Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: Tough Love
SERIES: Men of Olympus, Book 2
AUTHOR: Dianna Roman
NARRATOR: Liam DiCosimo, Tim Paige
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 9 hours and 47 minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2023
BLURB:
Damiano’s parents have never had any faith in him, so it’s no surprise when his new boss doesn’t either. He’s determined to prove Graham Brandt wrong though, if only he could stop pushing the man’s buttons and dreaming about tearing them off. It’s frustrating being a hot-blooded young man, particularly when your sexy boss is straighter than the level he uses on job sites.
What do you do when your ex-wife won’t come home, and you can’t stop thinking about your obnoxious apprentice? You lose your damn mind, apparently. That’s the only explanation for why Graham agrees to let Dami teach him how to explore his unexplainable desires. When the lessons are over, however, Graham learns he may have misunderstood not only sex education, but Damiano Andropolis.The school of tough love is in session, but who is teaching whom.
REVIEW:
Tough Love picks up where Johnny and Aiden left off at the end of You Again, the first book in Dianna Roman’s Men of Olympus series. The focus shifts from Johnny and Aiden to Johnny’s cousin Damiano (Dami) and Aiden’s older brother Graham. You don’t have to read You Again first, but it is helpful as context.
In Roman’s books, we often get pairings where one man is close to perfect and the other is frustratingly flawed, acts out of fear, and makes stupid mistakes and decisions. We saw this in Roman’s excellent first MM romance, The Shutout, and in both books of the Men of Olympus series. In You Again, we see the dichotomy between gorgeous, kind, patient Aiden and Johnny the hot mess. In Tough Love, that is sharpened further, contrasting the endearingly oblivious Dami and Graham the confused, sometimes cruel curmudgeon. Both Johnny and Graham are difficult to like at times in each of their respective stories. Here, Graham’s reticence and internalization of his feelings leaves him stewing in a potent mixture of jealousy, confusion, and self-loathing that he takes out on Dami. It’s a stark contrast to Dami who is one of those characters you fall in love with immediately and want to wrap up in bubble wrap especially against Graham’s callous treatment. Dami is kind, earnest, sunshiney, beautiful, a bit clueless, and hopelessly optimistic as he works to implement his three-step plan for becoming independent and falling in love.
The dynamic between Dami and Graham is unexpectedly sexy and quite sweet once Graham drops his walls and stops lashing out. But there are times when we wonder why Dami persists in engaging with Graham at all. But just when Dami is ready to give up, Graham sparks a glimmer of hope and Dami hangs on.
Graham, for his part, realizes he’s been looking for love in the wrong people for 30 years of his life. His hesitation about coming out now is less about shame about being gay and more about wanting to keep things private. He so zealously guards his privacy that he doesn’t allow people to understand him, so they draw the wrong conclusions.
All of this is to say that, paradoxically, Graham and Dami’s relationship is just as it should be, in all of its unvarnished glory. Dami learns to stand on his own two feet, gain independence from his parents, and take ownership of who he is as a person – a gay man who loves fully and completely. He gains confidence, purpose and a backbone as the story goes on.
Graham’s vacillating attitude toward Dami is a perfect mirror of Dami’s personal journey. He’s hopeful and loyal, but lets himself get walked over and taken advantage of. It’s Graham who correspondingly causes him the most pain, but also prompts him to embrace the things he loves, like art, and a belief that he can be successful.
Roman doesn’t give us a polished up love story. It’s hard and messy and real, and it’s one of the things I like best about Roman’s stories. Tough Love gives an unflinching look at love between imperfect people who belong together. Graham and Dami have a hard-fought, real, everyday kind of love that we can relate to. It solidifies their HEA because we’ve seen these men fall in love despite conflicts, misunderstandings and challenging circumstances.
Liam DiCosimo and Tim Paige’s narration of the Tough Love audiobook helps bring out Dami and Graham’s differences and plays up the humor throughout the story. They are connected to the emotions of the story, and they understand their characters, Paige as Graham and DiCosimo as Dami. That being said, their vocal performances here are a bit too much, upsetting the delicate emotional balance Roman creates in the text. To understand and truly enjoy this story, it’s important you understand the complex relationship between Graham and Dami. Their dialogue is laced with subtext that you need to pull out in order to connect with them and buy into them as a couple. It requires a level of nuance that is overwhelmed by Paige and DiCosimo’s heavy-handed performances.
I’m not sure what exactly caused these two talented, experienced narrators to go off course. DiCosimo generally does a solid job and Paige has had some superb performances. They know their fundamentals and typically deliver them well. But here, Paige and DiCosimo sound like they are trying too hard, so it strips authenticity from the narrative and makes it hard to engage with Graham and Dami’s nuanced emotional journeys.
Paige’s Graham voice is good – growly and deep, befitting Graham’s character. DiCosimo gets Dami right too, with a youthful, brightness to his voice that conveys Dami’s hopefulness and indefatigable spirit. It’s the rest that’s the problem. Paige and DiCosimo’s Damis are quite different, as are their Grahams. DiCosimo’s Graham, in particular, embodies a heavy-handed growl in a strained deep, gruff voice, so much so it makes Graham sound caricaturish. The side characters similarly feel cartoonish and stereotypical.
There are other issues like unvaried range and timbre that cause them to struggle with stories like this with many characters, some of whom have accents, and neither does a great job with female voices. Then there are the mispronunciations. Both Paige and DiCosimo mispronounce words here and there throughout, but the most egregious is the pronunciation of Dami’s name. The typical Italian/Greek pronunciation of Damiano or Dami is with a short “a” sound – like the “a” sound in cat or the name Dante. However, Paige and DiCosimo pronounce Damiano and Dami with a long “a” like in cake or day, or how you would pronounce the letter “a” itself if you were doing your ABCs. Of course, it’s Roman’s prerogative to have Dami’s name pronounced however she wants it to be, and given she didn’t correct the narrators, that implies their pronunciation is how she intended. However, there’s no corresponding indication in the text itself that the atypical pronunciation is the correct one, so I read it one way and heard it from Paige and DiCosimo in a different way, and the cognitive dissonance that created was distracting.
Overall, Tough Love is a highly enjoyable romance that I really enjoyed. I personally didn’t find the audiobook added to the experience, but YMMV.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: