Ricky

I've had some kind of upper respiratory situation for the past week which I think must be messing up my neurotransmitters or something because this is the third gay romance novel in a week that I have enjoyed enough to want to give four stars to, when I had never given four stars to any romance novel before. In this case, I think part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much was because of the way it complements the TV show. I don't know how I would have rated it if I hadn't seen the TV show first. It really is satisfying to see them grow both as people and as a couple. The end is kind of cheesy but it's nice.

I guess it probably doesn't hurt that before reading these books, I read a bunch of really bad Christmas themed romance novels throughout December and maybe that recalibrated my rating system lol.

But also at the same time, I find myself thinking of this moment that happened in my early twenties where I was at a rave party and I realized I authentically, genuinely liked techno. I feel like I've developed Stockholm syndrome because I've been reading these trashy gay romance novels (for years now) as a guilty pleasure as a kind of mental health thing because they often lighten my mood. Now I worry that they've rotted my brain or something lol. Maybe I need to get back to my project of reading all of Thomas Hardy's novels but I keep getting stuck at The Hand of Ethelberta lol

I really enjoyed this. kind of so much that I'm asking myself what is going on with me. before this week I had never given a romance novel more than three stars and in the last 2 days I've given three of them four stars. My best guess is that my neurotransmitters or my hormones or something are all thrown off by the flu or the cold or whatever it is that I have. this one has the added benefit of being in German. I definitely tend to enjoy things better when they are written in German. and for a while I was liking it so much that I was like what if I just like this because it's in German? but then I went to the Kindle store and downloaded samples of a bunch of other German romance novels just to test out the hypothesis and I found that I didn't really engage with the prose, so I guess I must think this book is pretty well written. I feel kind weird making that pronouncement because my German is so rusty and I'm not reading as many books in German as I was when I was in college which was many years ago. anyway I really enjoyed this book. I found the characters really engaging and all in all, the story was effective. these characters might be among the realest characters I've ever read in a romance novel. It kept making me think about how most of these books feel like they take place in the same universe as Hallmark Christmas movies. I really appreciated how familiar this world felt. It kind of feels like people that I would know or have known and I kept thinking that I wanted to read more books that reflected my world in this way. why aren't there more books about gay hipsters lol

There are a few tropey things that come up. both of the characters seem excessively clueless or insecure at times. That's probably the thing that felt like the biggest weakness. also Noel's family seems kind of unrealistic, but again it is ultimately a romance and there's a slightly cartoonish quality to it I think which makes it okay. also even though there were moments where I felt like their level of cluelessness didn't seem believable, I would say that actually for the most part the communication deficits and insecurities that are the motors of most of these books seem much better motivated and explained in this book. also so many of these books that are written by women put such an emphasis on children which is always kind of alienating to me, but it didn't bother me as much in this book. It seemed to be a decent part of the story and the child wasn't annoying. mostly the children in these books are freaking terrible. but this one actually seemed okay and frequently seemed to comport herself like a real person. which is not usually the case in these books. just thinking about some of these children I've read in books recently has me cringing, so I appreciate the restraint with which this child is drawn. and the author sketches these various family situations. and certainly some of them feel larger than life or cartoonish, but they were fortunately lacking the shrillness that I often find in American novels of this sort.

I was so happy to get through one of these books without endless speechifying. there was one moment of virtue signaling where the protagonist becomes aware of the way that a couple of characters are treated sometimes because of their ethnicity and he is a bit outraged about that. and of course, we should all be outraged about that, but it's weird to me how many of these romances have these big performative speeches. something about millennials and even younger people feel like this needs to happen. like there's some kind of psychological or spiritual cleansing that happens when they perform this kind of outrage. but fortunately this book is mostly free of that. and even the moment that I'm thinking of was pretty mild and a pretty normal thing. It felt like it flowed well with the book, as opposed to most of these books where characters just start giving these random speeches where it's like: Girl, less is more.

Anyway, I'm experimenting with leaving these rambling stream of consciousness type reviews when I read books so that I can refer back to my thoughts in the future when I have forgotten what I thought about a particular book. so I guess that's what this is.

I would definitely read another of this author's books. I love that it took place in Germany. It's kind of annoying to me that most queer literature seems to take place in the UK or America, even much of the stuff that is written by authors from other places. so I'm always excited to read something that takes place anywhere else, certainly Germany which is a place that I'm very fond of. I look forward to exploring some of this author's other works. I started actually listening to the audiobook because they had it available through my library, but there were so many words and phrases that I wasn't particularly familiar with that I ended up buying the ebook from Kindle because I was having a bit of trouble following the story. and the thing about German is that a lot of words sound like what they mean so even if you don't know a word you can usually kind of figure out what it means, but I just kept being like, wait did that mean what I think it meant lol. and I was especially somewhat confused because when you start reading a book like this, a gay Christmas romance with a cute cover, and you think it's going to be like all the other ones that are very chaste and half the book is about people not having sex with each other because they want to respect each other which is totally a way that gay people think about each other (sarcasm obvs); so I kind of didn't believe it when I was listening to the audiobook, like wait is this book actually starting with people fucking each other's brains out? spoiler alert: it is lol. and I think maybe this is part of why I enjoyed the book so much, that so much of the language was different than what is typical. there's just a lot of great German vocabulary in here that you don't come across everyday. especially in books that are translated from English. I kept thinking that when I was reading this book: this is why I've been trying to find books written in German by German people, because when you translate books from English into German, you don't get these kinds of turns of phrase.

ETA: It's a week and a half later and I've just been thinking today that one of the things I really love about this book is that the characters are actually gay. or LGBT at the very least. so much in this genre really privileges the experience of people who are in the midst of a gay Awakening or a bisexual Awakening or are living in the closet or something like that. really these kind of straight acting people who are unpolluted by actual gay culture. to be honest I find it sort of offensive after a while. so it's really nice to read a romance book that actually reflects people who are queer and involved in the queer community.

The more of these I read, the more I see this scale of the degree to which these books read as though they were written by and for women. this one definitely feels too far along that scale for it to feel like I can connect to it.