Title: Too Close
Author: R. Phoenix
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 202 Pages
Category: Contemporary Romance
Rating: 4 Stars
At a Glance: Author R. Phoenix offers up a heartfelt story that, in the end, gives her characters the happy beginning they both earn and deserve, and I can’t find a single thing wrong in that.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Skylar Orion’s life has been complicated ever since his mother abandoned him and his sister Evie. Making ends meet seemed impossible until Tate Chandler took them in—his knight in shining armor who promised to make life about more than just surviving. But Tate is not the man he seemed to be, and even his whispered I love yous and generous gifts do little to soothe the pain he causes. Knowing he can’t give his sister all that she deserves without Tate, Skylar stays with him, relying on bad puns and a worse sense of humor to keep up the charade.
He will do anything for his sister, even if that means acting the responsible adult and going back to his old high school to meet Dexter Weston, the hot math teacher who can make even algebra interesting. Sparks fly between the two of them, but with his dependence on Tate, Skylar isn’t free to follow his heart. He wants what is best for Evie, but can he pass up the chance to find love that heals instead of harms?
Warning: This book contains scenes of domestic violence/abuse that some may find triggering to read.
Review: Please take note of the content warning in the blurb for this book. Not only is physical abuse a front and center subject, but psychological manipulation as well. Too Close is the story of an extreme imbalance of power, the loss of agency, the exploitation of a minor, preying on the vulnerable, and to categorize it as anything as simple as a Hurt/Comfort story I feel tropifies it in a way that minimizes the gravity of Skylar Orion’s life. Sure, sometimes a story is just a story. But sometimes that story just may resemble parts and pieces of someone else’s life.
Sky did what he had to do in order to survive, and that decision leaves him, and by association, his younger sister, vulnerable to a violent coward. Skylar and Evie’s mother abandoned them when they were much too young to be on their own, so to avoid being fast-tracked into the foster care system, Sky dropped out of high school and took on the responsibility of caring for Evie, making sure she had a roof over her head, food to eat, and that she stayed in school. But the desperation resulting from a low paying job that didn’t cover the high cost of living saw him turning to the only way he knew how to make fast money. At the age of seventeen, Sky, in essence, sold himself to Tate Chandler, a man twice Sky’s age who looked like a savior but quickly became his worst nightmare. Sky’s one condition in this devil’s bargain was that he and Evie were a package deal, and from that point on, everything Sky did he did to protect his little sister. Even if it meant losing himself in the process.
R. Phoenix does a thorough job of laying out the resulting consequences of that decision, both the mental and physical, through Tate’s controlling of Skylar via intimidation and fear and with his fists. The resulting damage done to Sky by a man who claims to love him, all while battering and demeaning and stalking him, is made clear from the moment Sky is introduced and readers are impelled to watch him worry disproportionately about something that would otherwise be utterly innocuous. Now a legal adult, but trapped like a butterfly in a jar nonetheless, the contrast Sky begins to draw between what he has and what he wants is sparked when he’s called to school, as Evie’s guardian, to meet with her math teacher, Dexter Weston.
Sky and Dexter connect immediately, not in a love at first sight way, but in a way that strikes them both as recognition of someone they would like to spend time with. There’s an easy rapport between them and an undeniable chemistry that offers them more trouble than it does solutions, though, especially for Sky, whose every word and action at home is a potential landmine. This is where the secondary impact of the story is made, the first, of course, being the domestic hell Sky lives in. Where Phoenix draws the distinct juxtaposition between what Sky has and what he could have is in the sweet and goofy banter he and Dexter engage in, and the ways in which they both can’t stop thinking about each other, and in the beautiful little things they have in common, and in Sky increasingly longing for something, and now someone, he not only believes he can’t have but that he doesn’t deserve.
Too Close, in the literal sense for Sky, is about perspective. It addresses an inarguably tough subject as well as exposing the unpredictable and contradictory emotions that come along with still caring about what happens to someone who has deliberately set out to hurt you over and over and over again. This is not a story of retribution, though; Tate doesn’t get his comeuppance, nor does the author delve deeply into the recovery process of someone who’s escaped a domestic abuse situation. Sky simply gets what he wants—peace and happiness for himself and Evie—and who he wants—Dexter. And Dexter is gifted with Sky in return.
That’s where the romantic angle of this heartfelt story comes into play, and where Dexter’s kindness and patience and calm nature allows Sky to crystallize at his own pace and in his own way, ultimately allowing his story to emerge from a darker place to become something gentle and sweet. In the end, R. Phoenix gave her characters the happy beginning they both earned and deserved, and I can’t find a single thing wrong in that.
You can buy Too Close here:
[zilla_button url=”https://smarturl.it/TooClosePhoenix” style=”black” size=”large” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon/Kindle Unlimited [/zilla_button]