reviews_and_ramblings | A Keen Edge by H. Leigh Aubrey

A Keen Edge was a surprisingly romantic love story. I don’t know, but usually, debut novels by male authors, even if classified romance, tend to be too angst and “realistic”, and since usually real life has very few romance in it, so do the novels. So I have two theories: or H. Leigh Aubrey is one of the few gay men that was so lucky to find a real romance in his life, and so the novel is a true romance since the biographical connotations are not ruining it, or the author is one of the last example of romantic at heart able to write a romance without feeling guilty for being tender with his characters.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not all roses for Neil and Scott, but in a way, they are luckier than most same sex couples, and above all, they have more possibilities (and I’m speaking of financial possibilities) than most of them. It can sound meaning, above all if related to a romance, but the true is that money help a lot: try to be a gay married man who wants to divorce his wife and not losing his kids, and you will see how much money helps.

Basically the story is probably one that many men went through. Neil is 27 years old and recently divorced; from a very conservative family and always trying to do the best to appease them, he married young and tried to be the perfect husband. But he was not able to go through to the farce, and now he is divorced and living thousand of miles away his family who doesn’t want to see him. In the new town he befriends his boss’s son and colleague, the 37 years old Scott. Scott seems to be what Neil was not able to become, married to the perfect society wife with three teenager sons.

When it’s clear from the first meeting that Neil and Scott are drawn to each other, I was thinking, “Ok, this is a good “ordinary” romance, now Scott realizes he is gay and in love with Neil, and they will find a way to be together”. Well, I was “almost” right, but there was a leak in my theory: Scott is more similar to Neil of what Neil thinks. Not only Scott is gay, he is since he first had sex with a guy when he was 14 years old, and he is in a “steady” friends with benefits relationship with that same guy since then. Really, it was like a bomb fall on me: usually I don’t like cheating man, but guys, that gave a whole different reading on Scott’s character. It made him imperfectly perfect!

Maybe it helps a bit in my liking Scott the fact that Paula, the society wife, is not exactly an easy woman to like. She does all the things you can think to estrange Scott, arriving even to tell him that she doesn’t like sex with him, that he is not good at it. Well if you want to have a man hate you, that is probably the best way. And then the reader knows that it’s not true, Scott is having sex with his best friend, and then with Neil, and both of them think different. It’s clear that Paula is not the right woman for Scott, and not only since she is obviously, well, a woman.

Even if Scott is not exactly a knight in shining armour, and neither the epitome of courageous man, he is living in denial for more than 20 years!, well, I really liked him. I liked that he was not all over Neil from moment one, I liked that he tried to not hurt him or his family, but at the same time that he was unable to deny their love, for me it was not a sign of weakness, it was the proof that there was not easy choice.

Maybe the ending is a bit too much as if the author was looking through a pink glass lens, but I stated at the beginning that I think to author is a romantic at heart and so I took it as a sign that I was indeed reading a romance. If you can’t have an happily ever after, it’s not a romance.

Amazon: A Keen Edge: A Novel

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