The Swap

Crabby McCrabby Review
Well this happened ....

You know those illustrated, coffee-table quality cook books? The ones with the gorgeous photographs of the ingredients and the finished dishes? You look at them and you think “yes! this is going to be awesome!” and yet despite following all of the instructions to a T none of the recipes work out. I'll stop with the cooking/cook book analogy but that was this book for me. A big meh.

The good parts: Beautiful cover, no discernible errors in copy, and clearly professionally formatted & edited. Bravo. As for the story all of the principals are nice, good, and progressive people. There's no shaming anything, there's a bit of a flip on the traditional older/younger, bigger/smaller roles etc. Sadly all of the things that are “right” with the story are what made me not connect with it on an emotional level at all. Or maybe it was the way it was told.

Maybe Spoilerish from this point forth
At the age of 37 Samuel Bishop's life takes a sharp turn. After sending his daughter off to college he and his wife, Gayle, admit to each other that though they love each other they were never in love. As a way for both of them to ease into the dating pool they go to a key swap party and pretty much what you expect to happen happens. Both Gayle and Samuel meet people who will turn their lives around. In Samuel's case that happens to be Oliver Hughes a 22? up-and-coming model. Oliver is that now almost ubiquitous gay character in romance: physically slight, somewhat traditionally fem in his choice of clothing & make-up, and attracted to a bigger, older male, however he's no wilting flower in the bedroom. On the contrary he can be quite bossy. That's our Oliver, though his topyness is more alluded to than seen.

Everything else and everyone else suffered from an illness I like to call Aspirational Characters. Example: when Samuel first spots Oliver and his loins literaly stir he barely bats an eyelash. Granted we're told he'd felt attraction to men before meeting and marrying Gayle, but we also know that he's so good that he'd been nothing but a devoted father and husband in those 17 years. I'm thinking he might of had a moment, just a second, of soul searching. Nope. He's just mesmerized by Oliver's beauty. When he tells Gayle that he's now seeing a man, a way young one at that, again ... immediate understanding. His daughter is the only one who comes closest to manifesting anything but PC approved emotions and it lasts for about half a second.

Let us now talk about how insta everything is for everyone. Samuel & Oliver are exchanging “I love you” after a couple of weeks and apparently so are Gayle and her new man. And the pièce de ré·sis·tance is Samuel's very first bottoming with Oliver rimming and penetrative sex all in a premiere session and loving it. *doubts*.

There's a side story which I'd like to erase from my mind because it brought nothing to the story, which in my mind should be the developing relationship between Oliver & Samuel. Period. However since that story has zero conflict, the author has grafted on an absurd serial killer story. No thank you. Zero conflict relationship stories can still be rich territories to explore.

This didn't work for me but it was well written, hurts no one, and maybe will be someone else's cup of tea or mine on a different day. Who knows.