I never heard of Sally Malcolm before but wow she can spin a beautiful story. Pre-revolutionary war America is one of my favorite historical time. That Rebel is set at that time is a bonus for me. Great main characters that I am looking forward to spending more time with. ( )

This is a MM set right before then after the American Revolutionary War with the politics associated with Royalists/Torys and then those fighting to see America a self-governing nation.
The main characters here are just meeting and beginning their friendship and it's a very sweet one. However, it ends with tragedy. No deaths here, just the couple ripped apart by politics and fear as the Revolutionary War kicks off. The main series sees them reunited with all the angst that comes with that. I like that Malcolm released this so that you're not just thrown into the series with them hating each other over a shared past we otherwise wouldn't know about.

Malcolm is going to become one of my favourite writers in MM, I think. Her book [b:The Last Kiss|51107671|The Last Kiss|Sally Malcolm|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1581279273l/51107671._SY75_.jpg|75902984] was great and when I finished it, I was disappointed to see it was her only foray into the genre. I'm very excited to get into this series. ( )

What mattered to me most, in this precursor tale to what I expect will be a very interesting and exciting series, was that the men who fell in love with each other weren't just...okay with it. Right before the Revolutionary War in a provincial backwater Rhode Island town? Yeah, right, I was prepared to think.

Instead I was treated to a genuine coming out. Nate Tanner, Harvard educated Boston sophisticate, was exiled to this little burg to keep him from the fleshpots of a sinful city (Boston! sinful! *snort*). Apparently his father, the exiler, didn't know the whole of it or the exile would've been a lot more severe. Nate is all his father isn't: a nascent revolutionary, a free-thinker where gawd is concerned, and an avid shirt-lifter. He reads novels, and Richard Barnfield's The Affectionate Sheppard and Rousseau and Plato and...thinks about them. Ponders what he's read. I think he's my ancestor.

Sam Hutchinson is a bottom. He believes what he's told; he doesn't question, does internalize the guilt and nastiness of his preacher father's revolting religion, feels he's Bad and Wrong and Must Be Punished. For all that, he's powerfully horny, and that speaks louder than gawd's blatherings when the near occasion of sin is seducing you with words and ideas and the promise of loosening that horrible knotted rope around your mind.

It's the first of a romantic-novel series. There was no mystery that the two were going to get their freak on. It was in an adorably eighteenth-century-virgin way, and it wasn't yee-haw-the-organs-go-mad. I still do not recommend the read to the squeamishly heterosexual. But it's 99¢ so if the idea of two men learning to love each other fully clothed and then learning to pleasure each other doesn't make your gorge rise, spend the buck. ( )