Red, White & Royal

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, 423 pages.

Alex Claremont-Diaz hates Prince Henry of England and his stupid face and boring personality. After he makes headlines when the president's son is seen in an altercation with the prince at his brother's wedding they have to convince the press that it was all a misunderstanding and actually they're best friends in order to save both families a scandal. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the act isn't an act for very long, as Alex realizes that most of Henry's public persona is in fact a persona, and soon the two are talking more honestly than they talk to anyone else. This turns into something more romantic before too long (shocking), but since their relationship would literally cause an international incident, everything has to be very clandestine. Is this a long term solution? Probably not! The question becomes how much will they each give up for this relationship.

I liked this book, I found the characters compelling. Like all of McQuiston's books I find the supporting characters to be one of the most compelling parts. This wasn't my favorite of the author's books, but I still found it sweet and fun, a perfectly enjoyable book.

We Could Be So Good

 We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian, 384 pages.

 Nick Russo works as a reporter at one of the biggest newspapers in New York at the end of the 1950s. Andy Flemming is set to inherit said paper, which terrifies him, because he can't keep track of his own keys. So Andy gets assigned to work as a reporter for a year to get a feel for it, and soon enough he and Nick are inseparable. They're best friends, and Nick pushes down the possibility of anything more, because even if Andy feels the same, being outed as gay in 1958 would cost him his job, and probably get him arrested besides. But soon both Andy and Nick have to decide if this growing relationship between them is something worth fighting for.

This is the first book I've read by Cat Sebastian, and I've got to say I'm really impressed. From the very beginning I was sold on the fact that these two characters like each other, and there were a whole lot of reasons why they work romantically. I also appreciated that, due to the plethora of external factors, there didn't have to be a lot of contrived emotional reasons why these two characters, who obviously care deeply about each other, can't be together. I'm always annoyed by (romance novels in particular) where there would be no plot if the characters just talked to each other, and I was pleased that there was very little of that here. Overall a pretty neat historical fiction novel, and I would definitely recommend it to people interested in either the time period or a solid historical romance.

The Tin Star / J.L. Langley

The Tin Star by J.L. Langley. 290 p.

Ethan's best friend John comes over to Ethan's ranch, The Tin Star, with news that Jamie, John's little brother, has been kicked off their father's ranch because he told his father he was gay. Ethan, who's gay but not out except to his close friends (like John), thinks Jamie was foolish to come out because life will be tough in ranch country and their small Texas town for an openly gay cowboy. He offers Jamie a job at the Tin Star. Once Jamie arrives, Ethan realizes that he's very attracted to Jamie, and they start up a romance. In between sex scenes they try to figure out who's harassing them, damaging property and eventually shooting Ethan.

This is pretty much pure fluff--not that there's anything wrong with that. I had a terrible time taking the dialogue seriously; I don't have the book here to quote from, but there's lots of "boy howdy" cowboy-isms sprinkled throughout. Then again, I've never met a cowboy in person; it's possible that the speech patterns are accurate, and they just sound like a goofy cliche to me because of my ignorance. I was a bit more thrown by the plot; at the beginning of the book Ethan strongly believes that coming out in his situation would just be foolish and make managing his ranch more difficult, so I would expect it to be a bigger deal when he decides to do it later in the book. Yet it reads almost like an afterthought. Similarly, the harassment that Jamie and Ethan undergo didn't really seem menacing; it was just plot to fill the space between love scenes. I didn't expect serious realism or anything, but the tone seemed a little too facile to suit me.

Overall, my dabbling in the male/male romance arena wasn't terribly successful--the first (Lovers' Knot) didn't have enough romance and the second (PsyCop: Partners) didn't have enough detail about the plot or the romance. This one was closest to what I'd consider a good romance in the erotica category, but it was a bit too goofy for me. Then again, if I picked three random titles off a list of ten het romances, I'm not sure I'd have any better odds of finding on that I really liked.

PsyCop: Partners / Jordan Castillo Price

PsyCop: Partners by Jordan Castillo Price. 276 p.

This is an omnibus of two short novels, originally published as Among the Living and Criss Cross. (Obviously very short novels, given the page count.) Vic, the narrator, is a psychic who can hear ghosts. He works for the Chicago police department as a PsyCop, part of a two-man team where his partner is someone with no psychic talent whatsoever--that way, if some freaky psychic mojo incapacitates the psychic half of the team, the other person will be immune. Vic, who's gay but not out at work, meets Jacob, a really hot (and out) cop who's the non-psychic half of a different PsyCop team. Vic and Jacob start a personal relationship, and Vic ends up working with Jacob and his partner to track down a serial killer. In the second book, Vic starts seeing ghosts as well as hearing them, plus he starts attacking Jacob in his sleep.

These stories are awfully short. The setting is mildly intriguing, but it's not fleshed out at all; I don't think we even find out that they're set in Chicago until the second story. Vic pretty much says "I'm a cop" and the reader has to fill in everything else, based on every generic cop show you've ever seen. The psychic bits get more attention, of course, but even the background for that is left really fuzzy. I'm not advocating paragraphs of infodump about the worldbuilding, but a little more detail would have been a very good thing. I believe the book is marketed as romance, not mystery, so I wasn't expecting a police procedural, but even the sex scenes are pretty perfunctory. Vic's internal monologue about Jacob is mostly about how he doesn't know what Jacob thinks about the relationship, and how they haven't talked about this thing or that thing. And then they continue to not talk.

Lovers' Knot / Donald L. Hardy

Lovers' Knot: an m/m romance by Donald L. Hardy. 364 p.

Male/male romance has become a popular (and controversial) subgenre in the last few years. It's particularly popular in e-book form, but I don't have an e-reader, so I jumped at the chance to read one in print. This one is set in 1906. Thirty-year-old Jonathan has just inherited a farm in Cornwall. He only ever spent one summer there, when he was 16 (in 1892), so he takes his best friend Alayne with him and goes to visit his new property. Jonathan is in love with Alayne but has never spoken of it, being unwilling to lose their friendship. Of course, Alayne is secretly in love with Jonathan but has never spoken of it for the same reason.

I'm fond of this plotline in a romance--longtime friends who come to realize they love each other. However, I was somewhat disappointed in this book, because most of the romance that we actually see, in flashback form, is between 16-year-old Jonathan and a farmhand named Nat. The main story concerns repercussions in 1906 of what happened in 1892, but we spend far too much time with Nat and Jonathan to suit me. It's not a bad book; it just wasn't what I wanted.

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