Title: Him
Author: Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy
Genre: New Adult / MxM
Publisher: Rennie Road Books (Self-Published)
Published: August 2nd 2015
Page Number: 360
Rating: 5/5
Summary:
They don’t play for the same team. Or do they?
Jamie Canning has never been able to figure out how he lost his closest friend. Four years ago, his tattooed, wise-cracking, rule-breaking roommate cut him off without an explanation. So what if things got a little weird on the last night of hockey camp the summer they were eighteen? It was just a little drunken foolishness. Nobody died.
Ryan Wesley’s biggest regret is coaxing his very straight friend into a bet that pushed the boundaries of their relationship. Now, with their college teams set to face off at the national championship, he’ll finally get a chance to apologize. But all it takes is one look at his longtime crush, and the ache is stronger than ever.
Jamie has waited a long time for answers, but walks away with only more questions—can one night of sex ruin a friendship? If not, how about six more weeks of it? When Wesley turns up to coach alongside Jamie for one more hot summer at camp, Jamie has a few things to discover about his old friend...and a big one to learn about himself.
REVIEW
STOP! Put down the book you're currently reading and listen to me because you guys are going to be dying to pick this book up after you've heard how incredible it was. Because trust me, HIM is my favourite book of the year.
I'm a massive New Adult fan, I love being able to connect to the characters because they're around my age group, and I love being able to relate to certain things that they're going through, so when I saw such a huge amount of praise for HIM, I decided to take the plunge and bought myself a copy.
I'd normally stray away from M/M Romance, not because I'm homophobic (I happen to be gay myself) but because I hate it when all authors can do is write stereotypical characters that only end up insulting us gay people because they obviously didn't do their research. There is nothing stereotypical about HIM though, the characters were so real, honest, so fleshed out that I felt like they were actual real people. Wes is one hundred percent gay and has known so since he was 13 years old. Being able to see how he felt really made me connect to him a lot more because I went through the same thing when I was 10; having your first crush, not being entirely sure why you're attracted to guys instead of girls. It's such a confusing time in anyone's life, but finally knowing so and having to keep it a secret is just so darn tough. It's like carrying a million hardback books on your shoulders. It's painful and thoroughly drains you, consumes your entire mind.
What I loved more than the characters themselves was the transition from their friendship to exploration to their relationship. It's not done quickly in a chapter, but it is continuously worked on and I honestly thought I was seeing a very fleshed out relationship between them both.
Every New Adult novel tends to have sex scenes in them and honestly HIM easily had some of the hottest ones, and I'm not saying that because it's 2 men on each other and I'm gay. I say it because the sex scenes were rehashed, I didn't feel like I had just read the same sex scene after each other because each scene was completely fresh, new. And the sex wasn't used just for sex, but for the development of their characters and relationship. I was enamoured by it all.
What makes this book my favourite of 2015 for me is that every single page was perfect for me. The authors didn't shy away from anything, they wrote what they thought was right and the outcome was this fantastically, sexy novel that I will continuously reread until I get a sequel too.
No comments