Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: Hummingbird Heartbreak
SERIES: The Gold Brothers #1
AUTHOR: Max Walker
NARRATOR: Greg Boudreaux
PUBLISHER: Tantor Audio
LENGTH: 8 hours 13 minutes
RELEASE DATE: August 20th 2020
BLURB:
DUSTY GOLD
College is weird. One second you’re studying for a huge exam in integrated physics and the next you’re secretly drooling over the sexy rugby player living in the dorm next door. The second after that, you’re sharing a bed with that same Insta-famous jock, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what in gay heaven caused such a miraculous and terrifying thing.
Maybe inviting him to stay at my family’s house for the summer wasn’t the greatest idea I’ve ever had?
BRANDON REED
I freakin’ loved college. I loved being able to play rugby the most; losing myself to the game, watching the crowds in the stadium grow bigger with every win. Rugby gave me an escape. Then Dusty Gold springs into my life. After we end up as surprise roomies, a spring busts on his bed and we go from roommates to snuggle buddies.
Snuggling somehow turns into staying with him over the summer at his family’s animal sanctuary. Soon, I find myself falling hard for the handsome and shy nerd. I’ve got a messy past, though, and Dusty’s got a bright future. Will my ghosts ruin us before we could ever really begin or will we both get a once-in-a-lifetime shot at a happy ending?
REVIEW:
First, my apologies for this long review. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one. — This is a sweet addition to the Jock/Nerd romance trope, if a tad overwritten. Dusty Gold is your typical brainy nerd with a twin bother and an emotional support kitten. Brandon Reed is an out and proud Rugby player with a bit of a thing for brainy nerds.
As to the being overwritten, some of the phrases used seem overly elaborate,unnecessary, and out of character coming from the mouths of college students. I’m guessing that the whole bit about “busting my dildo with a hand-basket” was an attempt to make the rest of the weird word soup seem normal but, for me at least, it failed. Other examples?
“Holy Shiitake shitballs” ,“going to hell in an elephant sized hand-basket” ,“my previous place was burned like a crisp piece of toast left inside the Devil’s toaster”, “What in the d*ck-slipping gay heaven is going on right now?”, “a sight like that could stop a heart in ten different Mariah Carey high notes” “What in the wild Bill Nye F*ck did I just say?”
Also, at one point Dusty muses “I could calculate the geometric mean rate of return in the blink of an eye” (a finance thing) which seemed odd for a math / science geek when he’d just skewered his gal-pal Kira for being a finance geek a few chapters earlier.
I’m not going to mention all the less serious continuity issues, or this review could run to another thousand words. … e.g Brandon described as being clad in just a pair of white gym shorts and a T-shirt after escaping from the dorm fire. Then next thing he and Brandon are making a “Target run. It had me wondering when and where Brandon got his wallet and where he managed to stash it. & e.g. The nonsensically pushiest drug pusher I’ve ever seen in fiction.
I also had a bit of trouble with the couple’s chemistry. Brandon seemed a catch. He’s a tall, athletic and sweetly humble, cat-rescuing good-guy. But, understanding why he was SO attracted to Dusty was a bit unfathomable. At least in the beginning it was a superficial attraction, and we’re not really told enough about Dusty’s appearance (particularly through Brandon’s eyes) to see the appeal.
Brandon’s back-story is also presented in an awkward way. We get some references early but the majority is just “dumped.” First during a flashback which seemed out of place, and then during an overwrought confrontation scene.
Oddly I had a surprise “mightabeen moment” where real life paralleled something in the book. Back in my college days, I actually had an incident with a straight college room-mate where a mattress spring broke. The spring punctured his buttcheek a bit and the wound was in a spot he couldn’t easily reach. I offered to help with first aid. He made me promise to never tell anyone or he’d hunt me down and kill me. It’s now been several decades, and I do still recall it clearly. I lost touch with him long ago, so I guess it’s safe enough to share that story here. But take it from someone with the life experience… Dusty’s damage could have been sexier.
It also seems a bit strange to be listening to an audiobook set in Georgia and not hear a preponderance of southern accents. There are also almost no southern phrases at all. I presume this is set at the University of Georgia campus (they do mention Athens Georgia, and it sounds like a big school). One would expect at least a few of the characters would have them. Dusty and his twin were both raised in Georgia; as was his childhood gal-pal. Though Brandon gets a pass here having been raised in Florida.
Outside the lack of Georgian accents, narrator Greg Boudreax does his usual professional job with the narration here. I’m not sure I’d have completed the book if it were in text form. But Greg’s narration made getting through the awkward bits less of a chore.
That said, I did feel that this might have been better if done as a dual-narration book. Boudreaux’s “strong and commanding” voice worked OK for Brandon but a younger, more boyish voice might have been better still. His “introspective nerd” voice, that worked so well for Merlin in the Guardians of Camelot series, was also OK for Dusty. But in a “he said/he said” style book with just the two characters speaking so much of the time, it was just a bit wearing. It felt like a bit too much whining in spots.
I thought more than once that the dual narration audiobook that he did with Teddy Hamilton was better realized, given the variation in their voices. Just as not every song fits every singer, (no matter how talented the singer) not every story fits every narrator.
This felt like a bit of a marathon in spots, and looking back at this review so far, I’m actually a bit surprised that I enjoyed it as much as I did. In my “If I Ran the Zoo” mind, I’d have made the scenes set in college be book one in the series, with the “Meet the Parents” part book two. As executed, I’d be hard-pressed to put this near the top on any list of book recommendations, but I did enjoy it, and if you’ve a forgiving nature, you just might as well. It reminds me a bit of my middle brother’s favorite movie candy, Good & Plenty, aptly named, it’s not to everyone’s taste but it has its appeal. I did enjoy it, and will be ready to check out Book 2 when and if it comes out on audio.
RATING: 
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