Megan Slayer Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 979-8201578428
Contemporary Romance, 2022
Matt Green and Reed Jordan are already boyfriends at the start of Megan Slayer’s Harvest Moon.
Well, they are in love, because when they are not shagging, they are texting one another about shagging.
Can’t wait to come home and fuck you sideways
Can’t wait for you to be home…@3?
See u @ 3
Matt’s family is open and supportive. I know because his sister narrates how happy he is with Reed to him, in his face, because that’s always a natural, organic way for an author to get the reader up to speed, especially if the reader somehow misunderstood the text messages and assumed that they were all about some kind of non-consensual on-the-clock sexual assault.
Anyway, it’s Thanksgiving and hence, family time.
Reed is not a people person—actually, he seems to have some kind of personal trauma about family gatherings—but he’s making an effort to show up for Matt’s sake.
However, can he withstand the ultimate sensory onslaught move from Matt? You see, the loving and understanding boyfriend is going to propose to him in front of everyone…
Oh, don’t worry, this is not some story of an asshole boyfriend passed off as true love.
What is present here, instead, is a large number of overly sugary moments that make this thing resemble a mountain of evidence that one can indeed develop type 2 diabetes from reading such stories.
This story is a tough one for me to chew on because it only offers empty calories in titanic amounts and little else.
These guys immediately bare their thoughts like they are playing shrink and patient, so there is never much conflict here. Everything is resolved by these guys dumping exposition on their individual feels on the other person, and the other person immediately understands the situation completely, so any incoming crisis is averted before it can even take root.
Also, this one has a “fan fiction about men written by a woman” feel all over it. Matt and Reed emote, talk, and behave more in a stereotypical feminine manner, and the author’s puppet strings become a little evident when these men can easily analyze the other person’s issues and feels a little too on the dot, as if these characters all share the same hive mind as the author.
In other words, Reed and Matt never come alive like ordinary blokes. They seem to share the same brain, think the same way, and all but complete one another’s sentences and thoughts in a way that appears very robotic. As a result, nothing about them and hence their romance feels real and relatable.
So yes, in the end, this one offers a lot of sugar but not much else to whet my appetite.
