This is the second story I read by this author and it was much different than the first. Where "The Mouse that Felled the Oak" was a sweet romance with a bit of a m/m fairy tale feel, this was a contemporary story that seemed to bounce around like a pinball. One of the main characters, Taylor, is styled after the author (at least according to the author's biography,) making me wonder if the story itself is not autobiographical. Given that truth is often stranger than fiction, if this were indeed an autobiography, it would go a long way to explain some of the bizarre twists and turns of the story.
I liked the first half of the story, especially the way the main characters did not hit it off right from the start but instead had a fairly rocky beginning. I also liked Taylor's rustic lifestyle (again, styled after the author's own apparent lifestyle) and the part it played in the development of the MCs relationship. By the time the MCs got together I was really rooting for them and hoping for a HEA, which may have been difficult given that one of the MCs was only visiting for the summer. I actually suspected that the potential separation at the end of the summer might be the source of the story's conflict, but that turned out not to be the case.
Somewhere around the mid-point the story took some very bizarre and perplexing turns that had me scratching my head in confusion. There were two separate unexpected conflicts. The one that would have caused a huge problem for me turned out to be easier to solve than the one that I would have expected the characters to handle better. The epilogue seemed to wrap things up, but in a way that still left the potential for open-endedness.
Based on the second half I cannot rate the story as highly as I may have wanted to after reading the first half, but I do like this author's writing style and intend to read more of his m/m stories.
p.s. not relevant to the content, but my one final nit is with the cover, which currently shows a snow covered evergreen. Given that the main story (outside the epilogue) takes place during a warm summer, the cover makes no sense.