Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: It’s Not You
SERIES: True-blue Book 6
AUTHOR: Becca Seymour
PUBLISHER: Rainbow Tree Publishing
LENGTH: 320 pages
RELEASE DATE: November 28, 2020
BLURB:
When a protective ex-cop helps his gorgeous tenant through his recovery, their complicated history is asking for trouble. Will the fear of the past repeating itself destroy any possibility of happiness?
Daredevil drifter Lawrence Crawford is hunting for a place to call home. After ten years of looking, he believes he’s found what he’s been searching for. With a job that pays the bills and a small group of friends he’s opening up to, he lets down his guard. Perhaps too much so. Finding himself in need of support, Lawrence is forced to accept help from the one man who’s been driving him to distraction for the past year. His landlord.
Former cop Billy Hilton made a mistake—admittedly there’ve been many over the years. The latest is when he lets Lawrence believe he isn’t interested in pursuing anything with him. It’s not even the age difference or the fact the guy lives in Billy’s studio apartment that’s the problem. Instead, it’s all him. When Billy offers to play nursemaid to Lawrence, his intentions may not be pure, but they’re honest. And that honesty blows their lives wide open when Lawrence’s past comes knocking on the door, demanding changes and threatening an upheaval neither man may ever recover from.
Book five in Becca Seymour’s stand-alone low-angst, feel-good LGBTQ series, True-blue. In this small town, there are busybodies, dogs who cause chaos, families who have the “best” of timing, and opportunities for good men to find their perfect match.
REVIEW:
Becca Seymour’s It’s Not You is the sixth installment in her True-blue series, which follows the men of the fictional small town of Kirkby as they fall in love and find their HEAs. Ms. Seymour released this book in November 2020, a year and a half after her first True-blue book, Let Me Show You. In that time, you can see a steady improvement in the quality of Ms. Seymour’s writing. It’s Not You provides the most polished, enjoyable story yet, built around the age-gap romance between 27-year-old Lawrence Crawford and his 43-year-old, ex-cop landlord Billy Hilton.
When It’s Not You opens, the Prologue shows us the morning after a hot hookup between Lawrence and Billy. The two men have very different views on the prior night’s “activities”, which then propels the plot for the bulk of the book. In the short novella, Always for You (True-blue Book 5), we get glimpses of Billy and Lawrence a few months after that hookup, in avoidance mode, exchanging lingering looks and building palpable tension. The story then jumps forward, picking up about seven months after the events of the Prologue. Lawrence and Billy are barely speaking, Lawrence doing his level best to avoid Billy, and both walking on eggshells afraid to shatter the tentative status quo between them.
Lawrence and Billy both have secrets, trauma, and other complex issues to work through. The push/pull of their obvious attraction to each other runs alongside trust-building on both sides. Ms. Seymour does a nice job of developing Lawrence and Billy’s respective characters as well as their interactions and relationship development. Her dialogue and descriptions are more fluid and authentic.
Throughout this series, some kind of conflict assails the featured relationship. Many of them didn’t feel entirely plausible. However, in It’s Not You, we see a very believable, realistic relationship conflict built on secret-keeping and lack of trust. Lawrence and Billy struggle with poor, quickly regretted decisions and miscommunications. However, there’s also an external conflict brewing, something concerning Lawrence’s past. The early parts of the book set us up for it. Once Lawrence and Billy solidify their relationship, the book then shifts focus to that external conflict. The problem I had here was the mismatch between the set-up and the conflict reveal. The set-up led me to believe something perhaps more “melodramatic” was afoot. Instead, Lawrence’s “past” turned out to be something very different than what I expected, which was disappointing. Also, I’m not convinced that the setup made sense in context.
That being said, on the whole, It’s Not You provides two endearing men in an enjoyable storyline with a very solid, sweet HEA. It’s definitely the best of the series so far and I’m interested to see what comes next.
RATING: 
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