2 out of 5 stars
Ebook. Kindle Unlimited. 288 pages. Published April 1, 2018
Blurb:
“No More Secrets Everything Tennis champion Tyler Florman touches
turns to gold. Winning is easy, but fame comes with a price. Living in the
closet in exchange for riches and honors was second nature, until he met the
younger man who conquered his heart.
Chip Carter has turned a childhood trauma into a
career saving lives. As an EMT, he’s never found time for love, but all of that
could be about to change when he rescues the famous, older athlete who steals
his heart for the very first time.
Avoiding love is second nature for both men,
until they meet that special someone worth fighting for. The odds against Chip
and Tyler look insurmountable. But can Tyler leave the safety of the closet,
and win Chip’s love at the same time?
Welcome to Hidden Creek, Texas, where the
heart know what it wants, and where true love lives happily ever after. Every
Men of Hidden Creek novel can be read on its own, but keep an eye out for
familiar faces around town! This book contains an eccentric blue-haired aunt, a
spurned blackmailer, and a whole lot of balls.
Likes:
- The acknowledgement that it can be hard for sport figures to come out.
Dislikes:
- No hook.
- Needs a good line editor.
- Neither Chip nor Tyler made he want to know more about them.
- The prologue was actually a preview of what happens in chapter fourteen.
DNF 20%
This gets a 2 star rating because, while I didn’t get into it, it wasn’t terrible. It just didn’t make me want to read more. I got to chapter six, and the first kiss, and felt nothing. I didn’t care about either character, what they were going through, or where they were headed as a couple. And for me, there’s no point continuing if I don’t care about the characters.
Chip is a twenty year old who constantly has trouble getting to work on time but is an EMT responsible for saving people’s lives. Tyler is a tennis champ who only feels happy right after winning so he doesn’t want to retire despite being miserable. Both of these characters put me off and nothing they said or did made me warm up to them.
None of the side characters caught my attention either. It’s clear that Tyler has some toxic people in his life. As for Aunt Dixie, she’s not believable as a seventy-one year old. If she was in her forties or fifties, sure. It would also make more sense if she was younger, because Chip is only twenty and Dixie is his father’s younger sister.
The whole thing (or at least the part I read, so I’ll assume it applies to the whole book) needs a good line editor. There is massive pronoun confusion, changes in tense, awkward phrasing, and entire blocks of dialogue that you have no idea who is talking until the end. I’ll usually put up with some imperfection from a self-published author, but this was a bit much, and a marked drop in quality from the other books in the series. Add in random POV shifts, including paragraphs from side characters, despite the chapters being marked as coming from either Tyler or Chip, and it was a choppy read.
My final big complaint was the prologue chapter. It shows a scene where Tyler and Chip are together. Since there’s no context, I assumed it was in the past, and Tyler and Chip had been a couple when they were teens. So I was really confused when they met as adults and thought the other looked familiar but couldn’t remember why. Turns out, the “prologue chapter” is actually a sneak peek of what the two will be getting up to in chapter fourteen. This would have lost the book an automatic star just for the confusion it caused me, even if I had liked the book.
Ian O. Lewis is an author I’ve never read before, and I can’t say this was a good first impression. He has not written any other books for the Hidden Creek series, so I won’t likely be reading his other works any time soon. I have to admit, I was incredibly disappointed with this book. Especially when it’s a series, I try to read everything, even if I end up skimming. I just wasn’t willing to spend my time on something I had to force myself to keep reading. I had enough of that in high school.
Love is Love Reviews 