Lift Your Voice by T.A. Chase

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Lift Your Voice is maybe a too optimistic novella, very much about good feelings and pink glasses perspective, but it’s also a nice and comfortable story that warms your heart.

It’s about two men, with different, tragic experiences in their past, but both of them managed to make a new life, and now they are ready to love. Brandon is a former soldier who had his leg amputated after he was involved in a bomb explosion in Iraq, and with the loss of his leg he lost also his plans for his future. Brandon has never thought twice on what he was doing after he retired from the Army, he was vaguely planning of finding Mr. Right and setting down somewhere with a little house and a small garden. But now he is well far away from retiring age and he has to decide what to do. Mr. Right is not yet in his future, or so he thinks.

Donald is the nephew of Pastor Fred, the man who is courting Brandon’s single mother; Donald was kicked out of home when he was only 16 years old because is uber-conservative family couldn’t accept him being gay. Despite his uncle being a Pastor, he was the one who welcomed Donald, and now he has a nice life, a teaching position in the local high-school, and a career as songwriter who is giving him a lot of satisfaction. On a personal level I think that Donald was scared by his feelings when he was really young, and the dramatic consequences didn’t help, and so he is like “interrupted”, he has never had a love relationship and he is a totally virgin, barely kissed one time.

When Brandon and Donald met, the consequent love story is almost a must, and not only because they are apparently the only gay guys around of the same age and free. Brandon has not mood, or strength, for rushed actions, and Donald needs the slow pace Brandon is setting. Donald’s good willing, his very Christian attitude (real Christian attitude, love thy neighbour and all) will help him to accept Brandon for who he is, and sincerely it helps that, despite the disability, Brandon is still a very handsome man, well-mannered and good at heart.

As I said, Lift Your Voice is not an overly dramatic story, despite the issues it deal with, and the chance to slip on the angst was always there and maybe tempting, but the author decided to maintain it more on a romantic than dramatic level.

http://www.amberquill.com/AmberAllure/LiftYourVoice.html

Amazon Kindle: Lift Your Voice
Publisher: Amber Quill Press, LLC (August 19, 2010)

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