These books are entertaining but several things bother me.
The language and process in the stories sounds EXACTLY like L A Witt, with the same quirky non-Amercian English.
I don’t care where people come from, but if you’re writing a book set in the US, British or perhaps Canadian expressions sound unnatural coming out of an American characters mouth. A few examples:
The Drinks Menu – US we would say Drink Menu
In queue = standing in line
Trackies = Sweat Pants or sweats
Drive = Driveway
The Rear View – needs mirror
There are several others that catch my ear as wrong, but I’m not remembering them at the moment.
You can always tell when women are writing gay romance, and they seem to be writing it for a female audience.
The characters seem like female persona in male bodies. They instantly fall in love and are almost always monogamous from day one. (those are called Lesbians…LOL) The other thing, and yes I’m generalizing… once the sex scenes start, they go on for pages and pages and pages and most are extremely vanilla. Daryl Banner & Alexa Land weave and balance the sex and story in a way that makes sense than most. Too many authors write the the NO NO NO NO then SEX SEX SEX style. I wear my right finger out pushing the 15 seconds ahead button LOL. Sometimes less is more.
Oh and…if I asked my husband to put his “length” into my “opening”, he’d either laugh hysterically and fall off the bed, or throw up all over me. NO gay man talks like that – yah.. it’s not a “member” either…
And please… if you read most gay romance written by women, EVERY gay man wears “boxers” Maybe in 1950. Just for fun I went through my contact list of my gay friends that I see at the gym and/or have known for a while, and from my military days… boxers are clearly at the bottom of the list of what underwear they wear. I only know 2 gay friends out of 30 that wear “boxers” …one is 75 and the other is Brazilian. Ok this is nit picking, but if you want a piece of fiction to be really enjoyable, the little details have to be right, otherwise the reader doesn’t relate… Accents, vocabulary. psyche, clothing, etc…
The devil is in the details as they say.
All that said, Greg Boudreaux is always a good narrator, and usually nails the characters. I liked his narration especially in this book. I thought Joel Leslie read in a way that depicted more of a 60 year old fussy queen, his character sounded 20 years older than the other….Not sure if that was writing or performance.
The first book in this series was really fun, and I thought the character contrast was really good on all fronts.