REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: Rough Draft
AUTHOR: Leo d’Entremont
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 66 Pages
Blurb:
Elliot “Ray” Douglas is an army veteran with PTSD and a closet full of secrets. Discharged and alone after an explosion on the battlefield and the implosion of his sham marriage, Ray is salvaging what’s left of his life. Attending a community college should help him adjust to civilian life and give him a sense of direction again—if Ray survives one hot teacher hell-bent on getting to know him.
Young adjunct English professor Brian Randall enjoys challenging his students and tends to get under their skins. Brian decides to push Ray not only in Composition I, but also in facing himself and dealing with his issues. While coping with the death of a squadmate and the destruction of the only life he’s known, Ray will face his greatest fear—admitting he’s gay.
This semester is Ray’s chance at making a new life for himself, and if all goes well, Brian will make sure he’s a part of it.
Review:
Ray is a soldier who’s making the transition to civilian life. It would be hard to NOT sympathize with him just for that fact alone. Throw in him coming to terms with the fact that he’s gay and he’s a character you can definitely care about.
Brian is a young professor who genuinely cares about his students and is determined to make a class that is usually just taken as an unwelcome requirement into a true learning experience. His dedication is admirable and we all would have been lucky to have a teacher like him.
There is a lot of good things about this story. An excellent premise, stellar writing and editing, characters that are compelling and likable. I loved the interactions between Ray and Brian and I was definitely cheering them on.
But I had one big problem with this story….it seems to be missing something. Like the middle of it. In a few paragraphs Ray goes from “I’m never going to come out of hiding who I really am” to “I want everyone to know the real me” and I was left there, wondering what in the hell happened!
At the point where I felt that the angst and anticipation should have been growing and pulling us along the story with it, Ray does a complete one-eighty degree turn with very little provocation or reason that I could discern. It’s like we go from the point where he first starts to admit to other people who he is to the beginning of the happily-ever-after and it kind of ruined it for me.
Everyone he tells is smiling and helpful and supportive and it’s all sunshine and roses and if you like your stories virtually angst free then this is definitely the story for you.
But I’m kind of a story snob and I wanted a lot more details about Ray’s struggle with himself and the huge changes he was making in his life. This story just seems to gloss over the pain that he would have been in, like the author just couldn’t deal with writing it and we end up in the middle of everything going perfectly. And life is rarely perfect.
I also would have liked to know more about Brian. He seems like an interesting man but we only get the barest of facts about him and that’s a shame.
I’m giving this three stars because the stuff that’s good is really good, but this had the potential to be so much better.
Rating:
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