If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained. ― Neil Gaiman
August Ferrell and his high school basketball team are playing in the North Dakota Class A basketball tournament, and this one’s for all the marbles because August is a senior, so there are not more do-overs if his team doesn’t pull out a win this time around.
August has never been what you’d call a risk taker. He’s always played his cards pretty close to the chest, and there are only a couple of people in his life who know he’s gay. He’s never learned the finer art of flirting, or even how to tell if another guy’s gay without getting his behind kicked for coming on to the wrong one. Keeping his secret has conditioned him not to take chances when there’s a safer alternative, but that all begins to change the moment he meets Luca Knutson, point guard on a rival team that August’s own team needs to defeat to make it to the final round of the playoffs.
Posy Roberts’ Risking It is a lovely coming-out and coming-of-age story, in which somewhere amidst the smiles and the eye contact and the adrenaline of the competition, August discovers that taking risks is often the only way in life to win. It’s the story of two young men who are about to take the monumental step from high school to college, and is a story of the freedom simply to be. It’s the promise of a relationship that began with secret stolen kisses but will grow in the pride of living and loving out loud.
I’d love to see August and Luca, Part Two: The College Years someday. That’s how much their new beginning drew me in and made me sorry to see their story end.
Risking It is part of Dreamspinner Press’s 2013 Daily Dose: Make a Play project, so this book’s individual release date is a super top-secret-reveal-it-on-pain-of-death surprise, but if you’re interested in pre-ordering it, you can do that here:
We did it again! This is my review today at BER, LOL.
Stop it! That’s hysterical… and a little creepy. Ha! Okay, what’re you reading right now? If we’re reading the same book, I’ma be a little skeered. :-D
Not reading anything right now but Love Has No Boundaries stories so I think we’re safe! :)
Okay, we’ll just tell people we’re on a break, then, if anyone asks. ;-)
I just finished Infected: Undertow. Are you reading the series?
We’re safe :) I never read them originally so when she started publishing them I didn’t really have time to catch up. Not yet at least. That series and the Cut and Run series are the two big ones that I’ve missed out on and don’t have time to read now that I’m reviewing so much!
Amy Lane’s “Promise” series, Mary Calmes’ “Change of Heart” series. I’m sure there are others, but I can’t think of them right now.
I’m a huge fan of the Cut & Run series, but I haven’t read book 7 yet. I’m afraid. Heh. I’ve heard it’s angsty, and I haven’t been in the mood for that lately. I’d probably end up skimming the bad stuff and going straight on to finding the happy. So, I’ll wait because I’m a weenie.: D
Yeah that’s another reason I’m so nervous to read the Cut & Run books! And I’ve heard that the Infected books are pretty intense too, though I think I could deal with those.
Last fall, I made a promise to myself and my blog readers that I’d read and review all of Amy’s backlist (just over time, thankfully!). I’ve yet to read the Promise books! I’m terrible with angsty books and they’re not even that bad when I read them, but it’s the anticipation that kills me and makes me put them off. Back when I started reading m/m and didn’t know Amy, I read the second book, Making Promises, without realizing it was part of a series and I loved the book. Back then though, I reveled in the angst ;) That Carolyn Gray book was my favorite even, A Red-Tainted Silence. LOL not now!
I love Mary’s Change of Heart books though, that’s one of my favorite series. I only just got caught up on it recently, but I really like them.
The angst in the Cut & Run series up to this point had more to do with the building of the relationship–the whole, you guys know you love each other, just freaking get over yourselves thing. I know that drove some people away from the series in the first few books. I kind of wanted to smack Ty and Zane upside the head with a skillet myself. But now that they’re together, angst means an entirely different thing for me; that’s like advanced angst once a couple I’ve been waiting to be together forever gets a couple of good books’ worth of happy and then, kablooey, bad stuff. I just need to shut up and read it, though, because I don’t want to fall behind. If I do, I’ll probably never catch up.
I looked up AR-TS. That’s 500+ pages of angst? I’m not sure I could manage it. I get too emotionally caught up in my reading. You know, when your heart gets all crampy and your skin feels like it’s on too tight? No? Just me? LOL. I do seriously get intensely involved in the reading, though, to the point where sometimes the book isn’t even a pleasant experience.
Now, Amy angst is some good angst. I have no idea why I’ve never tackled her Promise series. Or Mary’s CoH, either, for that matter. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that 1.) they’re both already so many books into the series that it feels like it’d take me forever to catch up; although, it probably wouldn’t, and 2.) there are always so many new books coming our way to choose from that it never feels like there’s time to go digging into backlists.
If you like Urban Fantasy at all, then I’d definitely say give the Infected series a go. The first book was a little rough around the edges, but I still loved it to bits, and the storytelling just keeps getting better, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, Andrea Speed made me ugly-cry really, really hard, but you know, I think it takes a lot of guts for an author in this market to stay true to her story and her characters and not pander to the HEA crowd. That’s not to say that I’m not a part of that crowd, though. I’m as fond of happy endings as the next reader, but in this case, pulling out a deus ex machina in the eleventh hour would’ve just been wrong. It hurt but she had to stay true to the world she’d built. So, I don’t know… I think you’d be fine with it if UF is your thing. The humor in the series is what does it for me, along with the characters and mysteries.
You rock, Cole. Just sayin’. :-D
:D
I do that too!! I get seriously involved in books. Not just books. Remember Six Feet Under, back when it was on HBO? I was addicted, though I was in college then so I had to watch the seasons when they came out. So we’d have marathons and they always affected me so badly and everyone else would be over it and then it would be a week later and people though it was really strange for me to still be so depressed! :) I do that with books and I get to be a cranky reader. I know that people around me have heard shut up and SHHH! more times than I can count :) That’s part of the reason I have a hard time reading anything angsty, because I become so short with people for a day or two after I read the book. I’ll be like, why am I MAD? Oh yeah… But then, that’s what is so good about HEAs in angsty books, when they’re true, solid, well-deserved HEAs without lingering doubts on the horizon.
I do like UF, so I’ll make sure I make time to read them. Yeah, there are so many new releases now, and so many good ones, that take up our time. That’s why I made sure I started doing Author Backlist Reads on my blog because if I don’t I’ll never get to read some of those books!
Oh yeah, and ARTS is TOO much angst, I realize that now. It’s like, serious angst too. Like, horrible secrets of sexual abuse and like I’ll take the abuse because it’s best for someone else but I can’t tell them angst. It’s HORRIBLE! LOL.
Okay, wo-w-ow, look at our conversation?!
Oh my God! We are so normal. And I say that with almost no sarcasm at all. :-D
I’ve often joked that when I’m into a good book, the rule is that unless you’re bleeding, vomiting, or on fire, Mommy is off limits. Extreme, no? Ha! But I’ve been known to be interrupted at a really good part, and then it’s like Linda Blair-headspinning-pea soup horking, “What?! What?! Whaaaat could you possibly need right at this moment?! … Oh, right, food.” Sadly, that’s kind of not a joke. LOL!
I think all of us reviewers are like that to one extreme or another. If we weren’t passionate about books, we certainly wouldn’t do what we do, and certainly not for free. It’s a labor of love.
Brita Addams did a blog post last week asking if romantic fiction needed to have loads of conflict to be good, and it spun-off a conversation about the difference between conflict and angst. I don’t think they can be categorized as the same thing, though. I think they’re more a cause & effect thing: conflict causes angst. I was reading an article once discussing how much it’s necessary to torture a character, and there are definitely writers out there who write with that in mind: here’s my character, here’s the plot, now let’s see how evilly I can thwart him and torture him at every turn until he achieves that ultimate reward. J.K. Rowling made an empire out of that formula, so it works, but, having said that, I think there’s a point where too much conflict can feel manufactured just for the sake of achieving the angst. Was AR-TS sort of like that? Just curious because I have to admit I’m sort of intrigued by it now. :-P
We’re just a couple of chatty things, aren’t we? ^_^