Author: Michelle King
Publisher: Loose Id
Pages/Word Count: 83 Pages
At a Glance: While stronger than the first book in this series, I was left vaguely unsatisfied by this rushed story.
Reviewed By: Sadonna
Blurb: Jamie loves Morgan and he has for years. He just couldn’t tell anyone about it. Now he’s finally free, and he wants to tell everyone. Starting with Morgan. But what if Morgan doesn’t want to commit? After all, he’s been keeping Morgan his dirty secret for years.
Morgan DJs at The Pirate’s Cove on the weekends. It’s the perfect place to meet up with his lover. At least… so Jamie hopes.
Review: Jamie is a closeted gay man who is married, with two sons. Twice a year, when his wife takes his kids to visit family, he has a secret affair with the DJ of a local gay club, The Pirate’s Cove. He’s told Morgan, the DJ (and club co-owner), that is all he can offer—but now that marriage equality has come, Jamie’s decided he’s going to divorce his wife and pursue the love of his life, Captain Morgan.
I know a lot of people will have issues with the fact that Jamie has been essentially cheating on his wife for years, having this illicit affair two weeks out of every year. While I don’t agree with that type of behavior, I actually have a bigger problem with believing an adult thinks the love of his life is the guy he spends two weeks a year having sex with, but has zero contact with, ever, for the other 50 weeks of the year. Out of the gate, this is already ruffling the skeptic in me.
I can’t go into much more of the plot without being entirely spoilery, but let’s just say if evangelical religiosity and blatant homophobia is a trigger for you, you must avoid this book. There is a LOT of drama around the wife, the children, and Morgan’s true business (personal security and recovery). This all happens quite quickly in the book, without enough background. I felt like we got half the story—like maybe some chapters were missing.
There are some fairly large time jumps that didn’t contribute to making me care about Morgan and Jamie as a couple. The villains of the piece are cardboard cutouts; again, without any background information we’re left with one-dimensional characterizations that annoyed me almost more than anything else.
This is the second book I’ve read by this author, and the second in a series. While I do think it’s a stronger book than its predecessor, my overall impression is that this story was very rushed. Once again, there were a lot of opportunities to really explore what someone goes through when leaving behind one life and beginning to live authentically. That just wasn’t the case here, and it felt superficial and perfunctory. I wish the page length had been doubled so that we could really know and understand the characters and their motivations because, overall, I was just left vaguely unsatisfied.
You can buy The Pirate’s Cove here:
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