His Holiday Crush

De: Cari Z

Narrado por: Kai Rubio

Duración: 6 h y 44 m

Resumen del Editor

Workaholic attorney Max Robertson is one meeting away from making partner at a big NYC firm when his best friend calls and guilts him into coming back home for Christmas. But there's a reason he hasn't been back to Edgewood for a decade—too many bad memories. The plan was to go for just one night, until a wild deer and a snow bank wrecked everything.

Former Army Sergeant Dominic "Nicky" Bell is the new guy on the Edgewood police force, so of course he drew the short straw and is stuck working the night shift. But his evening gets turned upside-down when he gets called out to a wreck in the snow—and it's his one and only high school crush, looking even sexier than he did back then.

When they both end up stranded together at Dominic's house, sparks start to fly and Max isn't sure what to do. But everyone deserves a present this holiday season, right?

Contains mature themes.

©2020 Cari Z (P)2022 Tantor

Great book--wonderful narration

Cari Z. is a new author for me, so I was a little uncertain going in that I would even finish this audiobook. Not finishing books has become something of a hobby of mine, unfortunately, especially male/male romances, since most of the people writing them have no idea what it's like to be male, and no idea what it's like to be gay beyond what they read on woke twitter. I was especially wary because the author has done a couple collaborations with L.A. Witt, whose recent books come across more like political exhortations than romances, and to be honest if I'd researched this author and found the connection to Witt I probably would have given this one a pass because her writing has become so toxic to me.

But I'm glad I didn't, because this book is not only very sweet but it manages to avoid almost all of the pitfalls that most M/M authors have fallen into in the past few years. For one thing, her protagonists (I'm including Dominic's brother Hal here because he's such a strong, positive presence in the novel) are very recognizable as actual men; I'm convinced a lot of popular M/M writers (Witt, Keira Andrews, etc.) don't actually like men very much and write their male heroes accordingly, almost apologetically. Moreover, all the characters are actually well-drawn, fully fleshed out humans with charms and flaws. Dominic, for example, lacks confidence, while Max is conversely a bit OVERconfident. Hal, Dominic's brother and Max's best friend, is a great father but perhaps a bit lost over what to do about the recent, horrific breakdown of his marriage. Hal's young daughters feature prominently in the story and are both well-realized little kids, neither one of them is overly precocious like the majority of kids in novels.

Max and Dominic are not clones of each other, either, which is good, but therein lies one of my few problems with the novel. I'm not, to be honest, a huge fan of Max when compared to Dominic or even Hal. I liked Dominic, with his insecurity and naiveté, a lot better than worldly, jaded Max, who looks at both the town and even occasionally Dominic with an attitude that's just a hair's breadth shy of condescending. He also does something towards the end of the novel that is WAY out of line, and he knows it's out of line but he's only mildly apologetic about it. I won't say he doesn't suffer consequences--in fact it's those consequences that set up the last act of the plot--but they're honestly pretty muted and the action centers more on Dominic at that point. Max's father and Hal's ex-wife Ariel are introduced as mostly absent characters who serve as sort of soft antagonists. I think the book wanted me to sympathize a bit with Ariel but I really, really didn't.

However the reason I'm docking this a star has nothing to do with any of that, it's more to do with the sex scenes, which I didn't enjoy. Now, full disclosure: I rarely really enjoy sex scenes. But even given that, something about the sex in this book squicked me out a bit, and to be honest I'm not really sure why. There was a bit of a power imbalance between Max and Dominic (favoring Max), and while it completely makes sense for it to be there with these two characters, since Max is older, more experienced, and more cosmopolitan, something about it rubbed me the wrong way, especially the first sex scene. They did get better after that.

Anyway I don't mean to pick apart things I didn't like about the book because I liked a good 90% of it very much. In a time when romance tropes are not only ubiquitous but actually trumpeted in the titles of books, it's nice to read a book that subverts those tropes a bit, or at least humanizes them. You wouldn't even know from reading the blurb that this is a brother's-best-friend novel, and that's a good thing because it isn't cliché at all. The characters are not romance novel cardboard cutouts. I would recommend this book pretty strongly and I'll probably listen to it again at some point, and I'll definitely check into other books by this author.

Oh and lest I forget, the narration is flawless, and Kai Rubio deserves more narration work, since he's easily better than the same four or five tired narrators who seem to be assigned all the m/m stuff.

Slow and Boring

This story had potential. The beginning was good, but once the plot was supposed to take off, it became so slow. I’m returning it with three hours to go. I don’t care how it ends. Maybe a good narrator could have saved it.