The Fall

Title:
Author: Kate Sherwood
Cover artist: Leah Kaye Suttle
Publisher:
Amazon: The Fall
Genre: contemporary m/m romance
Length: 214 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

A guest review by Sirius.

Summary: I really enjoyed this family drama and romance

Blurb:

Every relationship leaves something behind. Dumped by his sugar daddy, part-time model Scott Mackenzie somehow ends up owning an abandoned church in rural Ontario. He dreams of using it for gay weddings, even if he’ll never have one of his own.

Joe Sutton is trying to keep his family together after his parents’ deaths. Between the family ranch, his brother’s construction company, and commitments around town, he doesn’t have time for a relationship. But Mackenzie is hard to ignore.

As both men fight their growing attraction, challenges to Mackenzie’s business threaten their relationship. If he can’t make it work, he’ll have to crawl back to the city in defeat. But the only solution involves risking the ranch Joe loves, and each man has to decide how much he’ll sacrifice for the other.

Review:

This book suited my mood very well. I was in the mood for a family drama, but not for the over top family drama and I thought that the writer managed to keep dramatic events from becoming the source of endless angst, which at times does annoy me so much. I do not know, I just felt that I was reading about the real people who were living their lives and working the jobs that real people may be doing. Granted, McKenzie sounded a bit more glamorous from the blurb, but apparently he tried to change his life to more normal as well and I did like that.

I  actually liked everybody in this book  and at the same time I could not say that anybody in this book was perfect. I mean, there were some members of Joe’s family who had small roles and they did not have a chance to screw something up in their lives or somebody else’s lives, but I still did not get a feel that they meant to be perfect “human beings”. I thought that the development of the relationship between Joe and McKenzie was very well done – it may have started with fast sexual attraction, but I never mind Insta!Lust in my romances, it is an Insta!love I have a problem with. And there is nothing Insta! when both men slowly realizing that they want something more from each other besides casual sex.

I think that what I liked the most in the development of the romantic relationship between Joe and McKenzie was their temporary mandatory breakup, which happens oh ever so often in the romance novels, and which I am displeased about quite often. It is weird because in essence their short separation was based on the misunderstanding and I usually hate it more often than not. However in this story it just made sense to me that such (or similar) misunderstanding would occur. It made sense to me based on the clumsy attempts by both men to guard their hearts and still awkwardly trying to move forward towards each other. Even the wrong assumption made sense to me because the one who made it probably thought that this was bound to happen anyway before any grounds for misunderstanding actually took place. And most importantly I really liked that such misunderstanding was resolved really fast. I thought that both Joe and McKenzie really grew throughout the course of the book and I really liked that.

I really loved Joe’s brothers and sisters, all of them, even the one who caused some friction in the family. They loved each other, they wanted the best for their wonderful older brother and even if they quarreled, I still did not doubt that they loved each other. I would read a story about each off them if the writer were to write it, and their roles were small, really.

Joe’s sisters were not the only female characters present in this book – there were couple more secondary ones which I really liked and when I see that I always want to give special kudos to the writer. There was one female character (just spoken about) who did not sound as a very pleasant human being, and that was great too. I was happy to see different women in this book, just as in real life.

Recommended.