Samuel Alexander, $2.99, ISBN 978-1005363628
Contemporary Romance, 2021

Samuel Alexander’s Stepping Into Love is a romance featuring an insecure bloke named Orin.

He has a good job, a fabulous apartment with a gorgeous view, and I’m sure he doesn’t look like a troll, but he’s still the most tragic person in the world because he isn’t sure whether he can truly love all the hot guys he keeps bumping into.

Then there’s Damien. I don’t know what he is like, because his scenes are almost always described in a “what he is doing” and very rarely “what he is thinking or feeling” manner.

Damien had just gotten home. His dog, Septimus, greeted him a bit too eagerly. He had been spending a lot of time at home since he decided he was happy with who he was. Single life had proved the remedy to enjoying that.

He pulled out the last two slices of leftover pizza, dabbled them with a bit of olive oil and a dash more of cheese and threw it into the oven. He burnt the cheese just a teeny bit for some extra crisp, then headed to the couch. Once he was done with his meal, he went to the bedroom to change out of his business attire.

Okay, so he has a dog. That counts as a personality, right?

He grabbed a beer from the fridge upon his return to the kitchen and threw some popcorn into the microwave. Popcorn was his go-to junk food. He ate it almost every night with a good book and beer. Sometimes he’d step it up with a glass of wine, but always a book and popcorn. He had just started a series by Samuel Alexander called I See Things in Blue and was loving it.

He’s also a fan of the author, so… yay?

Moving into a condo space that allowed pets, especially large pets, was the best thing he had ever done. He always wanted a dog and now he had one. It wasn’t long before Septimus was begging him to take him out. Damien gave in. He probably needed to do his business and walking was relaxing. He popped another bag of popcorn, then went to put on a pair of warm pants and shoes.

Hmm, he’s also not a nudist. I’m sensing a well-developed character here.

He grabbed his winter coat from by the door, leashed Septimus and was on his way. As he exited the elevator and out his apartment complex, he noticed the same people he always did. The ones not going out on Friday to live the party life and walking their dogs. He spoke to them as they took the ten-minute walk to the park. He played with Septimus for a bit before finally finding a bench and settling into a good, short book and his second bag of popcorn. He had just finished the first book and moved on to the second part when his phone buzzed.

Sorry, is it time for me to go to bed now?

That’s basically the story. Orin spends the whole story whining way too much, while Damien spends his time doing mundane, dull things. It’s like a story of a drama queen falling for a plank.

The romance is flat because, aside from Orin’s incessant insecurities, the rest of it is boring blow-by-blow of their text message exchanges or what they do in a scene, such as Damien’s exciting adventures I’ve shared above.

For me to experience the romance, I’d love to know what the characters feel, think; I want to know their anguish, yearning, dreams.

Instead, I get way too much of Orin’s personal, and frequently tedious, bouts of self doubts and insecurities and nothing about the romance. The whole thing is too lop-sided in the sense the romance is more of a self-validation on Orin’s part; poor Damien is just a personality-free happy dildo to him.

I feel that this shouldn’t be the way, at least for a story marketed as romance, because a romance story is about the people involved in the relationship, instead of just one person treating the other person as a therapist.

As the fabulous Ric Ocasek would say, it should be about emotions in motion, magical potion, and holding on to that special someone until they figure out where you’re at.

This one, though, is about a hot, financially sound man that has no issues at all meeting hot guys, only to whine incessantly about his impostor syndrome and a dozen other neurotic insecurities that are best unloaded onto a shrink, not onto me.

After all, the shrink gets paid to care. I’m not, quite the reverse; I want loving, not kvetching.