Reviewed by Donna
TITLE: Late Bloomer
AUTHOR: Bru Baker
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 64 Pages
BLURB:
If not for his family and his Christmas tree farm, David Rochester would be a recluse. And Erik Shriver wouldn’t know a quiet moment if it smacked him in the face. But now David’s farm has brought them together. When Erik’s flurry of bad jokes and frenetic energy sets David off kilter, his family notices and begins conspiring. They push David and a very willing Erik together again and again until David stops denying his attraction. But an almost-hermit and a soon-to-be-former club boy each bring baggage into a relationship. They’ll have to take things slowly to find the middle ground between David’s taciturn silence and Eric’s boundless chatter.
REVIEW:
David enjoys working as a horticulturist for Rochester Farms, his family’s business. He happily spends twelve hours a day working outside or in the greenhouse, surrounded by the plants that he loves. The trouble is, at this time of year, the holiday season (try rereading that with a bit of a sneer, just to get his attitude right) all anyone wants is Christmas trees, poinsettias and wreaths. And to make things worse, the farm is overrun with part-time seasonal workers who have no idea what they’re doing and customers. Customers everywhere! Because as much as David loves working with plants, he seriously dislikes the majority of people and has a reputation as being…grumpy is probably a nice word to use.
Erik also has a reputation. He’s apparently slept with every gay man in the town and made a significant dent in working his way through the next town over too. He’s the biology teacher at the local high school but he also works at the nursery part time. He’s perpetually cheerful and never shuts up and makes it quite obvious that he’s interested in David.
David likes Erik right back, but he really wishes he didn’t. He’s dated a guy like that before – a partier, a flirt, a player. And that relationship left him broken and scarred. There’s no way he wants to go there again. Despite his intentions to just ignore the man, Erik manages to worm his way beneath David’s skin until David is no longer sure what he wants.
This story was nice enough but there really wasn’t any depth to it. I realize that sixty-four pages don’t allow for a whole lot of complexity, but I still expect to feel a connection between the main characters. There needs to be some intensity to their feelings or at least an obvious potential for emotional depth. Usually in these short stories I prefer it when there’s no on page sex but I think that this book may have benefitted from at least some heavy make out sessions. I think that seeing the two men together like that might have made the attraction between them more tangible because it wasn’t just an emotional connection that I felt was missing. I also didn’t feel their physical attraction to each other.
Despite the time of year the story is set in, I wouldn’t call this a Christmas story. So for all those readers, like me, who are over holiday books it’s safe to proceed with this one.
RATING: 
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