Clear Water by Amy Lane

[lightreads]

Clear Water by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Basically I climbed into a psychological hole towards the end of this week and pulled this book in on top of me. For those purposes, it was great. Twenty three year old party boy with ADHD is trying to get his life together when everything goes to hell in one night, and he basically falls into the lap of a biologist studying toxic effects on frogs. There's this half-hearted afterplot about the pollution and an ex and blah blah blah, but honestly 75% of this book is just taking two guys and sticking them in a small space and watching them be ridiculously happy to have found each other, and then watching all their problems get solved. So, you know, aces for my purposes this week.

The thing about Amy Lane, though, is she's so damn committed to her kinks. She takes that whole 'older put together guy' and 'younger flighty struggling guy' thing, and then she brings all the kitten and bunny descriptions for the younger guy, with extra 'fragile' and 'slender' in case you missed the memo on the dynamic here. Which is all well and good for her, and probably for a lot of readers, but personally I like this trope in subversion, not straight-faced. So to speak.

Oh, but I do have to talk about the audiobook. And by "audiobook," let's be clear. I mean podfic. In a good way! This is the sort of production with a fair amount of unfiltered sound in the background, and a narrator who clearly has a lot of feels about this story, and who persistently says "kway" for quay. Basically it made me grin and want to pat them all and call them darlings. And I'm not talking about the characters.




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Comments

[marycontrary]

I never knew it was key! thanks

[cyphomandra]

Amy Lane is 110% committed to the emotional specialness of her characters! I liked this one, tho', although I could definitely have done without the environmental toxins plot - the characters are endearing, and I like that Fly Bait (have just had to check her name, as all my brain gave me was "lesbian scientist with atrocious name") has her own life around the edges of this story.

[ecaterin]

Awww - it does sound adorable :D

....though I am going, whoa - my podfic recording standards....are apparently high, cause you won't be getting any background noise or words I haven't double checked the pronunciation on :D

Not that I really care about that kind of thing as a listener - if someone is enjoyable to hear read, I don't care much about the production values.

But as a reader...apparently I'm a snob :D