Title: Torn

Author: Rick R. Reed

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: June 29, 2020

Length: 63300

Genre: Contemporary, LGBTQIA+, roommates, friends to lovers, road trip, United Kingdom, flamboyant characters, hurt/comfort, humorous

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A TALE OF TWO COVERS: Torn

A guest post by Rick R. Reed

 

Torn is based on my first-ever trip to England with my best friend, hence the main character name, Ricky Comparetto (my given name plus my mother’s maiden name). The “torn between two lovers” aspect really happened, as did many of the other events in the book, but I’ll keep quiet on what was real and what was fictionalized. TORN is, after all, a novel, not a memoir.

 

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the faces that cover artists put on books. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the best designers in the business work on my book covers. Torn is a re-release and it was originally published with this cover, by the talented Reese Dante:

 

While this is a gorgeous cover (and a gorgeous man!), I’m not sure it gives the reader a hint of what the book is about. It certainly draws the eye, but what do you get from the cover? A handsome pensive man, right? Sometimes, that’s enough to lure a reader into a romance. I adore this cover, but the new edition has this cover, by the amazing Natasha Snow:

 

 

I have to admit I like the new cover just a bit better because it reveals where most of the action in the book takes place—a vacation trip to the seaside town of Brighton, England and it also gets across the idea that the book is about memories and, ultimately, it’s about our main character looking back over his life.

 

BLURB

Ever been torn between two lovers? That’s Ricky Comparetto’s problem.

It’s 1995, and Ricky is making his very first trip across the pond with his best friend. Ricky, hungry for love and looking for it in all the wrong places, finds it in the beach city of Brighton. His new love has the curious name of Walt Whitman and is also an American, which only serves to make him sexier and more intriguing. By the time Walt and Ricky part, promises are made for a reunion in Boston.

But the course of true love never runs smooth. In Chicago Ricky almost immediately falls in love again. Tom Green is a sexy blue-collar beast with the kindest heart Ricky has ever run across.

What’s he to do? With a visit to the East Coast on the horizon and a new love blossoming in Ricky’s home of Chicago, Ricky truly is torn.

 

 

I’m going to tell you how this story ends, but not with whom. That’s a fair promise to make, isn’t it?

So…. Yes, you’ll get your happy-ever-after ending—if there truly is such a thing—you just won’t be privy to all the details. Unless you read on….

Almost twenty-five years ago, I was thirty-five years old and privileged to cross the pond to merry old England for the very first time. I was finally able to say I’d traveled internationally by the grace of my best friend, a writer of boys’ adventure stories with the improbable name of Lord Boutros BinBin (no, he was not an actual Lord; he told me once he simply had parents who were “quirky” and “creative,” also known as “free spirits”). He wrote under the much plainer moniker Beryl Kensit.

At that time, and during that trip, I was also blessed to fall head over heels in love with a gorgeous, kind, and sensitive man I met at twilight on the streets of the beachside city of Brighton . He ticked every box on my imagined list for the perfect lover—exotically handsome, spiritual, artistic, amazing in bed, and… I could actually hold a conversation with him. Our silences were okay too, comfortable. We launched into a passionate affair and promised that we’d meet again.

But the course of true love, as they say, never did run smooth. Ain’t it the truth?

 

I returned home from those two weeks with a satchel full of memories, a sexually transmitted infection, and the knowledge that I’d found true love.

But then, only a week or two after settling back into my little apartment in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago , I found myself falling head over heels in love again—this time with a salt-of-the-earth, charming, and sweet man from the South Side. He was nothing like I ever imagined I would be compatible with—our tastes, educational background, intelligence, and cultural awareness made us like creatures from two different planets—yet somehow the magic, the spark, was there.

How would I reconcile the two? Whom would I choose? Could things ever end satisfactorily when, as in Mary MacGregor’s song, you’re “Torn Between Two Lovers”?

Read on, my friend, read on… and discover how the head won out over the heart.

 

Or was it the other way around?

 

Purchase

NineStar Press | Amazon

Real Men. True Love.

Rick R. Reed is an award-winning and bestselling author of more than fifty works of published fiction. He is a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Entertainment Weekly has described his work as “heartrending and sensitive.” Lambda Literary has called him: “A writer that doesn’t disappoint…” Find him at www.rickrreedreality.blogspot.com. Rick lives in Palm Springs, CA, with his husband, Bruce, and their fierce Chihuahua/Shiba Inu mix, Kodi.

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