...Bookfanatic

What makes someone your brother?

Adam and Luc grew up together. When Luc’s mom marries Adam’s dad the two also decide to adopt each other’s child making them all legally family. This was all well and good until the boys are older and Luc realizes that his feelings for Adam are much more than brotherly or even best friends. Luc’s solution is to put distance between them first by how he treats Adam…no longer are they friends, Luc begins to treat Adam horribly pushing him away until the day that Luc goes off to college never returning to his family home…even for a visit.

When Luc’s mother calls him years later to help save their failing dance studio. Luc convinces himself that his feelings for Adam are under control but regardless of whether they are or not, his mom needs his help and even he’s not a big enough jerk to ignore a plea for help from the mother he loves.

As soon as Luc is faced with Adam he knows the truth of things…he’s not over Luc…he’ll probably never be over Luc.

I’ve often said that I enjoy a story that makes me examine my own ideals and values and this one certainly did that. While the premise of the story was more than a little intriguing to me. I found the execution of the premise was ok but there were a couple of things that kept it from being more enjoyable…

At times for me Luc was just too aggressive in his pursuit of Adam…aggressive to the point that I felt uncomfortable for Luc.

I would have liked for both men to have come to terms with their feelings for each other before becoming involved in a romantic relationship with each other. I’m not a fan of incest stories and at times that’s what this one felt like because both Adam and Luc kept thinking of each other as ‘brothers’ rather than ‘lovers’. (I’ll ramble about this more shortly)

My last issue regarding this story and it was probably the smallest of them all was the emphasis on the sexual aspect of their relationship…especially from Luc’s perspective. Don’t misunderstand I think a strong and passionate relationship is important to any relationship and from that perspective this worked, but for me it felt like there was just a bit too much emphasis being put on the physical relationship and I needed the emotional connection to feel like it was as strong as part of their connection as the sex, but for me it just didn’t quite get there.

I’m going to go back to my point about ‘brothers’ vs ‘lovers’. For me this was more of a moral or idealistic question and something that we all need to decide for ourselves. I know what my decision was at the end of it all, but in the end it’s a decision that each reader needs to make for themselves.

Neil Macfarlane was the narrator for this audio book and it appears to be his first audio book which was part of the reason I wanted to listen to this story…it’s always good to have another narrator you enjoy and while the audio sample went well enough to interest me.  I have to admit I’m still undecided about the book in its entirety. Mr. Macfarlane’s narration was good in that this story is set in England and he has the accent which really helps to maintain the story’s setting. Where things fell a bit short for me was how expressive he was or at times more accurately wasn’t. So here we are back to the sex…so, I’m going to be direct here…if I’m reading a story where two people are as hot for each other as these two supposedly are than when a sex scene happens I need the narrator to convince me that they’re genuinely passionate for each other…I realize this is a fine line that needs to be walked here because…to much expressiveness and it becomes eyeroll inducing at the least and simply laughable at the worst but here it was closer to ‘well…I guess we should have sex now’…sorry but it just didn’t convince me that this was a love affair for the ages. Still aside from this little quirk I did feel that this is a narrator with strong potential and I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for future audio releases…one story does not determine things for me with either an author or a narrator.

‘A Dance for Two’ was my first waltz with this author and the narrator and while it didn’t work out quite as well as I would have liked. It was still strong enough to get my attention and make me interested in seeing what the future brings from Colette Davison as an author and from Neil Macfarlane as a narrator.

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An audio book of ‘A Dance for Two’ was graciously provided by the author through ‘Gay Book Promotions’ in exchange for an honest review.