Reviewed by Elizabetta
TITLE: Gabriel’s City: A Tale of Fables and Fortunes
AUTHOR: Laylah Hunter
PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing
LENGTH: 280 pages
BLURB:
For spoiled young aristocrat Colin Harwood, the port city of Casmile is a buffet of easy pleasures. But when he steps into a pub brawl to help a dangerously outnumbered young man, he is drawn into the seedy underbelly of the city the young man calls home.
Gabriel is a cutpurse and a knife for hire, practically an urban legend. His vision of Casmile is touched by a strange combination of faith and madness, driven by fairytale logic and a capacity for love that he often must suppress to survive. He’s always worked alone, but when a dashing dragon who calls himself Colin saves him in a bar fight, he pulls Colin into his world.
Gabriel’s city is nothing like the refined, socialite existence that bored Colin senseless. Colin finds adventure and excitement there—and maybe even love. But with his layers of finery stripped away, nothing remains to protect him from poverty or danger—except Gabriel. So he must choose: go back to the civilized young man he once was, or fly free as Gabriel’s dragon.
REVIEW:
Well, this one is not your typical gay romance. I’d venture to say that Gabriel’s City is more of an action/adventure story with a look at how poverty and desperation reshapes one young man’s look at the world.
It took me the longest time to get a handle on the story…
At first, this appears to be a coming of age tale: a rich, pampered boy (Colin) gets in trouble with bad people over a gambling debt. He flees his comfortable home– and his debtors– for a hard knock life, hiding out in the city slums. There, Colin meets street thug, Gabriel. Knives are Gabriel’s weapon of choice and he gives Colin a personalized entry into a world of crime, grifting, theft, and murder.
Cutpurse and cutthroat. We get to see what these words really mean. In full technicolor. There is a lot of blood-letting.
And then, I’m confused… Am I supposed to like these guys? Gabriel is clearly not all there much of the time. He’s so, so dangerous when he’s not (with a capital D). Colin slowly learns about Gabriel’s slippery grasp on reality. You don’t get on his bad side, he’s a powder keg, ready to go off in an instant, knives flashing. Colin learns that his gift for storytelling soothes the savage in Gabriel. And Gabriel develops a thing for Colin. He sees hope and, maybe, a kind of salvation in him.
Colin — who becomes Drake in his new street thug reincarnation– goes along with it all. He falls trippingly into Gabriel’s life, at first frightened and leery and then seduced by Gabriel’s allure. Yeah, thieving and committing murder bothers him but it doesn’t send him running.
Not a cozy, warm and fuzzy couple, these two.
Maybe it’s a Prince and the Pauper kind of thing? But, instead of exchanging roles, Colin-now-Drake, climbs into a new skin. He sees the shallowness and futility of his previous rich-boy life and learns some hard-knock life lessons. That, in and of itself, seems like a good thing… but is this new life that Drake immerses himself in better? Is it an improvement?
What are Colin and Gabriel to each other, really, besides partners in crime? Gabriel wants nothing to do with rich-boy Colin. But has a fondness for the scrappy Drake who brings him companionship and stability (as much as that is possible). And Drake doesn’t want to reform Gabriel. He becomes an enabler.
About half-way in, an interesting dynamic develops between Gabriel and Drake.
It seems that Drake finally recognizes how poverty and abandonment can affect a bright mind. He learns to care for Gabriel when he slips beyond that narrow edge between sanity and madness. They learn to comfort each other. There is sex eventually, but it’s… odd. Gabriel, in this respect, seems strangely inexperienced and naive. Drake is much more experienced and it almost seems as if he’s taking advantage.
While I can appreciate the coming of age aspect of the story, I had a hard time empathizing with Drake and Gabriel. They are colorful and interesting characters but they’re also scary in how comfortably psychopathic they can be– a different take on Bonnie and Clyde, maybe. Gabriel’s City is a tough romance to cozy up to– it didn’t really work for me– but it is well written and has some great action/adventure scenes.
RATING: 
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