REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: Unfortunate Son 
Series: Book One in the Son’s Series
AUTHOR: Shae Connor
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 200 pages
Blurb:
Five years ago, Evan Day lost his lover in the Afghan sand, and in the fallout, he lost his military career and his family. With help from friends, he reinvented himself as porn star Trevor Hardball, but his scars are hidden, not healed.When Riley Yeats falls into Evan’s lap in a bar, he awakens a part of Evan he’d thought was dead and gone. Evan’s fascinated by the blond and twinky Riley, even though he’s the opposite of Evan’s usual type.
Then Evan’s family reappears his life, and Evan soon learns Riley has his own family-inflicted wounds—ones that make it hard for him to be there for Evan. A disastrous confrontation between Evan and his parents leaves Evan’s mother injured and Evan overcome by anger and fear. Losing his tenuous hold on his emotional control, Evan makes one bad decision after another, but maybe his final fall will be the wake-up call Evan needs to set things right—with his parents, and with Riley.
Review:
I’ve been fan of Shae Connor’s since she started so I was very excited to see that she was doing a new series. I snapped this one up as quickly as I could.
And I want to start with saying, I absolutely love the cover of this book. There truly couldn’t have been a better model to personify Evan than Travis.
Evan is a good man who was caught up in a horrible situation and with the help of good friends, made the absolute best of it.
As Trevor Hardball, he’s made himself a name in gay porn and he’s proud of it. Then he meet’s Riley and even though he’s the complete opposite of the men he’s usually attracted to, the connection sizzles from the beginning.
I want to take a minute to mention how the author manages to showcase all the sides of being in porn, not just the good or the bad, but all the grey areas in between. I like how she lets the characters be the focus and how porn is just a job that Evan does, not who he is.
In fact, I think it’s interesting how the author keeps Trevor the porn star and Evan the former soldier as almost two different people. When he’s filming, he thinks of himself as Trevor and it’s the only way he’s identified to the reader. When he’s not filming, he’s once again Evan, to himself and us.
Riley is a man who seems to have it all, but simmering under the surface, he has his own issues to deal with that make it hard for him to be there when Evan needs him most.
I love the fact that Riley really isn’t put off by Evan’s job, but he isn’t really intrigued by it either. I think this was probably a very difficult line to walk and the author did it wonderfully.
Evan and Riley have a lot of obstacles in their way, including two sets of parents who make their lives difficult and the ghosts of Evan’s past that haunt his nightmares in the worst ways. Evan truly captured my imagination in this story. All the terrible things that happened to him and he still finds the strength to keep going and seek out some happiness. One of the things the author does so well in this story is get Evan’s emotions across. All the pain and anger he feels bubbles just below the surface and colors everything that he does, because even though he wants to be happy, he first has to figure out how to deal with the past that keeps tormenting him.
Cory and Jimmy are Evan’s two best friends. I loved this couple. They are funny and smart and very protective of Evan. I was very happy to find out that they are going to be the focus of the next book in this series, along with Riley’s friend Mikey.
The characters in this story became people for me. Evan and Riley stole my heart and at time, made me so angry with their miscommunications. I wanted to bang their heads together in frustration and scream at them to just talk to each other!
I know there are people out there who are going to have a hard time with the fact that Evan doesn’t take the easy way out of his career once he meets Riley and that’s too bad. The fact that his doesn’t makes this story that much more real. He’s not ashamed of what he does, but he does it for a reason. When he found himself on his own after losing everything, he took a job that was offered to him to make decent money doing something that he just honestly liked to do.
Anyway, I could probably find hundreds of things about this book that I liked, but telling them all would give away too much of the story and that would be a shame. It’s truly a journey you need to take for yourself as a reader to appreciate all of the wonderful things about it.
I can’t wait for book two.
Rating: 
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