Review: Reeling Through the Fall by Zarah Detand

Author: Zarah Detand

Publisher: Self-Published

Pages/Word Count: 115 Pages

At a Glance: Reeling Through the Fall is a nice little tale to dig into when you’re looking for a bit of angst and a sweet resolution.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Three years. It’s been three years since Sven made the mistake of falling in love with his best friend’s little brother. He’s paid the price, picked up the pieces and managed to move on, forget about Leo and all those secret touches, kisses, smiles. Well, mostly.

Leo showing up at Sven’s place of work, though? That wasn’t part of the plan.

Review: Zarah Detand’s Reeling Through the Fall is another one of those chance 1-Click purchases that just so happened to pay off, where so many don’t. What this story lacks in page count it makes up for with a bit of angst, some indisputable chemistry between its MCs, a heaping helping of misunderstanding, and a jot of healing from past mistakes made when Sven and Leo were still innocent and green in the ways of love and sexuality. None of these themes may be original in the New Adult romance genre, but Detand’s breezy storytelling and the charm of her characters elevate this novella just enough that the sense of familiarity takes a backseat to our desire to discover what’d happened three years before that led to the hostility these two guys feel toward each other now.

Just sixteen and seventeen when their secret relationship imploded, now Leo and Sven, three years later, have been thrown together again in London after Leo’s given a job in the pub where Sven bartends while putting himself through law school. To say their reunion is nothing short of venomous isn’t understating the facts in the slightest. If these two could have killed each other with verbal barbs and stabby-eyed death stares, they’d have both been sliced and diced to a bloody pulp within the first few pages of the book. But then… then there’s the attraction to each other still bubbling just under the surface of all that acrimony… which does nothing but makes them even more hostile toward each other. Gotta love that irony, right?

Just when the story gets to the point where patience for their shenanigans begins to wear thin, the author pulls the story together in the nick of time, thanks to a couple of Sven and Leo’s good friends, and it wasn’t a moment too soon either. It worked well, though, the building tension, given that these two boys are still so young and are still trying to work through what had gone wrong—so many things—when everything in their relationship fell apart back in their small town where the walls of gossip and speculation and scandal closed in and made everything all the worse. But, they are earnest in their sincerity not to allow history to repeat itself, and that was the neon sign in the story that Sven and Leo were ready for a grownup relationship.

Reeling Through the Fall is a nice little tale to dig into when you’re looking for a bit of angst and a sweet resolution, all wrapped up in a quick and satisfying read.

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