Title: Milo
Series: Finding Home: Book Two
Author: Lily Morton
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: Novel
Category: Contemporary, Age Gap
At a Glance: Lily Morton delivers Milo and Niall’s story with her usual style and gift for tapping into the heart of what it means to fall in love.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Once upon a time a brave knight rescued a young man. Unfortunately, he then spent the next few years bossing the young man around and treating him like a child.
Milo has been burying himself at Chi an Mor, hiding from the wreckage of his once promising career and running from a bad relationship that destroyed what little confidence he had. Niall, his big brother’s best friend, has been there for him that entire time. An arrogant and funny man, Niall couldn’t be any more different from the shy and occasionally stuttering Milo, which has never stopped Milo from crushing wildly on the man who saved him.
However, just as Milo makes the decision to move on from his hopeless crush, he and Niall are thrown into close contact, and for the first time ever Niall seems to be returning his interest. But it can never work. How can it when Milo always needs rescuing?
Content warning: There are descriptions of domestic abuse in this book.
Review: Lily Morton’s books are the very definition of category romance, with a flair for the comedic and a tendency to hit their peak with a surgical precision—at a moment critical to the life and longevity of the relationship, when her characters are at their most vulnerable and her readers are most invested in seeing those characters confront the final obstacle that challenges their ability to solidify the happily ever after. She does so again in Milo, book two in the Finding Home series.
Where Morton’s other novels have kicked things off with a nod towards the humorous, she delivers a very different beginning to this story in tackling the subject of domestic abuse. In Milo, the emotional quotient skews darker and readers are lured in not by the presence of levity but by the utter absence of it, by an element of verbal and emotional cruelty and by Milo’s fear and the anguish of being made to feel less-than by his abuser. We aren’t there to laugh with Milo, we are there to empathize with him and to breathe a sigh of relief when Niall Fawcett storms in to rescue Milo and bring him back to Chi an Mor, to the place where Milo will find friendship, renew his spirit, and discover that he is more than what he has ever believed of himself. To the place where he will have to convince Niall that he neither wants nor needs a knight in shining armor.
Niall has a habit of protecting Milo, one that goes back many years, so the one challenge he faces is to understand he’s not there to clip Milo’s wings but is there to help him learn to fly again, so part of Milo’s rehabilitation is quite literally in Niall’s hands, in Niall’s knowledge that he is there to stand beside Milo and support him, just as he always has, rather than to stand in front of Milo and fight his battles for him. It becomes imperative that Niall’s instinct to take control and direct things, as well as what he’s discovering is a possessive streak, doesn’t include his owning Milo. Niall must gain an up-close and personal understanding of what it meant for Milo to have been in a controlling relationship so he, Niall, doesn’t push Milo away. Niall also must give weight to the fact that he’s becoming emotionally invested in someone for the first time, is devoted to that person’s wellbeing and is dedicated to seeing him happy and fulfilled, and that the sexual component to a relationship with Milo comes with allowing Milo to explore and grow and gain confidence in himself. Even if it means that Niall is only an experiment and a springboard for Milo to move on to someone else who can make him happy, and even if it comes at the expense of Niall’s own heart.
The definition of home in the romance genre has always revolved around the person more than the bricks-and-mortar place, and this series embraces that concept with a heartful of sentiment. Milo Ramsay’s story takes that idea one step further, however, in the foundation of his characterization and the building upon the cracks and chinks in the mortar of the things that make him beautiful but which he sees as his weaknesses, the things he believes make him unworthy and unlovable, which includes a speech impediment that he’s worked so hard to overcome but which undermines him at moments when it’s most critical for him to express himself. The challenge in building a credible relationship in this novel comes with the reality that Morton needed to begin restoring Milo’s belief in himself and his worth as an individual before he can commit himself to someone like Niall, a man who is a force unto himself, whose past includes a precedent of copious and random sexual encounters which Niall embraces and for which he feels no need to apologize—which happens to include a longstanding and ongoing friends-with-benefits relationship with Milo’s older brother, Gideon.
Both Niall and Milo have pasts they must reconcile with their present, baggage they must unpack and examine, and Gideon just so happens to be a part of that baggage for each of them. I wasn’t a fan of Gideon’s, not only because of his past treatment of Milo but also thanks to his disrespect and dismissal of both Niall’s and Milo’s feelings for each other; although, I will admit he did make strides to win me over, and he did serve his purpose in Milo and Niall’s relationship. If nothing else, he was the impetus for Milo offering up a heartfelt and, perhaps more notably, a fluid and unimpeded expression of his feelings for Niall that convinced Gideon of the depth and reality of those feelings.
In a genre where the familiar themes and tropes are the bedrock of the loyalty and passion its faithful readers feel for it, it’s often difficult to find qualities that make a story special or unique, which is where an author’s gift for characterization becomes critical to the ability and desire to invest in a contemporary romance. Lily Morton has never once failed me in that regard and, in fact, in Milo and Niall my expectations were exceeded. Where this story could have skated along on the empathy mined from Milo’s abuse, for the sake of a few plucks at the heartstrings, instead it delves into the deeper characteristics of its leading men, how they will incorporate their pasts into a functional union and to integrate their needs and their personalities into a workable partnership. And, how exiting and then overcoming the aftermath of an abusive relationship isn’t a simple matter of removing oneself physically from that environment but hinges on the daily struggle for Milo, afterwards, to exit his relationship with Thomas emotionally and psychologically, and to reshape his thought processes and to learn how to contradict the inner voice that whispers derogatory words meant to silence his strengths. Milo must learn to embrace his anger and frustration and to express it rather than bury it, and he must learn to have confidence in who he is, now, not in who he thought he was supposed to be before he found—and founded—a life he loves with everything he is.
Milo and Niall make this novel everything beautiful, and it’s to their credit that, even in their familiarity, all the underlying elements of the series shine through: the warmth and comfort of a place and the people who are chosen family; the courage, strength, and optimism that finding a home in and with someone offers; the humor that can be found even among the seriousness of one’s day-to-day challenges; and the understanding that helping someone learn to soar again is worth the risk of watching them flying away, even at the expense of one’s own heart, if only because it was an enduring and unconditional love that gave them back their wings.
Lily Morton delivers all of this with her usual style and gift for tapping into the heart of what it means to fall in love.
You can buy Milo here:
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