Penelope Peters, $3.99, ISBN 978-1005906498
Contemporary Romance, 2021
Penelope Peters’s Hands-On Hanukah features another gay guy that walks around acting like a moping killjoy because he can’t get over a break-up that happened four months ago.
Folks may know a David Nachem in their lives. He’s the kind of fellow that sucks all joy from a room, and when he grudgingly shows up at any gathering, like he does at a Hanukkah party at the beginning of this story, he makes sure that everyone knows that he is super unhappy to be there.
He’s overwrought and melodramatic. When he hears that the ex, Tim Mason, is MIA for a few days, he runs up the stairs to Tim’s place like he’s auditioning for the role of the Road Runner in some live action adaptation of the old cartoons.
Tim turns out to be equally overwrought and melodramatic, yelling and huffing and shouting all the time. I suppose allowances can be made, as he is injured shortly before a ballet show of a lifetime.
Conveniently enough, David is a massage therapist, so a little hands-on treatment is what Tim needs to rise to the occasion again…
Really, though, this story is exhausting to read because the two guys are so on and so over all the time. Everything is so exaggerated, with words in italics and exclamation marks flying all over the place because the story is just +9,999!!! from page one to last, and it’s not like the world is ending and everyone is going to die.
No, this is just a story of two guys that have barely any personality other than stereotypical sitcom gay wildly acting like their first world problems are going to implode and kill everybody on earth. This is why nobody likes these pampered, whiny hairless milquetoasts. They are so tedious and tiresome that I feel like slapping their faces with my credit card statements before shoving those annoying sheaves of paper down their throats.
Anyway, those people that want to read this thing best first check their personal threshold for whiny, melodramatic mountain-making-out-of-molehills twunks. How much can they take before they want to kill these two morons?
