Title: The Love Interest
Author: Cale Dietrich
Narrator: Michael Crouch
Publisher: Audible Studios
Run Time: 10 hours and 29 minutes
Category: Young Adult, Suspense/Thriller
At a Glance: While initially these characters were fun, after a short while they began to feel more and more over-the-top and borderline ridiculous, but I thought Crouch did a good job with the material.
Reviewed By: Jules
Blurb: There is a secret organization that cultivates teenage spies. The agents are called Love Interests because getting close to people destined for great power means getting valuable secrets.
Caden is a Nice: the boy next door, sculpted to physical perfection. Dylan is a Bad: the brooding, dark-souled guy, and dangerously handsome. The girl they are competing for is important to the organization, and each boy will pursue her. Will she choose a Nice or the Bad?
Both Caden and Dylan are living in the outside world for the first time. They are well-trained and at the top of their games. They have to be – whoever the girl doesn’t choose will die.
What the boys don’t expect are feelings that are outside of their training. Feelings that could kill them both.
The Love Interest by Cale Dietrich is a gay YA thriller that is nonstop action from start to finish.
Review: Cale Dietrich’s The Love Interest easily gets an A+++++ for that cover. It’s so amazing; I can’t stop looking at it. Unfortunately, I can’t give the story itself those same marks. ☹ The premise is great. I love the idea of a sinister, secret organization creating teenage spies who are trained to make their intended targets fall for them. I love that Dietrich overtly pokes fun at a number of YA tropes—probably foremost, the love triangle. Here, in Dietrich’s version, the two male components of the triangle turn it right on its head and fall for each other. Genius. I completely applaud what the author set out to accomplish in his first novel. For me, though, it didn’t hold up to the promise.
The characters are fun, initially. Caden and Dylan—hereafter referred to as ‘Dyl’—are both Love Interests, created to be perfect, each in his own way. Dyl is a Bad, the classic bad boy, and we all know that girls love a bad boy. And, Caden is a Nice, the classic boy next door. They are designed—literally surgically altered—to look a certain way, and trained to behave a certain way. And, they are sent out in pairs, to increase the odds that the target will, in fact, choose one of them. Juliet is the intended. A brilliant young scientist, destined for greatness, she has been on the radar of the LIC (aforementioned sinister organization) for years. Trevor and Natalie are Juliet’s friends, and round out the main ensemble in the book. Juliet, Trevor, and Natalie are also each his/her own version of perfect.
While initially the characters were fun, after a short while they began to feel more and more over-the-top and borderline ridiculous. Juliet’s character was a particular sore spot for me. She. Was. Ridiculous. And, I don’t know if it was on purpose—there’s a chance I just missed that part of the point was this OTT campiness—but this book had some of the corniest, most cringe-worthy dialogue I’ve ever encountered. I mean, it was baaad. Sooo many of the conversations sounded nothing like conversations modern teenagers would have, and Juliet in particular had some of the most awkward and stilted moments. As the book went on, it became increasingly difficult to get past.
Again, at its core, the storyline itself was cool. Though I had to suspend a LOT of disbelief at the story’s climax and resolution, I totally appreciated the originality of the tale Dietrich was trying to tell. He just didn’t wholly sell me on the execution, and my struggle with the dialogue took away from the plot. Also, there was a part near the end, where Dyl puts out some massive internalized homophobia, that I didn’t see the necessity of. It didn’t add anything to the story in my opinion.
I’ve been remiss to point out before getting this far into the review that I listened to the audio version of the book. The narration was done by Michael Crouch, who did a fabulous narration of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, so when I saw that The Love Interest was performed by him, I jumped on it. Now, I have no way of knowing if the awkwardness of some of the dialogue was exacerbated by having listened to it rather than reading, but I thought Crouch did a good job with the material. His pacing was good. I was able to differentiate between all the voices. And, his speech pattern in general is nice and makes for easy listening. I will absolutely continue to check out more of his work. And, for that matter, I will absolutely give Cale Dietrich another shot, as well. I didn’t dislike everything about this book, it just wasn’t nearly as good as I had hoped it would be.
You can buy The Love Interest here:
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