Review: Empty Nests by Ada Maria Soto

Title: Empty Nests (Nested Hearts: Book One)

Author: Ada Maria Soto

Pages/Word Count: 214 Pages

At a Glance: Empty Nests fell a little flat for me.

Reviewed By: Carrie

Blurb: Neither James nor Gabe has ever had a real relationship. They might make a connection if they can get past their differences—and their fears.

At age fourteen, James Maron decided to prove he wasn’t gay despite vast evidence to the contrary. Now at thirty-two, he’s getting ready to send his son to college and wondering what he’s supposed to do next. Outside his son, his life consists of an IT job he hates and watching telenovelas with the women in his apartment building.

Gabriel Juarez is the CFO of a technology giant. He has looks, charm, fantastic wealth, a workaholic personality, and a string of boyfriends who only stick around because he’s too busy to tell them to leave.

A bad laptop/projector interface causes James and Gabe’s paths to cross. Friends, family, and coworkers jump to match Gabe with a nice guy, and James with anyone. But are they too different? Everyone will have to tread very carefully to keep things from ending before they start.

Review: Empty Nests is the story of Gabe, the CFO of one of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, and James, an underemployed IT department manager at UC Berkeley. They meet when Gabe is doing a business presentation there and his laptop won’t talk to the projection screen.

Both in their mid-thirties, their lives could not be more different. I liked these men, and I liked the supporting characters, especially James’ seventeen-year-old son. I thought the premise for the book was promising, and it was, but I found James to be a little too good to be true—I guess that’s the cynic in me. James has a baby at fifteen, finishes high school and gets a job at a University, raises a great kid completely on his own, with no help, who is now going to Stanford and has never even been kissed, held, or hugged.

Gabe is a great guy – he’s a totally believable character. He has worked hard to be the man he is, and knows that it could all disappear tomorrow. Gabe is funny, he’s endearing, and he wants James. The only problem is that once you really started to feel them getting closer, one or both would back off and the hoped-for chemistry died.

Ada Maria Soto takes a long time to develop her characters in this book, and it’s not complete. It seems that just as James is starting to act more real, and Gabe is starting to make more mistakes, the book just ends… I hate that. I hate whoever the genius marketing person is that said if your books are too long, just split them up and you’ll get twice the revenues from making people buy part one and then part two. You are practically mid-paragraph in this book when you turn the page and it’s just done, no winding down, no simple resolutions, no plot setup for part two or anything, just…done.

I really hope that when part two comes out a lot of the problems will be resolved. I have to say Empty Nests is a book I probably would have liked if I could have read it all at the same time.