Okay, so this time around we have Jack Murphy, 36, the owner of Bottoms Up, the bar that Chase used to work at and still helps out at occasionally. Joining Jack is Liam, 24. He’s the bartender who started on Chase’s last day. It has been established that Jack suffers from PTSD from being in the army as a Ranger. If he brings his service dog, Charlie. into work, then he’s having a pretty bad day. As for Liam, people have been saying he seems familiar but they just can’t place him.
At the end of book two, Xavier realized something about him and then Liam’s secret was revealed. It was a huge leap in logic and there was no precedence for it. I just don’t understand where this came from. How Xavier figured this out, I will never know. You can’t explain this one away. Essentially, ANW just ended the book there and forced us to believe the unsubstantiated truth.
I had hoped that ANW’s writing would improve as the series progressed, but, like I tell everyone else: hope is the shortest route to disappointment.
SPOILERS HO!
I bet it’s equally as beautiful in the spring when everything turns green with new growth after a long, harsh winter.
Already with the weirdly impersonal inner monologue.
♂ Jack’s grandfather died. He was summoned to the solicitor’s office to pick up an envelope. The solicitor, Terry, was a friend of Jack’s grandfather who everyone called Big Jack. But the way they’re talking or rather the way Jack is talking you kind of get the hint that Terry and his grandfather might have been more than just longtime friends who were inseparable after both of their wives died. Or not. We’ll see.
The first time Big Jack was mentioned, the scene gave me a the feeling that Big Jack was Jack’s older lover that died. That was quickly dashed. But I gotta tell you, I giggle nearly every time I read his name.
♂ One thing about Amy’s books is that, in this series at least, people believe in God which is kind of scarce in the M/M world. They use “God” and “Jesus” as exclamations but rarely do you get the feeling or confirmation that the characters actually believe in God. In this series, though, people are praying. I’m not saying that people breaking down with the Holy Ghost or anything like that, but these people are praying and they talk about church. And not just praying that this or that will go well kind of thing, you know? They’re talking about praying in the way that someone prays when they actually want to commune with God. So that’s kind of refreshing. I just don’t see that a whole lot of that–or really at all–in M/M stories.
♂ Liam tells Chase that they are brothers and that he’s known since they met–nearly two years ago. The rest of that conversation didn’t go so well, so he goes to Jack to update him on the situation and maybe some comfort. They have a moment, but then Jack backs off and Liam takes it as a rejection. He starts to leave and then Jack calls him back. On his way out of Jack’s office, he runs into Trevor, another bartender, who came to tell Jack that they have a situation on the bar floor. Jack calls Liam again, but he keeps going. Before addressing the issue in the bar, Jack finally stops Liam and tells him that they’re going to talk about what just happened. He takes him to his loft which is the same building–different entrance–and tells him not to go anywhere. Only then does Jack go back to handle the situation in the bar.
I don’t know who taught these people how to prioritize, but this isn’t it.
What happened there? I don’t understand how do you leave a situation happening in your business to go secure someone who can wait without being escorted elsewhere. It’s not like he was worried about him leaving for real because he could have left Liam in the loft and there’d be no way for him to stop Liam from leaving when he wasn’t there–he just had to trust that Liam would stay. So what happened? How do you just leave the situation in your bar, your place of business, to go handle something personal like that isn’t even an emergency…not really. He didn’t even know how dire the situation was yet he… It bothers me when characters makes stupid decisions like this.
♂ Okay so ANW has just unwritten something in the first book. Chase said that Jack had a rule against dating customers and employees. And that was like the period of the sentence that was the conversation about Chase gating Gray. It happened on Chase’s last day, so it didn’t matter. However, in this book, only a year or so later in the story, Jack says he doesn’t have these rules, but he wished he did because it would make it easier to resist Liam.
Come on ANW, get it together.
My dick was hard enough to drill for oil…
There she goes again.
♂ I keep rewriting the lines as I read.
♂ ANW spends too much time making sure you know exactly what she’s talking about. Everything’s so precise. It just loses all of the passion. No excitement, no suspense, no tension.
♂ I would really appreciate if he stopped calling his dick “Sparky.”
♂ ANW had Jack use the pin drop expression when Liam was first in his loft, but now she’s having Jack say that he thought it was silly until the current moment, which is right before he was going to come out to his family.Why does she keep unwriting the story? At least the previous one was in a different book. This was only chapters apart.
♂ After Jack comes out, his dad tells him to walk with him for a bit. When they come back, the two guys from his military unit who didn’t look so happy when he first made the announcement were on the porch waiting for him. They looked a little more accepting. The whole exchange between them was really gross. I don’t know why people feel the need to make jokes about this sort of thing. I wish they would find some other method to convey that they’re good with the news.Hugs will never go out of style.
♂ Somethings that should be left for introspection are written as dialogue and vice versa. It’s weird.
♂ Liam and Jack are both consenting to their little trysts, but all this keeps happening at work. He’s still his boss. They might want to curb that.
♂ I am not built for soap opera sap.
♂ Exposition from beginning to end.
♂ There is zero sensuality in the notion of a dick “standing proud”. All I can imagine is a salute. a flag waving, and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” playing in the background.
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“Slip your hand between my legs and tease my hole with lube. You’ll feel it respond and quiver at your touch.”
See? Genuine step-by-step instructions.
“You will start out with one finger and you’ll be able to tell when I’m ready; my hole will be pliable and ready for more.”
I-I can’t…
♂ The envelope Jack picked up from the solicitor contained and letter and a key. In the letter, Big Jack told him that he should live his life truthfully, and he’d also told him that his true love was some dude Jeremiah he met in the army. This and his hard-on for Liam is what gave Jack the courage to come out. Now that they’re all squared away, they need something to do for the rest of the book.
Jack told Liam about the stuff his grandfather left him which include journals and photos detailing his life with Jeremiah. Liam wants to go find Jeremiah. So no they’re gearing up for a manhunt.
“Same sex couples still struggle to adopt kids and become foster parents, even in states that are considered same-sex friendly. Having biological kids is really expensive and you have to find a surrogate. So, it’s a struggle to make that dream come true and I erroneously wondered why a bisexual man would choose me over a woman who could give him what he wanted naturally without depleting his life savings or having to hear heinous things said about him if he happened to get a homophobic social worker or judge during fostering or adoption processes. You want to believe that educated people wouldn’t think or say such horrible things, but they do.”
“Wow,” I said, unsure what else to say. “That is really low self-esteem. I hate that you felt that way.”
“Thanks,” he said quietly.“
Really?! This is a convo between Chase and Liam. Gay. Brothers. No one talks like this! Are we at a judicial hearing or something? Are we writing pamphlets? Why is he in speech-mode when talking to another gay man? And Liam’s response is just… See what I’m saying? This is all wrong.
♂ So I just thought that maybe ANW writes the way she does to hit a certain word count. Really, think about it. If she wrote colloquially, then her word count would be much smaller, but saying things exactly as they are, as properly as she can without any sort of emotion or personality for each line is going to extend it; there’re no shortcuts. It makes the story longer, but it’s very boring.
Don’t mind me, I’m just still trying to figure out why she would choose to write the way she does.
Sparky started to stir and I told him to calm his fool ass down.
This is what Jack said about his penis.
♂ So Jack and Liam are in the shower and Jack pulls the shower head and starts aiming the nozzle for his rear and massaging things back there. Reading this… I’m trying to picture what that looks like. And I wonder if that’s safe. Is a jet stream of water penetrating your anus safe? Then I supposed that it probably was… Then I Googled “anus+shower+head” and I don’t know what I was expecting, but I did get shower heads with enema tips and I just giggled for about five minutes. I am five years old. I’m sorry.
♂ There’s got to be a better word than wiggle. I just can’t take it seriously when it’s used during sex.
♂ So far, all of the couples in this series have had the “let’s forego the condoms” conversation. And I always wonder how much more laundry will they have to do.
♂ Jack gets attacked in the alleyway on his way to his loft. The guy doesn’t hit him hard enough with the golf club so Jack is able to turn around and beat him down. He pulls out his phone and uses the flashlight feature to see who the guy is. He doesn’t know him. He texts Liam to tell him he’s going to be late and he calls the cops. Liam comes down and is all “hey, I know that guy.” It’s his ex’s best friend. Then, down comes Charlie, Jack’s dog, and he growls at the guy as he starts coming to.
So, is the ex’s BFF in love w/ Liam too? Or Is he trying to avenge the jilted arse?
“I probably will need a crane to help get me out of this chair later.”
“Nonsense,” Bevan said quietly and dropped a kiss on her forehead. “You’re more beautiful today than you were yesterday.”
This wasn’t even necessary. She didn’t say anything about not feeling pretty; she was talking about how heavy she was and how it made it difficult to move. It’s always more disturbing when women write lines like this and never have their characters called out for it.
♂ As a writer, I know I write things I want to read, so ANW is probably no different. But what good is a story that reads like a step by step instruction manual?
♂ I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve mumbled or yelled “gross”.
Not so much disgusting, though More like It’s too saccharine, too fake, and too bad and I just can’t take it. It offends me.
♂ “Feels so right. “It feels so natural.” All the time. Everything can’t feel that way. ANW needs to expand her vocabulary and concept arsenal. Too many repeats. Like, for the pin drop thing… I think she wanted to use the concept and those words and made sure to find a way to fit them in, but she forgot that she already did.
♂ There’s no rule against proposing during sex, but most people’s faculties are somewhere left of center when they’re being pounded to kingdom come. So, I feel like it’s cheating to ask or tell someone to marry you while at least one of you are in the throes.
Pun intended after the fact.
♂ Well, at least Liam echoed my thoughts. But he’s more worried about how he’s going to answer when people ask about how Jack proposed. Still, he said yes.
♂ Sort of picking up on the introspection vs dialogue thing… Often when ANW does that, it’s followed by redundancy. So she does this thing where she has a character think something and, almost immediately, she’ll have them say it to someone. She either doesn’t have faith in a reader’s ability to read between the lines or extrapolate or she herself can’t fill in the blanks.
♂ I’ve kind of ignored her grammar in light of how badly the telling of the stories have been in general, but now that I’ve gotten used to her writing, the typos and the grammar–especially the subject/verb agreements–are bugging me.
I wanted to skip past the BS so I could have more Christmas sex.
Same, Jack. Same.
♂ The end just kind of happened. Like, there was the proposal, they visited Jack’s grandfather’s true love, Ava had the baby, Christmas, New Year, then everybody’s planning for a Vegas wedding.
Well, there was the fact that Jack let the guy that attacked him off the hook. Asked that he do community service and get counseling instead of jail time. That will only work for white people.
♂ ANW had betas–plural–and they didn’t tell her. Or they told her and the original was actually worse. I can’t even imagine what this would have been without input from other people.
Let me beta.
Anyway, I decided that I will skim through book four because I can. I don’t know if I’ll be posting for that because it will probably be more of the same and I hope I’ve exhausted all that there is to complain about as far as ANW goes. We’ll see.
