Making Promises by Amy Lane

Making Promises by Amy Lane

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Amazingly treacley small town gay romance – he’s a cop, he’s a dancer (not like that). Hit some buttons of mine, missed others, details uninteresting to anyone who isn’t me.

But this book did make me think about the value of romance as a genre. This is a story about two people coming together while one loses his adored mother to slow, wasting disease. And it’s about their friends’s struggle to keep a business alive, and a soldier come home but not the same, and making the best of the baby you didn’t want to have. It’s about *gestures* all the shit that just happens. And because this is a romance, it doesn’t have to mean anything, and we don’t have to, like, have a drum circle about the unbearable lightness of human existence or whatever. It just is. The shit that happens. The way people die and how money is short and sometimes there’s no condom, but you do your best anyway, and at least the company is good. “contemporary fiction” or whatever we’re calling it these days can never reach me like that, because it’s usually trying too damn hard to have a big fucking epiphany. This book was mostly trying to get a couple of guys laid, and somehow it managed to get so much vital stuff of life into every frame.

So okay. I’ll chalk one up for romance. Sometimes, it’s just about the shit that happens to you. And as a person to whom shit happens on a startlingly frequent basis, I appreciate that we don’t have to talk about what it all means.




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