R Cooper, $0.99
Contemporary Romance, 2017
The Other Side of the Roses refers to the fact that, when they were kids, Sami had a big crush on his neighbor Tobias Winfield, and Toby’s mother deliberately planted thorny roses around the house so that Sami couldn’t practice his stalking and creeping skills on her son. As adults, with their mothers no longer in the way to keep the collision of pee-pee and poo-poo from happening, it looks like Sami may finally see his fantasies come true when his dream boyfriend moves back in town… just across the street from him.
No, really, Sami comes off like that creepy fellow people try to avoid talking too long to in parties because there is just something off about him. This fellow outwardly creeps after and stares intensely at Toby, and babbles non-stop in Toby’s presence to such an extent that I can only wonder whether he skins his neighbors’ pets in his secret basement. Sadly, this behavior is passed off as something cute—I may like Sami better if the author had played up this character’s creepy factor and make a celebration of it, like maybe having Sami tie Toby up to a chair and screaming that he will chop off the other man’s legs at the ankles if he didn’t put out ASAP. Instead, I find myself turning the pages and increasingly grimacing at Sami’s antics. He’s such a stereotypical surrounded-by-old-women, insecure, neurotic trope, really.
Worse, much of Sami’s babbling serves as nothing more than exposition, and because he babbles so, so much here, the entire story is a textbook example of telling, not showing, with added bonus of death by inverted commas galore. This also relates to the “comedy”, as each time the author likes to believe that Sami has delivered a punchline, Toby will laugh in an exaggerated way to what is actually a pretty limp attempt at humor.
Meanwhile, Sami is from a close-knit Muslim Persian family… that are all aware of him being a blooming homosexual from when he was a young age, and yes, it’s the nasty white woman that is the one that is tarred as homophobic because that woman didn’t want her son to play on the butt pirate ship with the creepy always-staring kid next door. Now, I’m not saying that every Muslim is homophobic, I’m just saying that the story becomes unrealistic when people practicing a not-very-gay-friendly religion are portrayed as uniformly accepting of Sami being a gay man.
Not to mention, painting “exotic” and “other” people of color as uniformly accepting of everything rainbow-flavored while claiming that white people are the bigots is such an American or European progressive thing to do. By forcing people of other races and religions into this unrealistic, one-dimensional, and uniformly similar bubble, these people are actually robbing the folks they claim to be allies of of these people’s agency to make their own decisions and form their beliefs. Instead, these people superimpose their own ideals and beliefs onto the people of color they are writing or making a movie about, turning these characters into white far-left folks only with different skin tones and religion. All this is actually quite insulting to people of color, as the clear implication is that these people of color are worthy to have these glorious open-minded Westerners as their champions so long as they think and behave like the Westerners want them to.
At any rate, there isn’t anything interesting in The Other Side of the Roses aside from perhaps the title itself. It’s talk-heavy without telling me anything interesting, the main male characters are bland and uninteresting stereotypes, and everything comes wrapped in an unrealistic portrayal of non-white people as nodding, simplistic, hive-mind enablers of progressive left values that may or may not jive well with their religious and cultural beliefs.
