A Different Kind of Honeymoon

Falling for the Wrong Man: An Age-Gap, Opposites Attract, Steamy Gay Romance (New Zealand Mountain Men)

By: Sofia Scott

Narrated by: David McPartlan

Length: 3 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

The honeymoon may be over, but the passion is just beginning.

Rory’s dream honeymoon in New Zealand is a disaster. Rejected and abandoned, he flees from his new husband, nursing his broken heart, and deeply dented self-confidence. When Rory’s motorhome breaks down in the remote mountains, he thinks things can’t get any worse, until a rough, tough, young Kiwi mechanic comes to fix it.

But it's more than just the vehicle that needs fixing. Drawn to the tattooed mechanic, Rory is determined not to act on his feelings. He must try to salvage his marriage - he can’t follow his heart to find love in the wilderness.

Aiden knows about the wild country, he can fix cars, he knows how everything works...except love. He’s never met a man like Rory before, someone sensitive, artistic, and openly gay and Aiden can't let him go. Running from his own demons, the young mechanic must choose between everything he knows, and everything he desires...

A stand-alone high-heat age-gap gay MM romance, featuring a young man’s awakening, steamy first-time gay experiences, crossed swords, and a guaranteed happy ending.

©2021 Sofia Scott (P)2021 Sofia Scott

Sweet

Truthfully, I always set a rather low bar for books whose titles include their tropes. I don't necessarily need to know that this is "An Age-Gap, Opposites Attract, Fake Marriage, Best Friend's Brother, Interracial, Sweet With Heat, Both Guys Are Named Clarence, Small Town Romance" or whatever other things you can think of to cram in there. I swear the narrator just reading the title takes up like a third of the book.

But! This one was really good. I liked the setting, I liked both main characters, the prose was good, and the narrator was good. What more could you ask for? It was also the perfect length; any shorter would have felt rushed, and any longer and I would have thought it went on too long.

The plot is thus: Rory and Hugo have just gotten married and are on their honeymoon in New Zealand. Hugo is (rather unrealistically) loathsome, and Rory has apparently just noticed this. So Rory sets off on his own to prove that he's perfectly capable of taking care of himself, and promptly mucks everything up. Enter Aiden, a tattooed local mechanic much, much younger than Hugo. The attraction is immediate, but Aiden is closeted--the book could have gone into slightly more detail about this, but I suppose it's not really the focus--and Rory is, technically, still married.

The chapters are rather unusually structured, as we get alternating points of view, but the Aiden chapters are just very quick recaps of the preceding chapter. They're much, much shorter than the chapters from Rory's point of view, and serve to offer us a quick glimpse into what Aiden is thinking. As a result, by the end, we know Rory much better than we know Aiden, but it still works surprisingly well.

David McPartlan is a narrator I'm unfamiliar with, but he does a very nice job with this book. He does read Aiden's lines in a passable Kiwi accent, though it's rather understated, which to me is far preferable to overstated. I'd happily listen to another book he has narrated.

The one flaw in the book, which I've already sort of mentioned, is that Hugo, Rory's husband, is just a cartoonish, outrageously evil jerk. The thing is, before we actually meet him on the page, I thought he was being described as a somewhat realistic overbearing snob, but when he does show up, he's just WAY over-the-top. Nobody is that bad in real life, or if they are, they're better at hiding it. It was too much, and it was the only part that took me out of the story a bit.

But that was the only issue I really had. Everything else was sweet, I REALLY liked both Rory and Aiden, and the narration was good enough for me to bump the rating up from four to five stars. I'd listen to it a second time, and as a matter of fact, halfway through the book I decided to by the audio version of the first book in the series, and I'll probably buy the third when it's released.

Mediocre & not worth 1 credit

Disappointed. This<4hr book is not worth 1 credit. I should have looked at the length before buying. The narration alternates between Rory & Aiden. At first the audiobook narrator speaks Aiden’s lines with a USaccent, later it becomes more down under. The author treads water a lot. Instead of the story continuing forward after a long scene narrated by Rory, the author simply repeats the entire previous chapter but in a different voice. True this reveals something new about Aiden but it’s mostly dry and redundant.