Pinky Swear

Title: Pinky Swear
Author: Lynn Lorenz
Publisher: Amber Allure
Genre: Contemporary M/M
Length: Novella (25K words, 113 pages)
Rating: 4.25 stars out of 5

Summary Review:  The protagonists were engaging and the plot worked for the most part, but I had a few difficulties with some elements of the story. Had it not been for a lack of communication this story would have been much shorter.
 
THE BLURB

Lane and Matt have been best friends since they were ten years old. They’ve been through everything together—childhood adventures in their New Orleans uptown neighborhood, Lane’s stuttering, Matt’s alcoholic father, high school angst, and “coming out” in college. All through the years, they’d shared secrets and, using the powerful pinky swear, vowed to keep every one of them. But neither Lane nor Matt ever told each other his biggest secret—that they were in love with each other.

For Lane, Matt was everything he wasn’t—gorgeous, sexy and outgoing. He had a different boyfriend every week, and Lane couldn’t get a date, let alone the man of his dreams. For Matt, he could never measure up to Lane, never be good enough for the man who set his heart on fire. Neither wanted to risk the deep friendship they shared to find out if the other felt more. Yet after one night of incredible drunken passion, Lane woke up to find Matt gone and a note saying he was sorry and not much more.

Four years later and half a country separated, one fateful storm, Hurricane Katrina, brings the old friends together again. But four years is a long time, and Lane’s grown up, matured, more sure of himself than ever. When Matt rushes home from the West Coast to find the friend he loved and fled, he discovers not just the man he left behind, but a man who knows what he wants—a best friend and a lover who won’t run, who’ll stay forever.

Now, it’s up to Matt to make the pinky swear…

THE REVIEW

I reviewed the first book in Lynn Lorenz’s series about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effect on the residents, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I really loved and the characters were so engaging I didn’t want the book to end. In Pinky Swear Lane and Matt were childhood friends who shared every aspect of their lives and kept each other’s secrets using the symbol of swearing with their pinkies. The story starts in 1985 when Matt found a human leg bone in the cemetary and swore Lane to secrecy, which confidence he didn’t disclose even when his parents found the bone and he was punished for taking it. Their loyalty to each other carried on throughout their teenage years and when Matt’s alcoholic father beat him up so badly he was going to run away, Lane’s parents took him into their home and cared for him until both young men left for college.

In all the time they spent together, first as teenagers, then as young men when they shared a house during college, neither Matt nor Lane told each other they were in love and the object of that love was their best friend. So there were many missteps and miscommunications until it was almost too late for them. During college Matt was the swinging man about campus whose sex life was the stuff of dreams because no gay man could resist him, while Lane who could only watch the constant stream of men waiting to give Matt what he needed, couldn’t get a date if he paid for it. Things came to a head 2 days before the end of their college years when Lane’s then boyfriend dumped him and Matt tried to cheer him up by getting them both drunk, with predictable results as they had sex together. Lane was hoping that this would be the start of a new relationship with Matt, and that they would confess their love for each other and live happily ever after, but it was not to be because when he woke up the next day Matt was gone, leaving no forwarding address. They never spoke to each other again until Hurricane Katrina struck 5 years later and Matt came back to NO on assignment for his newspaper to write a story about the impact of the hurricane on the residents.

This story, told mostly from Lane’s third person POV, was done very well as we lived through his teenage angst and unrequited love for Matt whom he idolised. Later on Matt was still bigger than life as seen through Lane’s eyes and everyone else was found wanting because they weren’t Matt. Lane’s stutter was used to great effect in the book since he had this problem whenever he was stressed or nervous. When told from Matt’s POV we see his uncertainties and frailties and some of the reasons why he thought that he was not good enough for Lane who he felt would never want him. The author used this technique quite effectively to show how people’s perceptions differ.

The story contained timelines from the time Matt and Lane were children and this helped the pacing and put the events in perspective as they happened. Like she did in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to much greater effect, the author was able to place me right smack in the middle of the hurricane and I experienced Matt’s and Lane’s anxiety about their immediate peril and their horror that the hurricane might not end well.

This book had a lot going for it and it demonstrated that a lack of communication can lead to many years of heartache. Communication problems, or what I call the Big Misunderstanding, seem to be a failsafe trope in M/M romances and I’m not sure if this is because men have a reputation for not talking to their partners, but more and more authors are using this trope. Sometimes it works but at others you wonder why someone wouldn’t just pick up the telephone or speak to the person in the bed next to them. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?

I had a few niggles in the story including Matt believing, even momentarily, that Lane had an 80 year old lover. The others I can’t go into because they would be spoilers, but if you read the book you will probably guess.

I thought that all the characters were three dimensional and I really liked Lane’s parents. His landlord and friend Sebastian was a wonderful  example of what gentlemen were like in a time long past.

I like Lynn Lorenz’s writing and she is one of my favourite authors. 70% of her books that I have reviewed are in the 5 star range so it takes a lot for me to critique something that she had written. In this case I’m critiquing the blurb for this book which I thought revealed so much about the plot and the characters that there was no mystery left about the story. As a reviewer I try not to reveal spoilers and I thought that this blurb made the case for why sometimes less is more, and authors should edit, edit, edit.

Recommended.