Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Brave Boy
SERIES: Perfect Boys #2
AUTHOR: K.M. Neuhold
NARRATOR: Tim Paige & Liam Dicosomo
PUBLISHER: K M Neuhold Publishing LLC
LENGTH: 5 hours and 49 minutes
RELEASE DATE: June 9th 2021
BLURB:
As long as LonelyDaddy is on the other side of the computer screen, there’s a chance he could be the man Emerson has been dreaming of.
I’ve gotten used to being alone, to disappearing inside the fictional worlds between the pages of a book and letting my lonely life fade away.
Books have never judged me for the stutter I can’t control. Books have never abandoned me. Books have never let me down. Then again, books have never hugged me or told me they love me either, so my plan is far from perfect.
The first time I lay eyes on the tall, red haired Kiernan with a beard for days and shoulders made for scratch marks, I wanted to crawl into his lap and call him Daddy. The only problem is, I can never seem to string two words together around him… heck, I’d be happy to manage to get even one word out, like maybe “yes”, preferably over and over again.
I thought making an online dating profile would be the hardest part, but it turns out getting up the courage to meet the man I’ve been messaging is even more difficult. Could LonelyDaddy be Kiernan? And if he is, is there any chance he’ll want to keep me? Can I be his brave boy?
REVIEW:
This is a sweet low-angst tale of a wealthy, dominant daddy-type who’s grown tired of the gold-digging opportunists that are all he’s encountered. When he meets and is smitten with a sweet young man with a debilitating stutter, he’s warned against him by his friends. But when he encounters that lad again on a chat site, he decides that maybe they’re perfect for each other. That is if Brave Boy really is the boy he thinks he is…
This book’s been reviewed before in print form so I’ll try to primarily be focus on the audiobook aspects. But that said, I do have to admit I did learn something new listening to this book. When the guys go to a BDSM kink-club they attend a “demonstration” of Shibari. I wasn’t familiar with the term, and now I’m curious to learn a bit more. Our boys here were really just naughty, not knotty.
For an audiobook. This has more frequent, more explicit sexual content than most of the titles I’ve listened to. I have a young straight roommate who’s open minded and is fully aware that he’s living with an older gay man. Still, I found myself turning the volume down on this a bit when he was around, just in order to preserve his modesty.
There are lengthy sections where “dirty boy” Emerson describes his sexual fantasies at length. The Emerson character also writes erotic fiction and even reads an excerpt or two. So, that “dirty” quality is on full display here. The couple even visit a sex kink club at one point, and unlike most of “what happens in Vegas,” that scene doesn’t “stay in Vegas.”
Tim Paige & Liam Dicosomo share the narration here with chapters presented from alternating points of view in the standard “he said/he said” format. I was worried, given that this book deals with someone who’s a severe stutterer that this aspect would be poorly done making this painful to listen to. But Liam Dicosomo, who mainly voices Emerson, does a credible job portraying the stutter without letting it become mawkish or overdone. Of course part of the credit for that, goes to the material itself which has Emerson engaging in a lively inner monologue without actually giving voice to most of his many, many thoughts. Tim Paige does a great job as well. His character, Kiernan, is a somewhat older, somewhat wealthier character who generally says what he feels. But he also has a LOT of internal monologue going through his head. The characters do text a lot, so there was plenty of opportunity for this to get confusing in an audio-format as to what had been said, what had been texted and what had just been contemplated. Both guys managed this amazingly well. There was little to no confusion here as that issue which I have encountered (and complained about) in other audio-books.
My big problem here is that this was book two in a series, and I haven’t been exposed to book 1. While this one is completely enjoyable on its own, it really has me curious as to the characters from book 1 that we meet here. I REALLY want to know more of their back-stories and book one is narrated by the same two guys. Now I’m torn between diving into it as an audio-book, listening to something unrelated as a sort of audio-sorbet, or getting the e-book version of book 1, and sparing the sensibilities of my straight room-mate.
RATING: 
(and 4 eggplants for sexual variety)
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