reviews_and_ramblings | Best Overall Gay Novel (1° place): Whistling in the dark by Tamara Allen

ALSO Best Historical Novel (1° place) & Best Writing Style (2° place) & Best Characters (3° place)

I had a very good history teacher in high school; he didn't teach us history through date but through the words of people who lived in the period we needed to study. I still remember the word, but not the name, of a writer who told his World War I: it was the war that changed the way of make war; before the WWI there were knights and the war was made by men; after the WWI there were machine and the men were only numbers, bodies to slaughter. Young men went to war with dreams of justice and came back, if they came back, forever changed.

It's not said why Sutton and Jack went to war, probably for the same reason of most of them, since it was the right thing to do, but now they are back home and home seems different, a place where they don't know how to live. Sutton is from a wealthy family, and he has still chances in his life to be someone, his family sends him to college but he is kicked out after a liaison between him and a teacher is discovered. Sutton has no face to be back home, probably since he still doesn't know what to do in his life... probably Sutton is wondering why a man like him, with forbidden desires in his mind, was allowed to come back alive when so many others lost their life; Sutton doesn't think he deserves that.

In New York instead Jack knows what he wants from his life, he wants to ail on radio, but he has also to pay off a lot of money he borrowed and his store is not doing well. Plus he is still recovering from the nightmares he brought back from Europe. He has no problem with the fact that he prefers men, since he has none intention to make a family and he is more than satisfy to spend his free time, and his few money, with his friends at night... anything to delay the time in which he will be alone in bed. Wasting all he has and behaving like a idleness is only a way to prove to himself that he is not worthy of something better.

But when Jack meets Sutton in the worst moment of the man's life, he has to help him... save one now since he couldn't save more then. Truth be told, Sutton and Jack help each other, Jack giving Sutton a shelter, and Sutton playing the piano for Jack's radio tune. And at night they again help each other, Sutton finally finding a man who doesn't fear to love him, and Jack having someone beside him to hunt down his nightmare. It's an easy and tender love story, not passionate declaration of undying love, but more the meeting of two lost souls. All right, maybe there is not graphic sex, but only since all happen behind closed door, and even if we don't see anything, the sensuality is all over the book, in the way Sutton looks at Jack when he wanders for the apartment, in the way they awake in the same bed still embracing each other and searching comfort, in the sweet smile of Sutton who thinks that Jack is the best man in the world, and in the good heart of Jack who knows that he has found a treasure and cherishes him.

You can say from the first pages that this novel will not deceive you and so you will happily loose yourself in the more than 300 pages, knowing that, at the end, the romantic in you will be happy.