Spot Me (Work Out #1) by Andrew Grey
3 out of 5 stars
Ebook. 95 pages. Published August 2009 by Dreamspinner Press
Blurb:
Working out is a daily routine for Dan,
who meets his friend Lonnie at the gym to lift weights. But breaking a sweat
takes on a whole new meaning when Dan sees Gene, a professional bodybuilder, in
the mirror. Dan knows it’s a lost cause: he’s forty and nursing a broken heart,
nowhere in the same league as gorgeous Gene.
Then at the gym the next day, Gene asks Dan if he can work out with him. A bet
wins Dan a smoothie and conversation, which surprisingly leads to a date. Now
Dan is faced with a dilemma: does he allow Gene to elbow his way into his life,
or will he give up on the idea of a new relationship before it even starts?
Likes:
- Older / younger romance where the younger guy was the pursuer.
- Dan learning to trust again.
- Lonnie’s steadfast friendship.
- Gene’s willingness to go as slow as Dan needed.
- It was short.
Dislikes:
- I never connected with Dan.
- Too much into on workouts, bodybuilding, and the focus on Gene’s body.
- Dan’s hangups seemed unnecessarily strong.
- There’s very little substance to this book.
- Clunky writing and lots of long sentences.
Andrew Gray’s works are either a hit or a miss for me and this one was definitely a miss. I never connected with Dan. There’s nothing wrong with him per se, but his personality seemed to revolve solely around his breakup months ago. Even his every day workout regimen started because of the breakup.
Gene seems nice. I liked him better, but since the story was only from Dan’s point of view, I didn’t get to see much of Gene that wasn’t about his body, bodybuilding, or him romancing Dan. I literally know next to nothing about the man, which is due in part to the shortness of the story, but also because the main conflict was centered around Dan’s insecurities.
And speaking of Dan’s insecurities, rather than making me sympathetic to him, they just made me annoyed. I don’t usually use the phrase ‘chick with a dick’ because people are people and they can act however they want, but all of Dan’s whining and hesitation could easily have come straight from a hetero romance.
My biggest problem with Dan’s issues was the timeline. Sure, he’d been with the same guy for ten years. That’s a long time. But Dan is forty-one. So he must have done some exploring in his twenties. Yet he acts like Mike was the only guy he was ever with and everything he knows about intimacy and dating come from their decade together. I would have preferred if Dan had realized that he wasn’t the same person he was before he started dating Mike, and so he had to relearn how to date again. That would have made more sense. And while it was kind of hinted at, the rest of his insecurities massively overshadowed that particular issue.
As to the writing, I feel like there’s too much focus on things that aren’t important to the story. Like how Dan gets to borrow Lonnie’s Porsche while he’s on vacation or the talk about music that went absolutely nowhere. There’s a subtle ‘rich guy’ vibe to the story that never gets explained. It’s as though the material is there to make this a full-fledged novel but that didn’t happen.
I’ll give the other books in this series a shot, because they’re all short. Hopefully there will be a little more depth to the characters next time.
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