Review: Work for It by Talia Hibbert

Title: Work for It

Author: Talia Hibbert

Publisher: Nixon House

Length: 283 Pages

Category: Contemporary

At a Glance: Hibbert’s writing is, at times, so lyrical that the beauty of it not only blooms in the imagination but it does things to the heart too. The author’s skill at weaving a tender love story from the broken threads of her characters’ pasts left me hoping Work for It won’t be her last LGBTQ romance novel.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Between men like us, trust doesn’t come easy.

In this village, I’m an outcast: Griffin Everett, the scowling giant who prefers plants to people. Then I meet Keynes, a stranger from the city who’s everything I’m not: sharp-tongued, sophisticated, beautiful. Free. For a few precious moments in a dark alleyway, he’s also mine, hot and sweet under the stars… until he crushes me like dirt beneath his designer boot.

When the prettiest man I’ve ever hated shows up at my job the next day, I’m not sure if I want to strangle him or drag him into bed. Actually—I think I want both. But Keynes isn’t here for the likes of me: he makes that painfully clear. With everyone else at work, he’s all gorgeous, glittering charm—but when I get too close, he turns vicious.

And yet, I can’t stay away. Because there’s something about this ice king that sets me on fire, a secret vulnerability that makes my chest ache. I’ll do whatever it takes to sneak past his walls and see the real man again.

The last thing I expect is for that man to ruin me.

Review: Talia Hibbert’s entrance into the world of LGBTQ romantic fiction is a lovely and aptly titled novel. Not only does Hibbert make her characters work for their HEA but as a result, the reader works right along with them, wondering, hoping, and, ultimately, celebrating that they make something out of the challenges they come up against as the narrative unfolds.

Writing a character who isn’t immediately loveable, or even likeable, is somewhat of a risk in the romance genre, the fine line between irredeemable and sympathetic resting in the author’s skill to make that character interesting enough for the reader to be patient and to make us want to delve into what makes them tick. Hibbert does that here with Olu. Olumide Olusegun-Keynes is a character who inspires empathy and compassion while at the same time coming off as distant, arrogant, and prickly. There are, however, underlying circumstances which the author lays out with no small amount of skill that engender empathy for all that he is grappling with when he meets a gentle giant of a man named Griffin Everett. And, as successful characterizations go, I loved Olu by story’s end.

The village of Fernley is the only place Griff has ever known as home. Quiet, measured, and built like a mountain, he is ignored and outright avoided by most of the townspeople because of who his mother was as well as because people assume his size and demeanor equate to a lack of intelligence. That could not be further from the truth. What Griff suffers from is a lack of self-confidence, and the loneliness he experiences as an outsider is palpable. He is the character I fell in love with from the moment he appeared on page, and he remains beautiful throughout the story. When he finds the courage to approach the gorgeous new stranger in town, thanks to a nudge from his best friend Bex, that initial encounter is not the stuff of love, or even like, at first sight. Olu’s walls are impenetrable and his contradictions not immediately identifiable, but his cruelty towards Griff is unmistakable, and Olu, unbeknownst to him at the time, throws a verbal strike that hits Griff in a vulnerable spot.

There is an enemies-to-lovers arc to this slow-burn romance. The forced proximity trope lends a hand as well, as the man Griff knows only as Keynes shows up at the farm where Griff is the operations manager. They are each composed of both soft and hard edges, and the friction is intense from the start, but their attraction and chemistry become undeniable as Hibbert unravels her characters individually in order to intertwine and then put them back together again. There is a sense of camaraderie that begins to build between them, mostly against their will, even as Keynes fights through the fog of his depression and anxiety, which is handled with understanding and compassion by the author. Olu is very much shaped by his past, which he projects in his belief that he should “do unto others before others have a chance to do unto him.” When Olu finally offers Griff his first name, it is treated by Griff like the gift it is, and from there Olu continually gifts little parts of himself to Griffin, even as his inner voice warns him not to get close, and, in turn, Griff does the same for Olu.

Hibbert’s writing is, at times, so lyrical that the beauty of it not only blooms in the imagination but it does things to the heart too. There is a natural element of wonder that wends its way through the narrative, not only in the way Olu comes to embrace his time spent with Griff on the farm, and how he both accepts and rejects his growing affection for the man he’d once thought unattractive, but in the more literal sense through their ventures into the woods. As readers expect of the genre, love is rarely simple, and it’s not without missteps along the way that the characters must work through their own issues, individually, before they can work on becoming a couple. This stands true for Olu and Griff, and the author’s skill at weaving a tender love story from the broken threads of her characters’ pasts left me hoping Work for It won’t be her last LGBTQ romance novel.

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