Hold Me

By: Courtney Milan

Narrated by: Xe Sands, Sean Crisden

Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's Summary

Jay na Thalang is a demanding, driven genius. He doesn't know how to stop or even slow down. The instant he lays eyes on Maria Lopez, he knows that she is a sexy distraction he can't afford. He's done his best to keep her at arm's length, and he's succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Maria has always been cautious. Now that her once-tiny, apocalypse-centered blog is hitting the mainstream, she's even more careful about preserving her online anonymity. She hasn't sent so much as a picture to the commenter she's interacted with for 18 months - not even after emails, hour-long chats, and a friendship that is slowly turning into more. Maybe one day they'll meet and see what happens.

But unbeknownst to them both, Jay is Maria's commenter. They've already met. They already hate each other. And two determined enemies are about to discover that they've been secretly falling in love.

©2016 Courtney Milan (P)2017 Courtney Milan

Witty and heartwarming

Survivors guilt, academic arrogance, misogyny and pretention meets dirty jokes about lasers and a smart witty protagonist whose gender identity is not the center price of the story and I never knew how much I needed it until I started listening. I am impressed and I cant wait to read anything this author writes. The performance bouncing back and forth between narrators took me out of it but that's a personal preference.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

A very interesting book

A very interesting book for a person with mathematical and scientific background. I love the fact that characters can flirt using math and science language.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Outstanding.

Very refreshing and original. Nice addition to this series. Excellent writing and loved the Bay Area setting.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Hold Me is a revelation

I enjoyed both Hold Me and Trade Me very much. I love novels that show me a new perspective, inspire me to see beyond my lived experiences, and thrill me with a moving love story. This book got everything right.

Narrators Xe Sands and Sean Crisden are excellent, as usual. It certainly helps when the are working with good writing. Courtney Milan is a new favorite.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

awesome!!

absolutely amazing! this book is even better than the first one. very feminist and very empowering.

Love her books!

This is no exception to her books, the strong female character who is academic.
But what is different is the transgender character. I wished a bit more into transgender's struggle. The family not able to understand and not supporting her in the change she choose is very meager but done to support the insecurities she has in her life.
It was my first female transgender book & I loved Milan's trade mark female personality mix!

As for the voices it was OK. But the variation is good.

I'd suggest reading, not listening to this one

Five starts for the story, three stars for the audio, basically four for Sands/one for Crisden, averaged to four.

This book is amazing, and soooo complicated. I read it a couple of years ago, but only remembered the larger picture, not the details. This time I listened to it, both a good and a not so good thing.

My favorite thing about the book is that Maria being transgender is not the point, it's not the cause of conflict (or, more accurately, it's not an obvious source of conflict although her experience with her parents definitely causes her emotional problems that do cause conflict), and thank you so much, Courtney Milan, for not making it anything Jay took even a second to consider. All of that is so unusual in books with transgender MCs that it stood out a great deal. There are so many social issues that are dealt with in this book, so much about intersectionality of social issues, but it is all handled so well that it never felt like I was being hammered over the head, something few authors achieve. I feel like I could spend paragraphs and hours talking about everything that is covered in this story, it's almost overwhelming. I'll leave it at, if you want to read a book that respects the Hell out of people that are marginalized in any way, this is the book.

I loved Maria, I loved how much she believed in herself in most things, how much she gave to those that she loved (although, sadly, to her own detriment at times), and how she didn't compromise her intelligence for other's comfort. At the same time she made me so frustrated at times, I perfectly understand why she reacted the way she did to emotional ties, but I still wanted to shake her. Jay was also a wonderful character, even though he started out as a bit of an ass, he never excused himself and always tried to do better at the things he failed at. I loved that he wasn't emotionally constipated for most of the book, it took him a while, but once he admitted his love for Maria he was all in, yet he respected her limits and didn't push for more than she could give.

As for the audio, I almost stopped listening in the beginning because neither narrator was working for me. I think this would have been better if they'd just chosen a single narrator and stuck with that, preferably Xe Sands because Sean Crisden was very nearly awful at all times. I eventually adjusted to Ms. Sands's narration, but Crisden sounded like the worst sort of caricature of both characters, his pronunciation was often bizarre, and his presentation just came across oddly. Every time the narrators switched I was thrown out of the story because their characterization was nothing alike and I'd have to adjust again. Plus, it just made the book too long, by the end I was really ready to be done listening.

Just okay for me.

This book was not nearly as good as Trade Me. I had a very difficult time trying to get into this book. Other people may like it, but it was a struggle for me.

Great if you are LGTB with a fetish for heels

Ok, this book tries to much at once and completely looses the regular listener in my opinion.

A really great idea about people getting to know each other online and in real life without knowing about it. Would be enough to carry a book without all the other problems packed into this one.

But there are simply too many problems packed into one book.

Bisexual character that acts straight through the story, so if feel he should be straight.

Transsexual character, I admit I should have know about from the first volume but I forgot and only caught up halfway throught the narration and them thought, what the hell is this in term of consistency, in the first volume there were problems that she was left home in the dorm because the other girls claimed she was not a girl and now nobody even notices? Weird. And I am sorry there should be some explainations for people who have no idea about the subject and how no talk about the operation or the medicamentation is necessary is too much for me. Or if it is not, same explanations at the end of the book for the uninitiated?

Subplot marriage with different faiths, Buddhism and Islam, really interesting but completely underdeveloped.

Subplot dealing with anxiety with therapy and medication, again there are already enough problems in the book, so that could have been left out.

Dealing with suicide, actually that was the sub plot I thought was reasonably well dealt with, but quite honestly made the book overloaded in my humble opinion.

Racial minorities. Actually this book made me feel sort of bad, because I would never look at somebody and think, might they be half chinese half thai, if at all they look asian to me. I sort of thought myself ok that I see people and might be interested where they come from, but this book had the weird concept of you should not see anybody any different while at the same time expecting you to know about every subgroup somebody might belong too. That honestly made my head spin.

And I have lived in Berkeley and can honestly say, there are non minority people to be found there too...

That leaves the final straw, heels. I know this hill in Berkeley and nobody would be dumb enough to walk up this hill in heels expecially nobody who can proof read physics slides without even studying physics (that said, I can understand how one might spot a missing sqared in r as oposed to r sqared, but spoting a differend of a constant like 2 pi, I am really not so sure).

Maybe I am just very unfond of heels, but I do think this book is overdoing it.

Ah and I forgot the workoholic that works all working hours but still has a wonderful body with muscles in all the right places.

The grating sould of one of the narrators doing a female voice did not help and the fact that the last quarter of the book was spend whinning by one of the characters did not help either.

Give me a break! (Not sure, why I did not give up on this one, but suffered through the whole).