What a Waste of a Bearded Hero

Another Kindle Unlimited book, another M/M romance, and one of two romances I have read recently in which there was a large age difference between the main characters.

From Amazon: In 48 hours, I lost everything. I came home to find my girlfriend of four years with another man. The next day a plane crash ripped my family away from me, shattering me in the process. In many ways, I died that day, too. The fun-loving man who’d lived in the fast lane and loved his career in the film industry was gone. Left was a forty-year-old shell that dwelled at the bottom of a bottle.

Only one person knew what I was going through. My sister’s stepson, who hadn’t been on the plane. Julian knew what it was like to lose everyone he loved, too. He’d stopped showing up at reunions when he was a teenager, so I didn’t know him very well. But I told him at the memorial service he could come out and visit me in LA whenever. One day he did, and I guessed it was as good a day as any to start picking up the pieces and see what was left of us.

Got that? Noah, a forty-year-old bisexual man, loses everything and is thrown into first a friendship and then struggles against and surrenders to a relationship with a much younger man, Julian, who is his nephew my marriage. Judging by other couples in the story, Cara Dee sometimes writes contemporary romances for people who are interested in major age differences and relationships that tread on, but do not technically cross, the taboo lines of appropriateness or legality.

Look, Julian is an adult. He’s 23 years old. Yes, he has known Noah for a long time, but the two aren’t blood related and have had a minimal relationship. They come together to rebuild their lives because they each need someone who understands what the other person is going through. Noah is appalled by his feelings at first, horrified. They know what they are doing might be seen as wrong by others, but their connection is too intense and they ultimately yield to it. I COULDN’T GET PAST IT, especially since some of their bedroom antics involved power dynamics in which Noah was the dominating participant. It was gross with a grossness that was gross and I only kept reading to see if Dee could find a way to make me okay with the taboo. She couldn’t and I should have stopped reading, just like I should stop wri