Home by William Neale
As the author himself says in the “about the author” section of this book, he is a strong believer in romance and as such he is presenting himself as a romance author. So, if the plot outside the romance was maybe overlooked, I think the reason is that William Neale was more aiming to the love story than anything else, and of course, you will never hear me saying that this is not a good thing, on the contrary, it’s very positive to me.
The romance in this story is so pushed, and the pink glasses perspective as well, that despite everything and everyone should be against them, the two main heroes manage to ignore it and enjoy their long-due love story. A lot of obstacles are in their path, but one by one they dodge them apparently without much effort. Sometime I wondered if that was even possible, if really it was that simple, or if instead the author was not planning for some big blow to strike… but nope, the romance flew smoothly, the men enjoyed their love story, and in the end, more or less the last 20 page, the author rushed for the time span of 13 months, letting the reader enjoying different moments of domestic bliss.
The starting point of the story is quite believable, and probably common: a gay man, Lucas, comes back home, in a small town in Tennessee, for his father’s funeral, a father who disowned his son when he came out. Among all the unexpected people who came to pay their homage there is Rogan, the high-school bully who harassed Lucas when they were in school. Of course to an external eye, the reason why Rogan was so fixated with Lucas was obvious, it was an unrequited love the guy was not able to admit. But now they are 30 years old, both financially independent, and so there is no reason why they cannot enjoy each other. Of course the author decided to write both of them like that to avoid any little problem to their happiness: they have not to worry to lose their job since they don’t really need it; living in two different, and far away States is no problem, since they can simply decided what suits them best an move in. Their only problem is to decide if they finally want to enjoy the romance they dreamt at school, and of course the answer to that question is simple: Yes, they do.
As I said, the romance overcomes anything else in the story, such as the unpleasant experience they have with a nasty reporter who made his point to outing Rogan, apparently for his personal agenda. But him, and the following scandal, are so minor occurrences, that they are soon forgotten. Actually everything seems to turning gay or gay friendly, and instead of being ostracized, Lucas and Rogan are almost invited to be the first couple of the small town. That is probably the point where I wondered if it was really possible, if it was believable that everything was so smooth for this duo, but then I thought, well, this is a romance after all!
I’m not sure, but after the rushing the reader experienced in the last few pages of the story, the ending was almost abrupt; that made me wonder if the author doesn’t have a plan to write a sequel for this story and these men.
http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=WNHOME01
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Amazon: Home
Amazon Kindle: Home
Paperback: 212 pages
Publisher: MLR Press (August 18, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608202127
ISBN-13: 978-1608202126
Reading List: http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle