The Apothecary's Garden

I was truly moved by this book and it may be my favorite read so far this year, despite strong competition. It has a fairy-tale feel, with a simple romance arc, yet it's also very, very deep in Hilary's point of view, and he's just so purely and completely in love with Tom. I cried a lot listening to this, because my heart was breaking along with Hilary's.

I'm American, so Midsomer Murders has not been a fixture in my life, but I watched some episodes on Netflix a few years ago. I grew up in the 80s/90s and I remember when every non-hetero character in fiction died or otherwise came to a tragic end. So, knowing the first episodes aired in the 90s, I saw a lot of the plot twists that Tom complains about coming, when I watched it. I was glad to encounter a character who was just as irritated as I was with those plots, but perhaps Tom found them more disturbing than I did, since he did not grow up with only sad gay stories. It was very clever to use Tom and Hilary's reactions to the show as a way to show their generation gap. Hilary has never really questioned that Midsomer Murders is like this, and he's still amazed that legal same-sex marriage exists (so am I).

Although I don't much like age difference as a trope, this isn't my first time reading a romance with an extreme age gap. So I wasn't hesitant to read it. I was glad to find that it does have explicit sex scenes, and they're just as emotional and sweet as everything else in the story. There is also a lot of cuddling, which I always enjoy in books.

Overall, it's a very sensitive and real story, despite the dreamy, Midsomer-Murders-ish setting of a small English village. As a sidenote, I felt that Tom's parents probably knew about their relationship all along, given what he said about not ever having had to come out to them, and their Christmas gift to Hilary. But I don't think Hilary was ready to admit that to himself.