Reviewed by Stephen K
TITLE: Franklin in Paradise
AUTHOR: John Patrick
PUBLISHER: NineStar Press
LENGTH: 302 pages
RELEASE DATE: May 31st , 2021
BLURB:
Life is good for eighteen-year-old Franklin. He lives on the spectrum, structuring and organizing his days, avoiding messy situations and ambiguity. But what he really wants is a boyfriend.
Twenty-one-year-old Patrick has a past he can’t seem to shake, and a sexual identity that’s hard to describe—or maybe it’s just evolving.
When a man-made virus sweeps the globe, killing nearly everyone, the two young men find themselves thrust together, dependent on each other for survival. As they begin to rebuild their world, their feelings for each other deepen. But Franklin needs definition and clarity, and Patrick’s identity as asexual—or demisexual, or grey ace?—isn’t helping.
These two men will need to look beyond their labels if they are going to find love at the end of the world.
REVIEW:
Take Franklin, one young man in Maine on the autism spectrum. Have him staying on his own for the first time while his parents vacation in Puerto Rico. Add another young man, Patrick, a red head who labels himself a “grey ace” (Demisexual/an asexual who’s able to enjoy sex when it’s someone he knows and trusts.) Make Patrick a bit locally notorious and the product of the foster care system. Bring the two together after a runaway killer virus pretty much ends civilization as we know it… You’d probably guess this is gonna get bleak.
You’d be wrong. This is (at least on some levels) a setup for an ideal romance. Patrick discovers Franklin still hanging out in the family home after three weeks. Franklin is afraid to go outside. But has basically exhausted all the foodstuffs the family had on hand. Patrick’s overjoyed to finally discover he’s not the last one on Earth.
The two join forces and camp in the abandoned local library. It provides all that knowledge, has no putrefying bodies and even has a small cabin with two bunks and running water in the back. Patrick is perhaps the perfect match for Franklin. He doesn’t really understand much about autism initially. But he cares enough to observe and learn.
When I first started this I wasn’t in the mood for anything dark. I immediately had to set it aside for a while. But once I re-started it, I was in a better state of mind. And, in many ways, this isn’t the depressing trek that I first expected. I’ve always had a soft spot for folks who see the world differently than I do, and boy do these guys qualify in that regard!
This post apocalyptic tale of m/m love involves a lot of aspects that never make it into the doom and gloom standards for this trope. It touches on aspects of autism and life after Armageddon. It even draws in Shaker beliefs and a surprisingly overabundant world following the rapid de-population of the planet.
The two do actually eventually encounter others. It’s even somewhat healing to see how the group go about recreating a society that has fallen. There are some romantic issues… Patrick is surprisingly horny once he’s gotten comfortable enough with someone to want sex. Franklin tends to fixate on labels as his way of understanding a world that’s often baffling to him. When he encounters all the variations of LGTQ+ et. al., he’s thrown for a loop.
In many ways this is a fantasy with optimal outcomes rather than the bleak speculative fiction I was expecting. As one might expect, the sex here mostly happens off page and is not at all graphic. The tale does cover some things (like a shut-down vs a melt-down) that I was expecting and some things I wasn’t (like a rather masculine woman blacksmith who gives Patrick and Franklin mixed signals.)
Once started, I was hooked. Though there were some troubling rumblings around the edges, this seemed like a pretty ideal outcome considering how things started. It did make me curious to see how things continue to develop and I’d love to see these same characters 5, 10, maybe even 20 years into this story.
There was another, earlier book by this author (also set in Maine which seems to incorporate some of the same locales) But that sounds like it is set earlier than this one. Guess I’ll just have to check that one out as well.
RATING: 
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