Jade Buchanan, $3.49, ISBN 978-1311462657
Contemporary Romance, 2016

Jade Buchanan’s Broken Silence isn’t going to break any new grounds. It is so by the numbers that the entire romance arc is basically mapped out from the first page.

Matthew Clark is a nurse, constantly bullied by his colleagues into covering for them on holidays, sighs and moons over Rich Mattheson a lot, and constantly experiences wild mood swings and indecisiveness.

However, he also likes to quip and says sarcastic things that tend to send everyone around him laughing like a loon, even if what he has said isn’t that funny, because he’s supposed to be a stand-in for every lonely lovelorn shut-in that a romance reader is supposed to be.

If you are already thinking “bottom”, you’re on point.

Rich is manly, gets drunk a lot, has two sequel bait friends, acts like a manly man, and yup, “closeted top” is exactly what every veteran reader of gay romances will immediately think when they encounter this guy. 

His angst is that he let another guy he had a crush on end up with some other guy because he is too manly to open the closet doors… even if this town is full of fag hags that laugh uproariously at anything and everything Matthew says and no one is exactly going to start pitching burning effigies at the lawn of queer couples. 

Despite Matthew supposedly dithering over how to even talk to Rich and Rich supposedly in the closet, these two are soon having sex because… look, we can’t all be sitting here whole day reading about whiny men gazing at their navels and giving long expositions about their feelings like they are auditioning to be guests on a daytime talk show, so let’s just get on with it, alright?

So yes, that’s the story: whining, sex, moaning, sex, moping, sex, and finally a happy ending. It’s nothing out of the ordinary that sets it apart from the zillion gay romances out there. The guys are boring stereotypes and forget that they don’t talk like actual men — they don’t even talk like humans at times. 

The whole thing is a dull and rote affair, so I’m not sure why anyone should rush to read this thing. If they want to read about spicy man-on-man sex scenes, just look up fanfiction or erotica sites out there. If they want anything else, just read anything else.