REVIEWED by VALERIE

TITLE:  The Lost Boy

AUTHOR:  Anna Martin

PUBLISHER:  Self Published

LENGTH:  264 pages

RELEASE DATE:  January 19, 2020

BLURB:

Five years after his band Ares shot to success, Ben Easton is struggling. He’s holed up in a mansion in Los Angeles while he fights depression and a dark drug addiction that threatens to destroy everything. In a final attempt to save Ben’s life, his best friend Tone does something desperate—he calls Ben’s ex-boyfriend Stan and begs him to help.

Stan Novikov is living in New York and thriving in his career as a fashion journalist. He hasn’t been back to London since he and Ben broke up, but that seems like the right place to go—along with Tone—to try and shock Ben out of his unhealthy lifestyle.

The band have to finish their album before Christmas but without Ben, work has stalled. Ben has to decide whether he’s going to stay with Ares and keep making music, or find another path for his future. One that might just include Stan.

REVIEW:

I have been eagerly anticipating the release of The Lost Boy because of how much I enjoyed its predecessor, The Impossible Boy, with Stan’s vulnerable, gender-fluid character, and Ben’s strong, supportive one. But then I read the blurb and was shocked to see the words, “Ben’s EX-boyfriend Stan”!  Say it isn’t so, Ms. Martin! I love this couple; I want them together.

Whereas The Impossible Boy focuses on Stan’s anorexia, this book picks up five years in the future and is all about Ben’s struggle with drug addiction, his interaction with the band, and Stan’s role in rescuing him. It’s an interesting concept – to flip-flop the entire dynamic between the main characters – and author Anna Martin succeeds in demonstrating the give and take between two people at the worst of times, not once, but twice.

Ben is so pathetic it’s disturbing. He is nearly unrecognizable from the man he was in the first book where he was so kind, caring, loving and gentle while supporting Stan and keeping him alive. Here he’s no longer strong; he’s the weak one and doesn’t feel like the same character. Being in the band and having Stan leave him have not been healthy for him:

“The past five years had been a whirlwind, and the wind had stripped away all the elements of himself that Ben like best. He imagined it like a tornado, peeling away his compassion and his sense of humor and his sense of charity. His politics were gone, his passion, his drive, his motivation. And what was left was a guy who liked to divorce himself from reality by taking shitloads of drugs because that was easier than facing the truth.”

By juxtaposing character traits that are diametrically opposed in the two books, Martin illustrates how circumstances can thoroughly alter one’s character. While it bothered me how much Ben had changed, after finishing the book and stepping away for a while, I began to appreciate how well Martin crafted the story.

As the book progresses, so does Ben and Stan’s relationship, from non-existent to the fairy tale ending they deserve. I like how slowly their intimacy builds. They don’t wake up one day and suddenly tear each other’s clothes off. There is no Big Talk about how they should proceed. It just organically develops at a healthy pace into the romantic and sexual relationships they once had. Although I miss the original Ben, and there aren’t a lot of happy times in this book, overall it’s a success with well-developed, complex main characters and a posse of secondary characters including the always loveable Tone.

Ultimately, this is about two men destined to be together after weathering the terrible storms dealt out over a two book arc. The end is fantastic, with lots of loving moments and plentiful sexy times to boot. I recommend The Lost Boy to those who couldn’t get enough of Stan and Ben the first time around, especially if, like me, you love a non-binary character, a rock star, and a great HEA.

RATING:

BUY LINK:

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