Reviewed by Stephen K
TITLE: Breaking Free
SERIES: South River University #3
AUTHOR: Isabel Lucero
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 210 Pages
RELEASE DATE: July 15th 2021
BLURB:
At a party on a rival college campus, I drunkenly stumble into a bathroom just as a tall, muscular man steps out of the shower…naked.
Instead of fleeing, I stay put and end up having the hottest bathroom hookup with someone whose name I don’t know. Because I’m still in the closet, I don’t talk about what happened that night, glad that it was with a guy who doesn’t live in the same town. But come Monday morning, the naked man from the bathroom strolls into the locker room and locks eyes with me.
Dominic is new to campus and threatening my spot on the team, which makes me hate him. It’s too bad I loved everything he said and did to me the night we met, but I can’t let him get to me with his cocky smirks and filthy words. I have to focus on keeping my position and making sure nobody finds out about us.
He’s arrogant where I’m modest. I’m docile where he’s domineering. We’re complete opposites, so it could never work, but being with him makes me want to break free from the chains that have kept me in the closet, because he’s also the firm hand to my wavering confidence and I’m the moth drawn to his flame.
REVIEW:
A closeted college football player meets and falls for a transfer student from another school. The transfer has stolen not only his affections, but his position on the field. Unlike so many “He said/He Said” romances, this one appears to switch back and forth between POVs every five chapters. I can only say “appears to” based on the Table of Contents indicating that. Unfortunately, the two main character’s points of view sounded so similar as to be indistinguishable. I was continually a bit confused as to just who was narrating the tale until some specific clue came along. Nothing pulls one out of a story as suddenly as realizing that you’re thinking of the scene from the wrong character’s point of view.
In this tale the supporting characters seem pretty well developed (as one would expect with the third installment in a series) but this novel is billed as “a complete stand-alone”. This is the first in the series that I’ve been exposed to, and I kept having the nagging feeling that some of the earlier novels had been about the supporting characters. The problem with that was that it often felt as if the supporting characters were more interesting that this book’s main characters.
One of this tale’s main characters, Dominic, the self confident transfer student, had family problems but the problems felt more like interruptions than organic elements of the plot. Also, other than thinking that he’s a football player of Latinx heritage, I couldn’t describe him to a police artist to save my life. While I was reading this book I also started reading another involving hockey players. Although I’m only two chapters in, in that one, I feel that I know more about the hockey players than I learned about the football-playing main characters here in 30-some chapters.
There was also a credibility issue surrounding one of the major plot points… The other main character, Trevor was deeply closeted. Yet we’re given no compelling reason he should be. Many of his fellow football players were either openly gay or Bi. I had trouble believing that there was any reason he’d be afraid to come out.
Overall, this book starts great, kinda lags in the middle, and then picks up toward the end. The opening scenes in this novel had a lot of promise. But thereafter it sort of felt a bit flat. While it was an enjoyable enough read, it did feel a bit like the author was just going through the motions a bit.
For an author with as many books to her credit as this, the tale felt a bit like the latest product of a “cookie cutter” style. To begin with, neither character has much more than a three line back-story. Second, for a book about football players, there were almost no details about football. About 60 % of the way through I started thinking about how few words I would have had to change to make this a book about basketball or hockey players. (Not Many.) I actually attended a Big Ten school in Michigan and was a tutor for the athletic department. The amount of mid season free time these “potential National Champion” college football players had was patently unbelievable. And have you ever heard of a potential National Champion college football team playing against a school with Prep in their name? Even a Michigan team flying to a game in Pennsylvania set off my incredulity alarms.
In a similar vein, for a novel set in Michigan there were NO Michigan details. And for a novel involving college students, there were almost no college details. At about the 65% point, after the two main characters stop their bickering, the whole coming out process and their coming together actually made this more interesting again. Dominic’s sub-plot involving his mother also worked better toward the end but we really didn’t get the level of detail we really needed to care much. I’m guessing that part of the problem there was that most of that back-story was “told” to us via dialogue rather than being “shown” to us in some way.
There were some interesting sex scenes here. Trevor’s initial submissiveness was intriguing. . I sort of wish that some of the time spent on the whole “closeted athlete issue” had been spent exploring more about the reasons behind Trevor’s submissiveness. I think that that would have made for a more interesting tale. Several of the “first time” scenes were also pretty engaging. Given what I read here I truly believe that this author is capable. Unfortunately, I also felt she was capable of more than this.
RATING: 
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