Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Best of Both Worlds
AUTHOR: N.R. Walker
PUBLISHER: BlueHeart Press
LENGTH: 114 pages
RELEASE DATE: October 9th , 2017
BLURB:
Sebastian Gilman meets a guy on a dance floor every Friday night. He knows nothing about him, not even his name, only to find one day this familiar stranger turns up on his building site and they need to work together.
Ryland Keller knows better than to get involved. Alone and half a country away from home, he revels in isolation until a handsome man in a gay bar turns his world upside down.
Sebastian wants to help Ryland recover from a horrible past, but only if Ryland can let his guard down long enough to see that he can have the best of both worlds.
REVIEW:
Drabble verb 1: to wet and befoul by draggling 2:a short work of fiction of precisely one hundred words in length.
This is the first book that I’ve ever read composed entirely of drabbles. The challenge to the writer here is to encourage brevity. When a book is composed of drabbles it gets a quality not unlike a series of flash photographs. Important events are highlighted, a story is told but little verbiage is wasted in transitions and the reader is left to his own devices to construe a deeper theme. While N.R. Walker does an admirable job of telling a sweet story and giving us charming characters here, unfortunately a bit of Webster’s first definition seeps in as well.
That said, not every author needs to spend years crafting precisely constructed prose to tell every story. Given that this is a free read on Amazon, I was more than willing to bear with the conceit here. The first few drabbles were obviously more carefully constructed than some of the middle ones and the tale did seem a bit disjointed in spots, but even so, Walker tells a more cohesive story here, (and a more enjoyable one) than many authors I’ve read who weren’t attempting to follow the constraints of this technique.
Sebastian and Ryland’s romance was one that I enjoyed and I found it well worth the time. Ryland is a Texas boy who’d fled the state after being disowned by his family and bashed by his “friends.” He meets Sebastian in the Pacific Northwest and falls for him (and Sebastian’s enlightened and accepting family). This is a tale of redemption and healing on several levels and while some of the solutions seem to come all too easy, it’s kinda nice for a change.
RATING: 
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