says: Are you for real?

From the outside, it looks like model and influencer Mason Nash has it all—beauty, fame, and fortune. With his star rapidly rising, and a big contract up for grabs, Mason’s on the verge of hitting the big time.

When an opportunity arises to co-host a gardening slot on daytime TV with his ex’s brother, Owen Hunter, Mason is definitely on-board. And he intends to use every trick in the book to make the show a hit—including agreeing to his ruthless producer’s demand to fake a ‘will-they/won’t-they’ romance with his co-host…

Owen Hunter is a gardener with a huge heart and both feet planted firmly on the well-tilled ground. He’s proud of the life he’s built and has absolutely no desire to be on TV—yet somehow he finds himself agreeing to do the show.

It’s definitely not because he’s interested in Mason Nash. The guy might be beautiful—and yeah, his spoiled brat routine presses all Owen’s buttons in the bedroom—but Owen has no interest in a short-term fling with a fame-hungry model.

As the two men get closer, though, Owen starts to believe there’s more to Mason than his beautiful appearance and carefully-curated online persona—that beneath the glitz and glamour is a sweet, sensitive man longing to be loved.

A man Owen might be falling for. A man who might even feel the same.

But in a world of media spin and half-truths, Owen is dangerously out of his depth. And when a ridiculous scandal explodes online, with Owen at its heart, it starts to look as though everything he thought was real is built on lies—including his budding romance with Mason…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHERS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Remember the story of Lewis and Aaron, the grumpy/sunshine boss/PA delight set in the TV world? It lost enough points for its SIX w-bombs not to get to five stars despite my deep affection for its story line and its delightful silliness. All that was wrapping a quite serious love story between two sad, lonely men whose lives are dedicated to a world that uses them for what it can get.

The authors? Nice people, one supposes, but severely addicted to carpet w-bombing the reader. Six was bad. TWELVE IN THIS STORY. Twelve! Using any word not a conjunction, pronoun, proper name, or toponym (and that one's iffy) twelve times in one's story is simply too damned many.

Anyway. The story, as expected from these two mavens of the genre, was a cracker. Owen raised his teenaged brother after their mother's death; as a barely fledged kid himself he...did a great job. He worked. He protected. He never left his brother in the lurch as he got left. His brother's grouchy personality, built to withstand misery and grief, was just more than he could handle. I think it's the most touching story I've ever read, and Owen's power as a character largely began from that base. When we meet him in this story, he's along for the ride at an awards show for Lewis's hit TV show, Leeches. One of the participants' plus-ones is young Mason Nash...Lewis's ex, met at the beginning of episode one, a model/Instagram influencer. Owen judged him harshly while Lewis was dating him. Mason rather curled his lip at Owen, too.

So guess what happens!

It's a rom-com. You know what you're getting, you know when you're going to get it, and this being 2022 we know we're in for some sex. The sex scenes add to the relationship drama, and the last one in particular was deeply, deeply relatable to anyone who's ever had a long-term relationship. So used well, written well, satisfyingly up to snuff on the heat-level scale...nothing tepid about these guys!...and exactly the proper amount of smexytimes for the story. (It doesn't hurt that I identify with Owen, either.)

One of the surprises in the story was the deeply sympathetic portrayal of "an influencer" or massively online person as a regular guy trying to make a living in a very cut-throat industry...two, really, as he was modeling as well as Instagramming his life. Or lifestyle, I suppose...like all the surface-gloss purveyors of Fantasy, there's a lot of effort behind the Glamour. Then there's Owen, simple son of the soil that he is, who runs a gardening business that doesn't require him to tart anything up for the cameras and likes it that way. But...key realization...Owen is a caretaker, with all the control and trust issues that implies. So, funnily enough, is Mason (real name it's not, but you'll find that out for yourself). Different angles, same path, and Owen'd been on it longer so has much, much more invested in the identity without really taking in his façade's effects on others. Mason's simply never, as a twentysomething, thought much about anyone he wasn't responsible for.

What draws the men together is what ultimately causes the only serious explosion neither is equipped to handle: Working together on something neither has any control over. It was a shock to me that Owen said yes, but thinking about myownself in my thirties, well...yeah, I see it. Mason's early-onset adulthood led him to reflect, "Responsibility, once assumed, was almost impossible to put down." This being an eternal verity known to most all of us who've taken it up as Owen had to do, as Mason must do, left me nodding along. Not for the first, or last, time, either. The authors are quite able to repackage Received Wisdom as new knowledge to their characters. It's one of the things that makes me enjoy these stories of younger people more than many, if not most, others.

The unfairness of Mason's life, as it leaks little by little into Owen's awareness, makes their estrangement that much more painful for them both. It was, TBH, about as blatantly signaled as can be. For a wonder, that actually worked to heighten its effect because of a choice I imagine was organic to the process of writing a series with two authors: Dual narrators. It's surprising to me how well the technique, mated to this story line, caused me to flip the pages past faster and faster. Kudos! By the end of the story, each knows the other's burdens, and it truly works as relationship binder. And the happily-ever-after that is part and parcel of the genre's promises to its readers arrived in a welcome, more grounded way than I thought it would...if at the expense of feeling a wee bit rushed.

Rein in the w-bombing, please, and bring on #3 soon!