Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Bowl Full of Cherries
AUTHOR: Raine O’Tierney
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 214 pages
BLURB:
Porker, Fatty, Tons-of-Fun: Crowley Fredericks has heard it all. He’s dropped a lot of weight since his high school days, but he’s still a big guy, and the painful words and bullying follow him. Rejected—again—because of his size, Crowley is starting to think that maybe love just isn’t meant for huskier men.
Averell Lang and his twin are so different they might as well not even be related. So when Rell’s brother brings his roommate home to snowy Susset for the holidays, Rell expects the worst—another uptight, pretentious hipster. What he discovers instead is Crowley. Nerdy, fascinating, attractive, Crowley. Rell never expected to look at a man this way, and what he sees in Crowley Fredericks is something he didn’t even know he was looking for. If both men can overcome their hang-ups, they might unwrap more than presents this holiday season.
REVIEW:
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
Hello to all three of you who are, oddly enough, choosing to spend your Christmas day reading book reviews instead of drowning in mashed potatoes and imbibing Aunt June’s Hard-ass Eggnog Extravaganza!
(I do not, in fact, have an Auntie June, or enjoy drinking eggnog, but I hear that it is a thing ‘normal’ people do at Christmas. I’m more likely to overdo the ‘irish’ in my coffee and end up standing on the coffee table, holding aloft the sacred pumpkin pie, and singing half-remembered Christmas carols. Like you do.)
As I’m writing this, it is four days till the Big Day (and heaven help me I am so far behind on my shopping that everyone is likely to be getting off-brand chocolate and a couple of halloween ghost-puppets–played off as the ghosts from The Christmas Carol–if they are lucky) and this will be the last review I have to churn out before I go into the holiday week with nothing but baking and panic buying to keep me company, so I just wanted to wish you all well this holiday season, and say it has been a pleasure interacting this last year.
(This is a good place to take a quick break to top up that eggnog/coffee. I’ll wait, don’t worry….)
Now, on to the review!
Crowley, tired of lying and probably just plain tired, came out to his family at Thanksgiving. It did not go well. Still, he wasn’t expecting to get a call as he pulled up to the airport saying that he shouldn’t bother coming home since no one was going to pick him up when he landed. His roommate, though, seeing that he was going to be all alone at Christmas ‘asks’ him to come home with him. When the other option is staying in their apartment and cleaning mysterious liquids out of the sink…yeah, Crowley decides maybe a trip to the Lang household may not be so bad.
When he arrives, and finds his roommate’s twin, Averell, is picking him up he doesn’t know what to do. Because Rel is hot. Like hot hot. And Crowley is not. But Rel is also geeky and fun…and they click. Oddly enough. But Crowley can’t see what Rel (who’s straight anyways) could possibly see in a chubby violin player with no real social skills, no matter what Rel says.
First off, this was too damn cute. It just was. I honestly didn’t know what to think when I started reading this (was afraid it was going to be nothing but one 200 page angsty pity party) but it was nothing like that. Yeah, Crowley has issues (ones that I am more than familiar with) but it doesn’t make the story sad…just makes it more real. And like I said, I have dealt a lot with all the shit Crowley is dealing with in this book, so yeah, I get it. Maybe that is why I like it so much; that connection between me and Owl (as Rel calls Crowley) was already there from the beginning. I didn’t have to fight for it like I do in some books.
Secondly…no matter how hard I try I can not think Crowley and then not have visions of Mark Sheppard dancing around in my head (this is not actually a bad thing, but gay romcom and demon lord of hell is one hell of a mashup to have going inside my mind). This is probably why I liked Rel’s nicknames for Crowley so much. Owl, or Owly, fit a lot better with this story than a (admittedly hot) demon from a tv show.
Thirdly, I liked how the whole weight issue was handled here. Not trivialized, but also not made a thing. And the way that Rel’s cousin goes about showing Owl just beautiful he can be…yeah, that was cool. Not something I would do in a million years, but cool nonetheless.
Lastly (this is not the last thing I like about this book, but more a ‘I need to go panic buy shit from the local grocery store now so I don’t have time to list everything I like about this story’ thing) the romance here was very sweet. Rel might be straight(ish) but I love how he saw Owl, saw something he wanted and could love, and didn’t have a complete and total breakdown. Owl had the ‘breakdown’ part of this book covered, so Rel was both a calming influence and someone who pushed Owl into all the fun situations he would never dare to on his own.
(Rel’s brother, and Owl’s roommate, was a bit of a pretentious dick, though. A loving one, but still a dick.)
So if you are still reading this and have not infact fallen into a turkey/ham/lamb/tofu/chinese food coma, I would say that I totally recommend you pick this one up. You know, when you have the strength to do more than just blink blankly at The Christmas Story constantly repeating on whatever channel it is that chooses to inflict that on us on a 24hr basis this time a year (if I was given the choice of one movie to banish from the collective memory of humanity, it would be that one).
Happy Holidays! (And if you need me I’ll be watching Doctor Who.)
RATING: 
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