Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Twinks in Bearland
SERIES: Bearland Tales #1
AUTHOR: Kendall Morgan
PUBLISHER: Tulabella Ruby Press
LENGTH: 69 Pages
BLURB:
The friends of pretty blue-eyed Dustin Garber are about to find out that he has a secret. He loves bears, big hairy gay men. None of them know it, but he’s just booked them all into the annual Gay Bear Ski week.
Craig, beautiful, black and Jewish, is initially indifferent to the fact that he is spending a week with big hairy men. He already has a hook up planned of his own, although that man turns out to have a bizarre secret.
Patrick and Ethan, two bear-hating twinks who have been secretly in love with each other for years, take much longer to come around to the idea that bears can be good guys too. Dustin isn’t so sure his friendship with them will survive the trip.
And then Dustin meets Nate, a big blond bear who is forever single but ready for something a little different. Nate’s friends, Casey and Ryland, are fighting about Ryland’s porn career. Nate’s friend Gil is busy with a Canadian couple, but together Dustin and Nate get lost on a backcountry trail. Deep in the snow away from everyone they may just find the love they’ve been seeking and the understanding they didn’t know they needed.
Twinks in Bearland is the first book in the Bearland Tales series, but each book can stand alone. This gay contemporary love story includes graphic sex and is intended for adults only.
REVIEW:
As a guy who helps run our local bear group, I’m always up for a book that is about bears. I’m not prejudiced against twinks 🙂 , so I thought this would be a great fit.
I’m going to keep it real, and tell you right up front that I thought the book was just OK. It had too many points of view in my opinion, trying to tell the story from several people’s perspective in a book that was really not even long enough to tell the story from one. There was too much going on and I would have liked a lot more detail.
Dustin is a twink, but a twink that secretly likes bears. I instantly thought of the kid in the movie Bear City. Take that storyline, dump it into a ski resort with a gay bear week and it tells you the whole plot of this book.
Dustin’s three friends, who are also twinks, don’t understand Dustin’s appreciation of bears, just like the twinkie best friend in Bear City. There is a lot of the twinks calling the bears fat, the bears saying things like the twinks being too “light” for their chairs, etc. I totally didn’t get the introduction of another twink that Dustin has been chatting with on Skype for months. Not really sure what he and his clown fetish had to do with a book about bears and twinks.
I did appreciate the humor of the two groups comparing each other and wondering about things like why anyone would pluck their eyebrows, eat gluten free, eat egg white omelets, etc., so I could see the potential here. If the book had been three times as long, maybe had a couple less characters, and given us a lot more detail it would have been a lot better.
This is the second book I’ve reviewed from this author, and again like with the other book, Spooky Ginger Love, I have to say the author writes well, but there isn’t enough. My advice would be to tighten down the characters and give us a lot more detail in the future books planned for this series, or I for one won’t be reading them.
RATING: 
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