Dan Skinner

Matt always felt fearful and doomed after listening to one of those sermons. Like there was no hope for a real life at all.

So yes, starting this book was just as I expected. Dan Skinner pulled on my emotions something terribly last month with Memorizing You, so what was I to expect from a book about two boys trapped in a living hell that masked itself as religion...as God's word? Where our sweet Matt was disciplined for the slightest indiscretion.

...But he that loveth him corrected him. show more Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell. Thomas Moore was very fond of delivering Matt's soul from hell.

“I can’t even tell you when I first started to hate the church. It seemed like I always sensed something was off about it. Something that didn’t feel right. And when I started getting beatings all the time for even the littlest things, I realized that I didn’t only hate the church, I was hating them. I was hating my folks. I figured out that my home was a prison and they were the warden and guard. That I wasn’t living life. I was serving time for the crime of being born to them.
My heart was breaking already.

But what I did not expect was the HOPE...the DISCOVERY...and the absolute NATURAL love that took hold of these two boys. There was no angst, only sheer love and hope for something more.

Caleb is an absolutely beautiful character who shows Matt a different perspective through nature...
Carefully, he plucked a wildflower and held it before his eyes. The bee still buzzed around it. “This is real magic. It’s greater than angels and all that other nonsense because it’s real. You can see it, hear it and know what it’s doing. What this bee takes from the flower, it turns into honey that we can spread on our toast, taste it and say: ‘Yum!’” He gently handed the flower to Matt so he could watch the bee up close.

Matt knew. His world had changed in a matter of hours. He knew for the first time ever that someone existed who actually cared for him. That he cared for him, too. It had been a natural, irresistible force that brought the two of them together.


Without expectation, love had found him.

My only negative really was the abrupt ending. Was I dis-satisfied with the end...no, but my Kindle showed 86% when the words "The End" appeared...sad really.

The beauty though, is that Dan has created a story where we as readers can see the what next. We can envision the hopeful future that lies ahead for these two beautiful loving "heroes". My mind likes what it sees.

*photograph by Dan Skinner
Another fabulous BR with Elsbeth (review), Christina (review), Ingela, Vilda (review) Zainab and Susan (review)" show less

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Sin. An Abomination. Teenagers Caleb and Matthew had been told by the radical fundamentalist church that dominated their families' lives that a love like theirs—between two boys—was unnatural and forbidden. That it would damn them forever. The religion controlled their families like puppets, watched their every move, made keeping a secret almost impossible. They had only one chance to be together...and it would be a daring one right under the show more noses of the very people who would condemn them...

My Review: How charming this was! How wonderful the breaking-free fantasy is for all of us who don't have Golden Boy stamped on our lives the instant we're born. (Which is to say "all of us.")

But really. "I wanted to know what it felt like to be joined to you!" Spoken by a 20-year-old in the throes of passionate virginal lovemaking with his 18-year-old lover? Hell, ANYone experiencing passionate lovemaking even NOT for the first time who can be that articulate? Please. If you can focus long enough to emit a sentence like that, someone's doing something wrong.

So there's that. And then there's the religion thing, which anyone who's ever read anything I've ever posted since I got a personal ISP account in 1993 can tell you is right up my alley. Yes, religious people are unkind to those who are different, and young religious people are very unkind to everyone like all other young people. But these pantomime villains! The creepy youth pastor wantin' to nosh on some chicken! Wee bit overstated.

So it sounds like I'm going to make this a bad 3-and-a-half star review. But that's not my purpose. Mr. Skinner sets a beautiful scene with his descriptions of the Clare farm, the over-barn apartment, the flowers and the corn and the stock tank. The horse Perseus. The fireflies and the shooting stars. Just lovely, all of it.

But the stars are all for this, an essential and a true and a beautiful expression of an eternal reality we grope blindly for then so often drop and shatter when we find:

Love does not make cowards. It creates heroes.

Yes.


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A beautifully written bittersweet love story. This short story pulled at the heartstrings and left a smile on my face. Zac's love for Rory was pure if totally one sided. Rory was that one special love that we only get one time before our innocence flees and the real world barges in. This magical story shows that love has always been around even for a lonely boy in Nowhere, Missouri in 1965.

The story is very long, maybe a tad too long, especially cause, the bittersweet ending, while with hope, it left me like robbed, I spent so much time with these two guys, that I wanted to know more about their future, and hopefully, happily ever after. So my feeling was that, if I spent a little less time with them before, and a little more time after, the balance would have been perfect.

Nevertheless the love story was really moving, emotional and with a lot of angst, but you can tell the show more author is a romantic, cause, even with all the drama, he still give a little tiny hope to happiness for these boys. The closing reminded me of some old fashioned romance, not those of the ’70s or ’80s, but more those love story of the wartime, or soon after, when lovers had very little chances at happiness, and it wasn’t unheard of that death set them apart; sometime, when the author didn’t want to kill even the little hope in the heart of the readers, they put those open endings, giving the more romantic women to decide if they want to believe there was still hope for the lovers.

Considering this author is more famous as a graphic designer than writer (even if I remember with fondness a previous novella I read by him), I found his writing style to be mature and beautiful, sometime poetic. I did wonder if the author wasn’t somehow more near to this story than simply a writer with their characters, cause he did seem really involved in the story.

Even if it broke my heart, I truly feel as recommending this book, maybe not if you are searching for a “light” reading, then, store this for another moment, but sooner or later, give it a chance.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DUXS4Z2/?tag=elimyrevandra-20 show less