The Long Game by Rachel Reid
May. 6th, 2022 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Long Game
3/5. New M/M hocky romance, long-ish awaited (by the timelines of this industry, anyway) sequel to the rivals one, the most popular of this series.
I went in with some trepidation here because I really liked where the first book left them, stable and happy but firmly closeted and intending to stay that way in the long term. It's not a HEA you get to see much in this genre, which pushes the everyone must come out under any and all circumstances propaganda. And I knew this book would disturb that resolution, and probably by way of making one of them want to come out. I was right, but the reasons for that, and the way that arc of the story develops, are allowed to be complicated and real and painful in ways that made them work for me. This isn't a book about wah wah, I want to kiss my boyfriend on television, wah. This is a book about how secrets can be isolating, and how the cost of that isolation might fall more heavily on one person over another.
That said, *rubs temples*. You know that joke about writing mystery novels that's like when you don't know what to write, do another murder. Instant plot!? Pretty sure for this genre that's when you don't know what to write, out people against their will. Instant plot! It gets old. And it is also really clear that she didn't actually know what to do with the delicate and painful story about mental illness and loneliness and accidental inequities in relationships that she had going, so she just kind of . . . threw a lot of random external events at it instead of letting the internal work breathe, and made it about some other stuff in the end.
Content notes: Depression, and fleeting references to suicidal ideation (done in a way that I thought was real and affecting).
3/5. New M/M hocky romance, long-ish awaited (by the timelines of this industry, anyway) sequel to the rivals one, the most popular of this series.
I went in with some trepidation here because I really liked where the first book left them, stable and happy but firmly closeted and intending to stay that way in the long term. It's not a HEA you get to see much in this genre, which pushes the everyone must come out under any and all circumstances propaganda. And I knew this book would disturb that resolution, and probably by way of making one of them want to come out. I was right, but the reasons for that, and the way that arc of the story develops, are allowed to be complicated and real and painful in ways that made them work for me. This isn't a book about wah wah, I want to kiss my boyfriend on television, wah. This is a book about how secrets can be isolating, and how the cost of that isolation might fall more heavily on one person over another.
That said, *rubs temples*. You know that joke about writing mystery novels that's like when you don't know what to write, do another murder. Instant plot!? Pretty sure for this genre that's when you don't know what to write, out people against their will. Instant plot! It gets old. And it is also really clear that she didn't actually know what to do with the delicate and painful story about mental illness and loneliness and accidental inequities in relationships that she had going, so she just kind of . . . threw a lot of random external events at it instead of letting the internal work breathe, and made it about some other stuff in the end.
Content notes: Depression, and fleeting references to suicidal ideation (done in a way that I thought was real and affecting).