Sarah Granger wrote one of my favorite m/m historical romance novels (A Minor Inconvenience), so last night I decided to check to see if she'd published any other historical romances that I had missed. This one is more of a novella, and it's kind of a quintessential early book - I can see the foundation for what made A Minor Inconvenience such a delightful book, but The Long Road Home is lacking both the depth and the conflict that made her later book so wonderful.
The story is set in a non-specific historical era, with ruling princes and horses and wars fought and won with bows and arrows and swords, but there's no attempt to actually ground it anyplace or time. Basically, a visiting prince stays at Sir Andrew's estate, and he takes a fancy to the groom, who's wonderful with horses and also is a veteran of the same war the prince himself fought in. There are allusions to secret traumatic pasts for both of them, but we never really get into their backstories, and while the banter between the two of them is readable enough, I never got a sense of why they were supposed to be in love rather than just enjoying a tumble in the hay. The dangers of rummaging through an author's back catalog, I suppose.
Grade: C
The story is set in a non-specific historical era, with ruling princes and horses and wars fought and won with bows and arrows and swords, but there's no attempt to actually ground it anyplace or time. Basically, a visiting prince stays at Sir Andrew's estate, and he takes a fancy to the groom, who's wonderful with horses and also is a veteran of the same war the prince himself fought in. There are allusions to secret traumatic pasts for both of them, but we never really get into their backstories, and while the banter between the two of them is readable enough, I never got a sense of why they were supposed to be in love rather than just enjoying a tumble in the hay. The dangers of rummaging through an author's back catalog, I suppose.
Grade: C
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