Kadin Mahoney is ten years older than his lifelong partner, Gregory. But when Gregory is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and winds up in a nursing home, Kadin decides to move there with him in spite of the fact that Gregory doesn’t even know him. His three children aren’t happy about this and his friends think he’s crazy. But Gregory is the love of Kadin’s life, and he’s not going to let him slip away without a struggle.
So he conceives a plan to help him remember their passionate, sexy past. With the help of a notebook computer and a personal blog, he begins telling him the story of two good looking young men who fell in love with each other during the l950s in Savannah. One is a recent college graduate, and the other is a thirty year old lawyer and divorced father of three. They meet by accident at the movies the day Kadin’s divorce is finalized, and wind up spending a full summer together engaged in every act of true love that is humanly possible.
But it all comes to an abrupt halt in mid-August, when Gregory’s family begins to suspect his forbidden feelings for Kadin. They drag him back to Atlanta early, where he enlists in the army to get even. Five years later, Kadin has moved on with his life and Gregory is engaged to be married. But Gregory sees Kadin on TV, and he goes back to Savannah one more time before the wedding. He only wants to find out what happened to Kadin, but the moment he arrives his clothes come off and their lives are never the same again.
This is a hot, sexy story with a happy ending. It’s about true love between two strong, passionate men that survives all the odds society and family have placed upon them. They do it with restrained dignity in public, but in private they share unbelievable, sizzling sex that leaves them both satisfied for the rest of their lives.
Ryan @ryanfield Hybrid author of over 100 published modern romance novels and stories, including AN OFFICER AND HIS GENTLEMAN, FANGSTERS, and THE RAINBOW DETECTIVE AGENCY. He is a Lambda Award-winner with a short story and he's always more than thankful for reader reviews. In fact, he cherishes reviews from real readers, and that means good or bad reviews.
You will love this book if you enjoy any of the following:
1. A book with a raunchy sex to plot ratio of approximately 7:1 2. Male leads that fall into traditional gender roles, where the "man" is a total jerk and the "woman" keeps the kitchen cleaner than the hired maid 3. The only significant female character is a frumpy, penis loathing lesbian stereotype 4. A book "based" on a popular mainstream romance novel and movie, where the source material is stripped of any soul and rendered completely meaningless
I happen to not like any of those things and found it impossible to finish this book. I did get more than halfway, though, so I feel like my review is fair.
3 Stars? Really...no but GR doesn't let me do 2.5, so I bumped up and I'll tell you why.
"For Gregory, it was a little different. Kadin's penis felt like a huge beer bottle that was ready to explode at any moment..." Well that paints a pretty picture that may take copious amounts of alcohol to flush out of my brain. Ok this is a sample of why I didn't love this book, I'm not a prude really, anyone who really knows me will tell you I am not some shy violet and I read books with dirty talk, smut, smexy sexting and it's not a problem but there's that fine line where it goes from sexy to crude and unappealing for me and I fully acknowledge this is a personal taste issue. Then there was also the fact that the blurb gave me the impression that this was going to be a warm, sweet, sexy story about an aging gay couple and how one half of this couple is striving to maintain the bond of love with his partner in spite of the advances of dementia, so I admit I was expecting something a little more sensitive, sorry a little classier.
This is a story about two men who met in the 50's a time when men didn't acknowledge their love publicly. They get separated through circumstances, 5 years later they find their way back to each other and are reunited. For the next 40+ years they live together hiding the true nature of their relationship from prying eyes. Then Gregory, who ironically is the younger of this pairing by about 10 years, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Placed in a nursing home where he can receive the care he needs, Kadin is free to carry on his life in his home, but no he chooses to reside in the same nursing home to be near the love of his life. Watching Gregory drift away a little more each day he comes up with the idea to tell Gregory their story through his personal blog. Gregory enjoys the story not realizing that he is one of the men in Kadin's blog story. This is a very condensed explanation of the story but needless to say I was taken, I wanted to read more. My mind had already created this warm wonderful love story, with images of these two sweet old men spending their days together reliving the past they shared.
Sounds sweet right? Well it did to me until I realized that what I was getting was Kadin's retelling of their past sexual exploits. Yes that's right I got to hear all about where and who Kadin's 9 inches went into as well as Gregory's exploits in the military. At times it was a clusterfuck of who's zooming who and how often, sorry I just needed to get that out.
The most frustrating part of this was that I would start to see glimpses of the story I wanted to read and I'd start to really get into where things were going and "wham, bam, thank you mame!" someone's getting their brains screwed out. Can I just say "I get it, Kadin was a total top who had a 9" dick and everybody wanted it. Gregory was the love of his love who wanted nothing more than to be dominated by Kadin in the bedroom. I get all of that in the extreme."
So right about now you're probably thinking "little angry there Karen?" "Why yes I am thank you for noticing."
The reason is simple. I feel let down, as I said I was seeing glimpses of the story I thought I was getting only to get pulled back from the brink of what could have been a beautiful, gripping love story and dropped smack dab into the middle of a cheesy sex scene that for me did nothing to drive the story or depict the strength of feeling between these two men. Am I implying that there should not have been any sex scenes in this book? Oh hell no, I like a good sex scene as much as the next person. I'm not even saying that the author needs to change how the story is written, it's his story. I'm simply saying why a story that I had honestly thought would end up being at least 3.5 stars or better got a begrudging 2.5 stars from me.
Ah well (and while we're on this little phrase, if you decide to read this book or possibly any book by this author you will encounter this phrase frequently, no I didn't count, ah well...maybe next time)...I guess you're wondering why I bumped up to 3 stars this is why. The best part of this story was for me contained within the last 5 maybe 8 pages. I wanted a story that I would remember as being a wonderful, funny, romantic, passionate love story about two men finding love and growing old together showing the world that love is love and who you find it with doesn't matter. I feel like that's the story the author was trying to give me, as the reader. Unfortunately it's not the story that I got. But at the very end, I found a bit of redemption, I felt the love and commitment that was shared by these two men, there was a little tug on my heart that had my lower lip trembling with compassion and nearly shed tears, because having experienced this story in real life as I watched my mother-in-law slip away day by day, memory by memory from her family, from a husband who loved her more than his own life I remembered the enormity of the task undertaken by someone trying to write a story of this nature and I appreciated the effort regardless of the result.
I really would have enjoyed this much more if at least half of the raunchy sex scenes had been left out. I found the parts in the present where they are in the nursing home sweet but once they go back in time it's just too much "over the top" sex and the protags felt too stereotypical in their roles of "top" and "bottom".
this one was of the best, when I read the intro to this story I knew that I was going to be crying the entire story it reminded me of the movie The Notebook, the love that this man had for his partner was outstanding.
When someone you love, is there, but is not. We go on the life story od Kadin, and Gregory. A journey it was. This was a wonderful romance, of a couple who spent 50 years together. Well written, strong story line, with great characters.