Reviewed by Stephen K
TITLE: Blackbird
SERIES: If I Fell #2
AUTHOR: Mia Kerick
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 171 pages
RELEASE DATE: November 1st , 2021
BLURB:
Timmy and Cole’s angsty love story continues…
Last year, in Timmy Hale’s junior year at Edgewater University, he set his romantic sights on Colton “Cole” Ledger—a burly and sometimes over-protective dormitory maintenance man. Cole soon had it bad for sleek and snarky Timmy too, and—despite a bumpy road (a frenzied stalker and an uncooperative son)—before year’s end they’d found love. Now, in Timmy’s senior year, the couple has left the dormitory behind. Cole is back to running his own custom construction company, and they’ve turned an antique Victorian home into a love nest. For a while, life is good.
But insta-love comes at a cost, and for Timmy and Cole it’s steep. Cole’s doubts haunt him: he’s almost certain he’s too old for Timmy, and that he’s pushing him into a life he’ll eventually resent, keeping him from spreading his newfound wings and taking flight toward his best future. Acting on his fears, Cole pressures Timmy to accept an internship in Manhattan—far from the home they’ve built together. He means well, but Timmy feels like a baby bird kicked out of the nest too soon.
Tensions rise until fear, resentment, and desire draw Timmy and Cole into explosive conflict. When the dust settles, will Timmy wing away like a young blackbird, or return to nest with Cole in their happy garden home?
For maximum enjoyment, Blackbird is best read after Hide Your Love Away.
REVIEW:
I was initially worried when I saw the cover for this one… Sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
In book one we saw Cole, a university maintenance man with a grown son, meet and begin a relationship with “Timmy.”
College junior Timmy is an insecure “surprise kid.” He was born 15 years after his mom thought she was done having kids. Growing up, Timmy wasn’t so much abused as ignored. As a young man he’s looking for a nurturing presence in his life. Something he didn’t get growing up as an afterthought amongst a brood of five.
In book one Timmy meets Cole, and thinks that together they can make a home.
Now, in book two, Timmy is almost finished with college and has been accepted as an intern in a New York City public relations firm. The internship is very much the idea of Robbie, Cole’s son. Robbie’s a bit slow on coming to terms with sharing his “daddy.”
While Timmy and Cole’s son, Robbie, were classmates in book one, they become flatmates in book two. And it was clear to me from the outset that Robbie had an agenda.
Timmy is quickly homesick. He feels like he’s been kicked out of the nest that he and Cole constructed. Timmy starts finding solace in alcohol. Meanwhile, Cole feels like he’s doing the “noble” thing, setting Timmy free for a bit to see if he really really wants Cole in his life. Neither man is happy, but with Robbie urging them on, they both just grow more depressed.
In my review of the first installment, I said that I was curious to see how this couple would evolve once their initial needs are met. There apparently was a “happy time” between the books.
But we get to see very little of that. What we do see is an alcohol laden period in Timmy’s life that just didn’t seem realistic to me. Both Cole and Timmy struck me as being too intelligent to allow miscommunication to cause the troubles it does here.
I know that contented couples CAN make for boring stories, but not always. I wished the author had trusted the characters and delved a bit deeper into the good stuff before throwing us back into turmoil.
I know several gay couples in real life with significant age gaps. The ones that I know have made it work a long time. In every one of those relationships, the younger guy is smart enough to benefit from what his older partner has experienced. But he also isn’t shy about calling the older man on his BS. Here the lack of communication was just an annoying contrivance.
Moreover, given the gravity of the situation here, if you care about these characters at all, the sex scenes felt a bit gratuitous.
Sex can be therapeutic. But here it felt like just one more excuse for the characters not having the in depth conversations they needed to be having.
Even with all that though, the characters and their situations here still have a reality that many fictional m/m couples do not. Unfortunately, this book felt a bit too much like schadenfreude for me to give it a higher rating than I did. I know that there’s another book in the works, and I’m curious to read it. I just hope it gets back to what I consider “the good bits” of these guys relationship.
There are so many aspects of this story that I’d like to see explored. I felt that this book took a wrong turn in focusing on what it did. I’d like to see some scenes where Cole and Timmy and Robbie actually share some quality time talking about what they feel. I’d like to see them work through a disagreement about something minor. I’d have liked to see them actually reach a compromise on something about their new home. I’d like to see more of Timmy’s family and see him (and Cole) interact with the family that pretty much ignored him. Don’t they have a story too? I’d love to see some of that in book three.
RATING: 
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