So there's this bohemian, you see, and he meets--you'll never believe this--a banker!
This is a pretty classic fish-out-of-water, two-worlds-colliding sort of romance. It's set in Paris and then London (and then Paris again) in 1901, and it's about a staid, by-the-rules banker who meets and falls in love with a bohemian performer at a gay version of Moulin Rouge. You know exactly what the attraction (and the conflict) at the center of this story will be just from the title, but I really liked the time and attention the book gave to how their feelings progressed. There was an immediate chemistry between them, but I could also see why their feelings for each other deepened into something beyond a single encounter.
That said, the book had a bit of trouble when it came to the major conflict between their two lives--in order for the two of them to live together happily, one of them had to dramatically overhaul his life. The final resolution worked for me, but it came together so easily in the end that it made the conflict leading up to that point seem needlessly overwrought. I ran into the problem that I do with a lot of gay historical romances, which is that I either wanted it to be more of a fantasy or more grounded in what it would actually take to make a relationship like theirs work. This book tries to split the difference, which is fine for a momentary diversion but means it's not a book that is likely to linger in my mind.
The other issue I had with the book is that in some of the sex scenes, the language choices felt odd to me. It can be very challenging to find the right balance between explicit anatomical descriptions and vague euphemisms or slang, and for me this book definitely did not always succeed at this.
Grade: B
This is a pretty classic fish-out-of-water, two-worlds-colliding sort of romance. It's set in Paris and then London (and then Paris again) in 1901, and it's about a staid, by-the-rules banker who meets and falls in love with a bohemian performer at a gay version of Moulin Rouge. You know exactly what the attraction (and the conflict) at the center of this story will be just from the title, but I really liked the time and attention the book gave to how their feelings progressed. There was an immediate chemistry between them, but I could also see why their feelings for each other deepened into something beyond a single encounter.
That said, the book had a bit of trouble when it came to the major conflict between their two lives--in order for the two of them to live together happily, one of them had to dramatically overhaul his life. The final resolution worked for me, but it came together so easily in the end that it made the conflict leading up to that point seem needlessly overwrought. I ran into the problem that I do with a lot of gay historical romances, which is that I either wanted it to be more of a fantasy or more grounded in what it would actually take to make a relationship like theirs work. This book tries to split the difference, which is fine for a momentary diversion but means it's not a book that is likely to linger in my mind.
The other issue I had with the book is that in some of the sex scenes, the language choices felt odd to me. It can be very challenging to find the right balance between explicit anatomical descriptions and vague euphemisms or slang, and for me this book definitely did not always succeed at this.
Grade: B
No comments:
Post a Comment