Honeymoon for One

Oh I loved this!!!!! It was adorable, and beautiful.

I really felt the pain and heartache that Ethan felt.

I loved how he was so brave, going on a honeymoon by himself while being hard of hearing. I thought the disability was represented really well.

And his tour guide, Clay, was so cute and patient with him. Insta friends, turned into lovers.

Decent enough book - if you like the tropes and/or way of handling things, add an extra star or two. I didn't.

So, I knew going into this book that it was a May-December romance. I'm not really a fan of them, but I thought certain other things would help balance that out. It didn't. (And, in fact, I had probably less trouble with this aspect of the romance than I did most everything else.)

This book claims to be a slow burn, but I don't think it is. In audio format, this book is only nine and a half hours long. I believe it was during hour five, Ethan and Clay kiss for the first time. (That's okay. Still a little fast for slow burn, I feel, but okay.) In the same exact scene, they are having sex for the first time. They've known each other eleven days. Even stretching it and calling it twelve. This is not slow burn to me. (And I do love slow burn.) They are confessing their love to each other after two weeks. Not two weeks of dating, but something like nine days of being burgeoning friends, two days of Cody being consumed by gay panic and, what, four-five days of them sexing each other up? Slow burn. Don't make me laugh.

I love when an older person discovers aspects to their sexuality - especially when the person realizes that they are attracted to a gender that they didn't know they were attracted to. That's Clay in this book. He's forty-four years old and, for the first time ever, attracted to a man. But...that's not accurate. Clay is repressed. When he was young - nine or ten, he had something of a crush on a man in his home town. However, his town was not queer friendly, which is like the understatement of the year. Because of things that happened, he shoved his same gender attraction down. He shoved it down so far that, until Ethan woke him up, he didn't remember feeling anything beyond friendship - much less the first stirrings of attraction - for any male. I don't like this.

Because of this, Clay also suffers from internalized homophobia. Not to mention the guilt that he's having sex with a man barely older than his kids. (Which is where my problems with May-December romances comes in.)

Finally, no matter how Ethan tries to dress it up and Clay is confused, Clay reads as straight up gay. (Pun totally intended.) Clay was married for something like twenty-four years, had a wife, and two kids, that he loves but never had sex that was as good as his and Ethan's first time. When he has to come out and actually says words to label himself, he says he's gay. That's fine, that's totally valid, but that's also all the rep I seem to find.

I don't like that he is repressed - I would prefer if he didn't even realize that gay was an option. Or, conversely, I would have loved it if he was bi and there wasn't this whole thing of lackluster sex with his ex-wife because he was with the wrong gender. (Because that's exactly what it feels like.)

Ethan tries to say that Clay might be demisexual, waving around words that Clay doesn't know or understand. And the fact that Clay totally freaked when Ethan called himself queer...yeah. As someone whose father used that word as a slur, it takes a long time to get used to it. So that was really something for me to read. There was the intent, I think, to show rep besides just gay, but it really fell through, I think.

Finally, the audio book was a trip to listen to. The narrator does a good job with Ethan as well as anyone with an Aussie accent. The rest sound so bad. I mean, the narrator went for the voices, but they just sounded horrible. Including the ones that, presumably, weren't supposed to have any distinguishable accent.

3.5 stars. I'm not usually a big fan of romances with big age differences, but this one really worked for me (probably because it wasn't a huge part of the plot). I really liked Ethan and Clay, separately and together, and Ethan's hearing loss was dealt with realistically and sensitively. Overall, a sweet and slow-burn sexy read.