Reviewed by Chris
TITLE: Drumbeat
SERIES: Notes from Boston #3
AUTHOR: A.M. Leibowitz
PUBLISHER: Supposed Crimes Publishing
LENGTH: 231 pages
RELEASE DATE: September 1, 2018
BLURB:
Jamie Cosgrove is doing his best to recover from a break-up after years with an abusive boyfriend. All his usual coping strategies have failed, and he’s fallen back on things that make him feel safe: drumming, food, and his friend Trevor. The trouble is, two of those are still secrets, even from those closest to him.
Cian Toomey has it all. He has loving relationships with his partners and a fulfilling, creative career. The one thing he’s missing is someone to go home to at night. When sudden changes occur at one of his jobs, he’s faced with a choice to find something new or move in with his partners in a different city.
Well-meaning but pushy friends seem to think Cian and Jamie are the answers to each other’s prayers. They couldn’t disagree more. A series of random events thrusts them into each other’s lives, and they find they have more in common than they thought. But when all of Jamie’s carefully constructed walls crumble at once, both of them will have to depend on the support of their friends and family to strengthen their fragile bond.
REVIEW:
I haven’t had the chance to read the first book in this series, so I kinda want to state up front that some of my problems with this book probably come from that. This is one of these stories where I don’t think you need to have read the two previous books to understand the central plot, but not having the backstory for all the secondary characters might make things a bit confusing and/or tedious. I know it did for me. If you have read the first two books, I think some of the things I’m going to talk about really won’t be issues for you. For first time comers, though, it might make the book, on its own, a bit of a harder sell.
The main plot of the story is basically that both Cian and Jamie are having a bit of a rough time in their current/previous relationships and over the course of the book find in each other the happiness they have been looking for. Jamie has an abusive ex who will not fucking stop harassing him. Cian has a relationship with three other people, but due to the distance between them, it is leaving him less than happy. But they fight all attempts at their friends trying to hook them up with each other, because of a misunderstanding when they first met. It isn’t until they start to really talk that they discover the things that might just make them fit.
My biggest issue with this book might just be that “hook Cian and Jamie up” is basically the only end goal of this book. Which wouldn’t be nearly the problem it is, except Cian and Jamie barely even talk to each other up until the halfway point of the book. The front half of this book feels like more filler than actual plot. And maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had got to know all these secondary characters over the course of the series, but I didn’t, so I never really cared about what was going on in their lives. Certainly not enough to have deal with the way it dragged the pace of this story to a near standstill at times. I’ve read four other books this week, all of them with at least a hundred pages more in length, and yet this is the one that felt like it took forever to finish. There didn’t seem to be any reason, inside this book, that I should a) care about whether these two hook up, or b) have a reason to stick around long enough to see it happen.
I get that Jamie has some history he has to work thru, but by focusing almost the entire first half of the book on his attraction to Trevor, that meant that by the time Cian was fully in the picture I had no energy left to really care. There was also the problem that Jamie felt a hundred times more attracted to Trevor than he ever was to Cian. There was certainly something between him and Cian by the end, but I had to ask myself, repeatedly, while reading this book, why this story isn’t about Jamie, Trevor, and the two other people that Trevor is seeing. That is what it felt like the book was leaning towards naturally, anyways.
And I know this is like a lot of negativity for a book I ended up rating 3.5 stars, which means I actually liked it a lot more than I disliked it. It is just that a lot of the things I liked were small things. Like the fact that a lot of these characters use ASL (American Sign Language), even the ones who don’t need to. It is translated a bit to make sense for reading, but I like that it was a constant thru the whole book, and the way characters shifted from talking to ASL felt natural. Like bilingual people having every-day conversations. And while I found that I tended to lose track of who was connected to which MC, I did like the two poly relationships in this book. The way that they were just there as a matter of fact, well, it was nice. Jamie’s eating disorder was also interesting–if a bit too vague at times.
So there were certainly enough here for me to like the book. And probably enough for me to recommend it as well (though, I would say you will likely enjoy it more having read the first two book). However I do think you are going to have to be prepared for the slow pace, and the rather meandering plot, as well.
RATING: 
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