Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Rock N Soul
AUTHOR: Lauren Sattersby
PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing
LENGTH: 434 pages
RELEASE DATE: January 16, 2016
BLURB:
I’m Tyler Lindsey, and until recently, I had an okay apartment, an okay girlfriend, and an okay job as a bellboy at a respectable Boston hotel. Then rock star Chris Raiden died right before I brought his room service—stiffing me on the tip, by the way—and my life went to hell. My fifteen minutes of fame was more like five seconds, and my girlfriend left me in disgust.
But even worse—Chris is haunting me. Not the room where he died, like a normal ghost. No, somehow he’s stuck to me and is insisting on taking care of a bunch of unfinished business in California. So now I have to traipse across the country with the world’s most narcissistic ghost.
But . . . I keep having these weird thoughts. Thoughts about how much I like the way he makes me laugh. Thoughts where I kind of want to kiss the emo-narcissist, even though he’s a ghost and an asshole and I can’t touch him anyway. And even if I could, what will happen when he finishes his business and nothing’s keeping him here anymore?
REVIEW:
“I would have loved you for the rest of my life.”
Working in a hotel, you are bound to find a lot of interesting things while cleaning up a guest’s room. Spare change, lost shorts, used…well, used you know what and let’s just leave it at that. What you don’t expect is to pick up is a ghostly hitchhiker. Especially the ghostly hitchhiker of a rock star you found dead in the room months earlier. (Although, if you were going to pick up a phantom stalker, it is probably gonna be the one you found dying on the hotel carpet, so be careful what corpse you walk in on, you don’t want to be stuck with a boring one!)
But despite not expecting it, Tyler Lindsey is now stuck with the ghost of the famous (junkie) rock star Chris Raiden. Heaven save him. Chis is annoying and persistent and too damn incorporeal to punch into silence (or to change the damn channels on Tyler’s tv). He is also, even more annoyingly, growing on Tyler. Slowly. Like a fungus, or over-dramatized soap operas about singing rodeo stars (or something).
Now to get rid of Chris, Tyler will have to cross the country to help his ghostly bestie to finish up a few last bits of unfinished business. And if he could do it all before he falls deeply and irrevocably in love with a man who he can never have in the most basic of ways…that’d be just great. Perfect. Awesome even.
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?” Chris asked, his eyes wide and ridiculously innocent.
“You know what, you crotch-nugget. The smiling. The grinning. The general aura of sexy rock star. It’s unfair and I have to go out in public now.” I crossed my arms.
Chris raised an eyebrow. “Did you just call me a crotch-nugget?”
“Fuck you,” I said again.
He laughed. “You keep me on my toes. That counts for something.”
What an amazing blend of humor, angst, and romance.
Despite the fact that Chris should have been just about everything I hate in a character he was not. He was sarcastic and a bit self absorbed and a bit of an ass. Strangely enough, that is why I liked him. He probably would have made an awful human being (at least at the beginning) but he sure does make one hell of a ghost.
And Tyler–he who should probably just admit he is fan and let the fanboy be his guide–is such a nice mix of snark and caring. If anyone can ever sympathize with a life that seemed to have gone off the rails for no good reason, it’d be me. Tyler doesn’t hate his job, but no one (or very very few people) make it a life’s ambition to be a bell-boy. For one, the tips can be kinda awful; for another, weird people tend to hit on you at random intervals. Yet when Chris pops into his life (literally) he starts to see what he is missing. Granted, some of what he is now missing is a full night’s sleep without a ghost yelling at him to get the Supernatural back up and running on the internet stream, but there are other things. Like fun. And someone in his life who is not a full on crazy bitch.
I like to think that if I ever was a ghost I would be like Chris, and if I was ever to run into a ghost I would be like Tyler (granted that said ghost was not also at that moment trying to drown me in a bathtub or rip my heart out thru my chest).
One of the great things about this book was the fact that these two guys (or one ghost and one guy) synced so well together. There were times when I almost had to restrain myself from flipping to the last few pages to see what was going to happen in the end. I needed to know that these two got something out of all this angst and pining. But I restrained myself (with much much difficulty) because working my way up to the end of their story was worth the wait.
And the few tears. Just like two. I wasn’t at all completely lost over that goodbye. Not at all. That’d be silly.
There isn’t a whole lot to this story plot wise but the characters, man the characters are just awesome. All of them. And I loved that these guys were both bi–and how few fucks they really gave about it. It was just who they were. The romance between them is what is important. And it is a romance even if it took a while for them to realize.
This definitely scores all the marks from me. I had a blast reading it, and even though it is like 400+ pages the time practically flew by. It was damn hard to put down as well. Can’t recommend it enough. So much fun.
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