Reviewed by Vicki
TITLE: A Clean Break
SERIES: Gay Amish Romance #2
AUTHOR: Keira Andrews
PUBLISHER: KA Books
LENGTH: 245 pages
BLURB:
They’ve escaped to the outside world—but can they really be free?
David and Isaac have found happiness in each other’s arms. In faraway San Francisco, Isaac’s brother Aaron helps them explore confusing “English” life and move beyond the looming shadow of their Amish roots. For the first time, David and Isaac can be openly gay, yet they struggle to reconcile their sexuality with their faith. At least they don’t have to hide their relationship, which should make everything easier. Right?
But while Isaac thrives at school and makes new friends, David wrestles to come to terms with the reality of the outside world. Haunted by guilt at leaving his mother and sisters behind in Zebulon, he’s overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of the city as he works to get his carpentry business off the ground.
While David and Isaac finally sleep side by side each night, fear and insecurity could drive them miles apart.
This is the second chapter in a trilogy of forbidden Amish love. This book features explicit sex and is not an inspirational/Christian novel.
REVIEW:
This review will contain spoilers for book one, if you haven’t read it I’ll probably give something away…. But if you haven’t read it, you should!!
A Clean Break, book two in the series started with A Forbidden Rumspringa, follows the continuing story of David and Isaac, two gay Amish men. The first book is set all in Zebulon, the Amish settlement in Minnesota they men lived in. The community started out in a different location, but a group moved to Zebulon to start an even more restrictive community after some thing bad happened with a few teenagers. Both David and Isaac were old enough when the move was made to remember some of the freedom they had before. So when the two boys leave Zebulon, they think they know what they’ll be getting in to when they get to San Francisco, the home of Isaac’s brother Aaron. Aaron left the community some years before, and is now married with a whole new life. At the end of the first book Isaac contacts Aaron for help leaving the community, and Aaron buys both Isaac and David bus tickets to California. A Clean Break picks up with them on the bus, headed to San Francisco.
David and Isaac get to San Francisco and try to settle in to a new life. However, it is not as easy as they think it will be, literally everything is new to them. They have no money, no identification, no birth certificates, no education, and only Aaron and his wife Jen to help them. It is a very slow process of acclimation. Everything is different and overwhelming. The sounds of the city, traffic, houses, food, clothing, shopping, people, TV, music, it is all so new to both men, even though they have seen the occasional movie, it is much harder than they expect. Aaron and Jen are excited to have them there and do help, but aren’t always as sympathetic or careful with them as they could be. Isaac settles in much better than David, wanting to attend school to get his GED and possibly go to college. David wants to continue the furniture business he had in Minnesota. He’s a bit shocked that Isaac doesn’t want to work with him.
They are surprised to see how accepting people are to them being gay, but annoyed to be constantly questioned about being Amish. They spend a fair amount of time defending their former way of life. David in particular seems saddened as they forget to pray, and seems to miss the community quite a bit. Isaac is younger and embraces their new life readily, but David not so much. They meet Clark, Jen’s best friend and a proud gay man, and are shocked by his behavior and appearance. They go to a couple of gay bars and can’t get over the fact that men can touch and dance together! Isaac makes friends at school, and David does eventually get a small space to build furniture.
This book is all from David’s perspective, and he is not a happy man. He’s scared about pretty much everything. Losing Isaac, although he does a fair job of pushing him away. He misses his family, and has nightmares about his mother and sisters. He begins down a very dark and destructive path, keeping all of his fears to himself. I can certainly understand his fear and anxiety, but he has people around him that could help if he’d only ask. I was also surprised that Isaac was as clueless as he was to David’s obvious stress. It was very hard for me to see, he was such a strong, sure, character in the first book, and he comes across as whiny and wimpy in this one. I expected him to be the more worldly of the two men, and be more confident than he was. I’m not sure I like the drastic change to his personality.
So I see drama in books in two ways, internal and external. This book is all about David’s internal struggle to accept his new life. There was very little external drama. Unlike the first book that had lots of external drama caused by the potential for being caught, the community, the accident David’s mother is in, getting caught by one of Isaac’s friends, breaking up at one point, things like that. This book is all David being mopy and scared. He did get lost at one point, and I was hoping something dramatic might happen, but he found a bar and started drinking…. For me it was too much in David’s head. I got really tired of him very fast. His personality has changed from the first book, and not in a good way. It started off good, then bogged down in the middle for a long time, finally at the end getting interesting with some external family drama. I LOVED the first book and had high hopes with this one, but it just wasn’t as good. I still liked David and Isaac, and I liked the addition of Aaron and Jen. Jen’s family was great, the plot was basically good, and the ending left us hanging, which was liked. However, I think more could have happened, I wish we had seen Isaac’s perspective part of the time, and it had been less about David and his anxiety. The sex between them was fantastic, even as they are growing apart. They are still able to come together physically in a beautiful way.
I liked this one, but I didn’t love it, I’m sad to say. I am looking forward to the next one, going by how this one ended, it has the potential to be quite dramatic!
RATING: 
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