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From Not Enough to Ever After: A Sweet Fairytale Romance With a Rainbow Heart
Ben was barely twenty and already raising a family. All Ollie had to offer was a quiet heart—and a truth he wasn’t ready to say out loud.Together, they didn’t just fall in love—they built a space where every queer kid could finally belong.Ben Diaz never meant to become a parent. But when his mother died and his gran followed right after, he stepped up—raising his three younger siblings with the help of his fierce twin sister. Life is heavy, and Ben is doing everything he can just to stay afloat. There’s no time for romance. And definitely not for someone like the shy schoolteacher down the hall.
Ollie Thompson is a closeted high school English teacher trying desperately not to rock the boat. He has spent his life hiding. From his students. From his colleagues. From the truth of who he is. But when he sees the way queer students are isolated and erased, he can’t stay silent. Starting a Pride Club is terrifying enough—falling for the bold, chaotic, rainbow-wearing neighbor next door might just undo him completely.
Then Maisy, Ben’s youngest sister, gets sick. When CPS steps in and everything falls apart, Ollie finds himself standing up in ways he never imagined—both for Ben’s family, and for himself.
Together, they create something beautiful. Not just a home, but a safe haven. A promise that love, in all its colors, belongs here.
Because sometimes the loudest pride begins with the quietest truth.
Features LGBTQ+ characters, found family, queer joy, and a small-town community with open doors and even bigger hearts.
Ollie Thompson is a closeted high school English teacher trying desperately not to rock the boat. He has spent his life hiding. From his students. From his colleagues. From the truth of who he is. But when he sees the way queer students are isolated and erased, he can’t stay silent. Starting a Pride Club is terrifying enough—falling for the bold, chaotic, rainbow-wearing neighbor next door might just undo him completely.
Then Maisy, Ben’s youngest sister, gets sick. When CPS steps in and everything falls apart, Ollie finds himself standing up in ways he never imagined—both for Ben’s family, and for himself.
Together, they create something beautiful. Not just a home, but a safe haven. A promise that love, in all its colors, belongs here.
Because sometimes the loudest pride begins with the quietest truth.
Features LGBTQ+ characters, found family, queer joy, and a small-town community with open doors and even bigger hearts.
442 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 5, 2025
15 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 13, 2025
From Not Enough to Ever After
By G. Garrison
Published by the author, 2025
Five stars
G. Garrison’s “From Never Enough to Ever After” is a lovely read. There’s a great deal of carefully calibrated emotion in the story, which I confess struck me as something like an After School Special, but one which kept my eyes wet a lot of the time. This is the sort of story that can feel obvious and heavy-handed. Garrison makes it sing, and plucks every emotional chord in your heart.
At the center of the romance are two young men: Ben Diaz and Oliver Tompson. Ben is just twenty, while Ollie is twenty-three. They’ve had very different life experiences, but both bring with them complicated stories that emerge to drive the narrative and develop the characters.
Ben and Ollie live in the same shabby old apartment building on the edge of campus in a college town. Ben is a student while Ollie is a brand-new English teacher at the local high school. The attraction is pretty much instant, but that just sets up all the frustration we feel as roadblocks are thrown in the path of happiness. Ben has moved into a two-bedroom apartment with his four siblings: his twin sister Susie, who is the reason for their move. She has a full scholarship to the local college and is be a full-time student. Two teenage siblings, Marcus and Ophelia (called Opie) and a six-year-old named Maisie are under Ben’s legal guardianship, which he obtained at the age of eighteen. Maisie is very smart, but has cerebral palsy and needs special education arrangements. These kids are alone because their grandmother, who was caring for all of them, died a couple of years earlier. Ben works full time, takes courses online, and manages everything like a superhuman.
Ollie seems to have a simpler story, but it depends on your viewpoint. He’s very close to his sister Georgia, who is a nurse; but there is also a mother here. Her story adds its own heartbreak.
The author does a beautiful job of playing out the emotional threads in the narrative; deftly weaving them all into the interconnected stories of sibling love, fear of loss, and past trauma. Ben is openly gay, but has never had time to act on it. Ollie is also gay, but is still closeted and afraid of being identified as gay. Little by little the backstories are revealed, which simply adds to both the texture and the emotional anxiety.
There are quite a few secondary characters here who play important roles as the story unfolds. They’re fantastic, and funny, and crucial. The old liberal phrase, “it takes a village” came to mind more than once as I read this. An important aspect of this book is that it entirely a story of goodness and kindness. I kept waiting for bad people to appear, and while bad things have happened in the past, the author has chosen to focus on the good—both actual and potential.
Our world is full of meanness and strife right now, especially from the people we generally trust to give us the opposite. That’s partly why this book meant so much to me, why it resonated so consistently. It’s a great story, but an important message as well.
By G. Garrison
Published by the author, 2025
Five stars
G. Garrison’s “From Never Enough to Ever After” is a lovely read. There’s a great deal of carefully calibrated emotion in the story, which I confess struck me as something like an After School Special, but one which kept my eyes wet a lot of the time. This is the sort of story that can feel obvious and heavy-handed. Garrison makes it sing, and plucks every emotional chord in your heart.
At the center of the romance are two young men: Ben Diaz and Oliver Tompson. Ben is just twenty, while Ollie is twenty-three. They’ve had very different life experiences, but both bring with them complicated stories that emerge to drive the narrative and develop the characters.
Ben and Ollie live in the same shabby old apartment building on the edge of campus in a college town. Ben is a student while Ollie is a brand-new English teacher at the local high school. The attraction is pretty much instant, but that just sets up all the frustration we feel as roadblocks are thrown in the path of happiness. Ben has moved into a two-bedroom apartment with his four siblings: his twin sister Susie, who is the reason for their move. She has a full scholarship to the local college and is be a full-time student. Two teenage siblings, Marcus and Ophelia (called Opie) and a six-year-old named Maisie are under Ben’s legal guardianship, which he obtained at the age of eighteen. Maisie is very smart, but has cerebral palsy and needs special education arrangements. These kids are alone because their grandmother, who was caring for all of them, died a couple of years earlier. Ben works full time, takes courses online, and manages everything like a superhuman.
Ollie seems to have a simpler story, but it depends on your viewpoint. He’s very close to his sister Georgia, who is a nurse; but there is also a mother here. Her story adds its own heartbreak.
The author does a beautiful job of playing out the emotional threads in the narrative; deftly weaving them all into the interconnected stories of sibling love, fear of loss, and past trauma. Ben is openly gay, but has never had time to act on it. Ollie is also gay, but is still closeted and afraid of being identified as gay. Little by little the backstories are revealed, which simply adds to both the texture and the emotional anxiety.
There are quite a few secondary characters here who play important roles as the story unfolds. They’re fantastic, and funny, and crucial. The old liberal phrase, “it takes a village” came to mind more than once as I read this. An important aspect of this book is that it entirely a story of goodness and kindness. I kept waiting for bad people to appear, and while bad things have happened in the past, the author has chosen to focus on the good—both actual and potential.
Our world is full of meanness and strife right now, especially from the people we generally trust to give us the opposite. That’s partly why this book meant so much to me, why it resonated so consistently. It’s a great story, but an important message as well.
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July 28, 2025I hate to say it, but this book feels like it was written using (or cleaned up by) ChatGPT.
It's not readily apparent, which is why I say maybe it was cleaned up using AI, but I did have to stop reading pretty early on because of those annoying em dashes. By the time we get to chapter 4, there are em dashes in every paragraph. Even if this is written by a human, the constant interruption of the sentence was giving me motion sickness.
Not to mention a lot of the sentences felt incomplete/oddly shortened. It gave the story an uncomfortable, stilted feeling.
I also noticed the author released a bunch of 300+ page books within weeks/a few months of each other. Maybe they were just really excited to release their books and are just in dire need of an editor...
It's not readily apparent, which is why I say maybe it was cleaned up using AI, but I did have to stop reading pretty early on because of those annoying em dashes. By the time we get to chapter 4, there are em dashes in every paragraph. Even if this is written by a human, the constant interruption of the sentence was giving me motion sickness.
Not to mention a lot of the sentences felt incomplete/oddly shortened. It gave the story an uncomfortable, stilted feeling.
I also noticed the author released a bunch of 300+ page books within weeks/a few months of each other. Maybe they were just really excited to release their books and are just in dire need of an editor...
July 8, 2025
great book....it's all about finding yourself and being seen for who you are
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews