Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Here Without You
SERIES: One Voice #2
AUTHOR: Mia Kerick
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 216 pages
BLURB:
With all of his scratched and dented heart, Nate DeMarco wants to be two places at once, but he’s been forced to make an unbearable choice. Having barely survived high school, Nate and his boyfriends, Casey Minton and Zander Zane, are ready to move forward. Casey and Zander have left home to attend Boston City College. Nate remains in New Hampshire to protect his volatile younger sister from their increasingly violent, alcoholic uncle. Nate suffers with anger, resentment, and loneliness as what he wants battles against what he feels he must do.
Separated, the young men fight to stay in contact. But they are faced with separate issues. Casey copes with residual fear from having been bullied in high school. Zander obsesses over the establishment of One Voice, the gay-straight alliance at Boston City College. And Nate fights for his sister’s survival. Meanwhile, the intensity of the boys’ relationship increases, both sexually and emotionally.
Nate’s effort to live two lives leads to tragedy, which threatens to blast their relationship apart before they can adjust to the changes in their lives. They must find their way back to a united path before it’s too late.
REVIEW:
First things first: That Cover.
Damn. I love that cover. Isn’t that a freaking awesome picture? Just bask in the glow of that lovely sight for a few moments…
*sigh*
Ok, now that we have that done, on to the real review!
US THREE’S all divided up now. Casey and Zander are off to college orientation—where they oughtta be—so that ain’t no problem. And just sayin’, them two wanted me to go with ’em. They said we could get us an apartment, instead of them livin’ in the school dorms. They said I could get myself some trainin’ at the culinary arts school right near Boston City College, where them two are goin’. Said it’d be so fuckin’ great and we could study together every single night and build our future together.
And I wanted to go with ’em so fuckin’ bad I could taste it.
But I couldn’t….
Couldn’t leave my little sister.
This book picks up about two years after the events that happened in Us Three (which I really suggest you read before you read this one). All three of the boys have graduated high school, and now they are on to bigger and better things. Well, Casey and Zander are, anyways. Nate is stuck at home with an abusive asshole uncle, because he needs to protect his kid sister till she can graduate in four years. So while Casey and Zander are down in Boston, being college boys, Nate is working two jobs, being slapped around by his uncle, and being generally shat on by life. It doesn’t help that he is starting to feel more and more isolated the longer his two partners are away at university. With lives going in seemingly opposite directions, can these three guys continue to be anything like the Us Three that they were in high school?
Oh, have I been waiting for this story to come out. I really loved these guys in the first book and I was in the not-so-silent majority who wanted their story to continue. You don’t get many m/m/m young adult relationships, and I couldn’t wait to see where these guys would go after they graduated from high school.
This story is told in the same fashion of Us Three, with the three-spit povs, each with a different method of narrating. Casey tells his story to us, Nate tells his story to his diary, and Zander ends up starting a blog for One Voice and using that to talk to his brother Dan. And this still might not be my favorite method of narrating stories, but like in the first book it does an awesome job of bring each of the three characters to life. Never once did I get confused as to who was narrating at the moment, and that’s an issue I have to deal with in paired relationships, let alone when you have three MCs wandering around the story.
Here Without You focuses more on Nate than the other three, since this is basically his story, like Us Three was Casey’s, but all three guys share the story. And since Nate was my favorite of the three, last time, I was glad to learn a little bit more about him. It was hard, though, reading about him and his life spiraling so out of control. And I never really understood how his sister could be such a, well, bitch. Like how could she not see that what she was doing was no better than what their uncle was doing to them? But I also get that she has issues–even if I kinda hate her for what she did to Nate.
But all the sad in this story was counterbalanced by the good. And we finally get some full-on sexy scenes in this book, which I am very pleased by. The three of them trying to figure out the dynamics and logistics of three-way sex was pretty fun to watch.
I do have an issues with how the characters haven’t seem to’ve grown up all that much since the last book. I know it has only been a few years, but they still talk like teens in high school. It worked well in the first book, but here they seemed a bit trapped in time, and I had a harder time believing that they were now adults (at least in the legal sense). This might be because I have different expectations on New Adult books than I do for Young Adult. I get that you wouldn’t want to break character with what they were in book one, but my initial instinct when reading college age characters, is for them to sound more grown up than their high school counterparts. But, then again, I didn’t get to uni till I was 22, so maybe I have a skewed view of what freshmen sound and act like.
Also, I never really understood Zander’s single mindedness in regards to One Voice. He was a bit obsessive about it, and I wish I had gotten a better picture as to why he felt it was so absolutely imperative to him as a person. I kinda got that he wanted to create a situation where he and his two partners would be free to show their affection for each other, but was he verging on ‘if i don’t do this then the world will fall to dust around me’ crazy for a bit there. I’m glad he had Casey to talk him back to earth, because it was starting to sound a bit nuts, and was making it hard for me to really get into the story.
Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and I am psyched to hear that there is a book three in the works. I can’t help but wonder what mess Zane is going to get into. And if the cover is any better than this one, just might end up swooning!
RATING:
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