Reviewed by Chris

TITLE:  Blank Spaces

SERIES:  Toronto Connections #1

AUTHOR:  Cass Lennox

PUBLISHER:  Riptide Publishing

LENGTH:  330 pages

RELEASE DATE:  November 14, 2016

BLURB:  

Absence is as crucial as presence.

The decision to stop dating has made Vaughn Hargrave’s life infinitely simpler: he has friends, an excellent wardrobe, and a job in the industry he loves. That’s all he really needs, especially since sex isn’t his forte anyway and no one else seems interested in a purely romantic connection. But when a piece is stolen from his art gallery and insurance investigator Jonah Sondern shows up, Vaughn finds himself struggling with that decision.

Jonah wants his men like his coffee: hot, intense, and daily. But Vaughn seems to be the one gay guy in Toronto who doesn’t do hookups, which is all Jonah can offer. No way can Jonah give Vaughn what he really wants, not when Jonah barely understands what love is.

When another painting goes missing, tension ramps up both on and off the clock. Vaughn and Jonah find themselves grappling not just with stolen art, but with their own differences. Because a guy who wants nothing but romance and a guy who wants nothing but sex will never work—right? Not unless they find a way to fill in the spaces between them.

REVIEW:  

A good friend of mine has been raving about this book for about a month now, and having now read it I can clearly see why. I don’t think it would be much of a shock to anyone reading this review when it comes out, but the last week has sucked. Like, a lot. To the point where I couldn’t even do much more than stare at a wall and fight the urge to scream. I couldn’t even look at my kindle. As the deadline for this review crept closer and closer I was scared that I wouldn’t even have the energy to read this book, let alone create coherent thoughts about it. But in the middle of the night, determined to at least give it a shot, I opened up my kindle, pulled up the book, and hoped that something would happen to make me be able to lose myself, for even so much as an hour.

Six hours later…I was back in reality, but it wasn’t quite as dark or quite as lonely.

This is not a normal review. Mostly because I don’t feel much like a normal person at the moment. I’m scrambling my way back up a cliff and I just don’t have it in me. So, forgive me this. It is probably a bit of a mess.

This story of Vaughn and Jonah starts with the theft of a…art thing. I’m sorry, I have no clue what it is called. Collage? Sculpture? It sounded really weird looking, to be honest. But then I don’t really get modern art on the whole. Let’s just say that a piece of artwork goes missing, and Vaughn–lowly man on the art gallery ladder–is the one to find it missing. Because it is not the first piece of art to go missing in the gallery where Vaughn works, the insurance people are rightly suspicious. They send their guys to check it out…and that’s where Jonah comes into the picture. Jonah and his supervisor are not buying the whole invisible person stole the artwork and left without a trace routine. They are determined to get to the bottom of the whole issue. Though if Jonah could stop focusing so much on the bottom of Vaughn, it would probably go a bit faster.

I’m not entirely sure what kept me so damn glued to my kindle for six hours while I read this book through from first page to last. There was no one thing. The writing was fresh and inviting. The characters were fascinating and flawed. The story was extremely well paced and kept me needing to flip page after page but never left me feeling all twisted up inside. Which, after the week I’ve had, a bit of a godsend.

Whether it was a combination of all those things, or some indefinable spark some authors have to catch me and never let me go, this book was damn great.

And, on top of all that, I adore how the asexual angle was handled in this book. I really love how the whole “what is asexuality” conversations took place. They felt extremely organic to the scenes they were in, and avoided the dreaded (at least from me) monologues that read as if lifted directly from Wikipedia.

The author was not afraid to the characters be who they were. Did not try and squeeze them into comfortable ol’ boxes even though it might have been easier on the palate of some readers. Especially in the case of Jonah. Jonah doesn’t need to reform who he is any more than Vaughn does. Yes Jonah likes sex. Yes Jonah wants sex. Yes Jonah needs sex. So…Jonah has sex. With a lot of fucking people. Just not Vaughn. Because it’s not what Vaughn wants. Monogamy is great, but it is not the be all and end all of the universe. I loved that this book went there. I love that this book showed that love can exist without sex, and that sex is not only good when confined to monogamous relationships.

There is so much heart in this book, so much *waves hands around in nonsense motions* soul, I guess. It works in a way that grabs you and then keeps laying on the layers as you go along that by the time you get to the end this fucking awesome thing is just sitting there and you are going…how the fuck did that happen?

I just really loved it, ok? It worked and I love it and I think if you give it a chance you might love it too.

RATING:  

BUY LINKS:

Riptide

Amazon