Reviewed by Ro

TITLE: Noah

SERIES: Salish Sea Society

AUTHOR: Leigh Jarrett

PUBLISHER: Steambath Press

LENGTH: 291 pages

RELEASE DATE:  June 14, 2024

BLURB:

Underneath that calm demeanour, I sensed lay a deeply passionate man.

Noah

To date, all my relationships that lasted more than a couple months have ended because I’m expecting something I don’t believe is unattainable. Perfection. My parents have pounded the concept into my head. Success is only possible through getting everything right.

Even now, in my thirties, I live by that. What I strive for rolls into my business as the owner of one of the most popular British-themed pubs in Victoria, BC.

Then one day, a guy named Brody walks into my pub and becomes a regular, coming in at the same time every night, and always ordering a G&T and buffalo wings.

His expression is often fixed, and he doesn’t talk much, revealing nothing about himself. But his deep mahogany eyes speak volumes. There’s someone passionate inside all that outward calm.

What I eventually discover about Brody makes me wonder if I want to take it on. A relationship with him would be far from perfection. Or would it? To call him mine, I’m going to need to rethink what perfection looks like and embrace a new way of seeing the world.

Noah is a sweet slow-burning romance about a member of the Salish Sea Society, a group of four best friends who have been through a lot together since high school, including each of them coming out as gay. This story takes place on the rugged coast of Pacific Canada and is a story of newfound understanding of the autism spectrum and finding passion and love beating beneath the chest of a man of carefully measured words and silent looks.

REVIEW:

This is the first book in a series about four friends: Noah, the chivalrous; Liam, the lover; Ethan, the optimist, and Owen, the sentimental. They call themselves the Salish Sea Society. They meet up once a week on Sunday to catch up, support each other, and be together while teasing each other and keeping each other sane.

As a special education teacher, I often see neurodiverse characters portrayed as caricatures, or they get a partner and suddenly appear neurotypical. It frustrates me because neither of those things is true or fair. In Noah, however, we don’t have that. Brody is on the autism spectrum and goes to the pub owned by Noah, the Lion and Pheasant, every night. He nurses a gin and tonic and has wings.

The bar is very popular and successful. Unfortunately, Noah’s parents are lawyers in a family-owned firm and since Noah deviated from their carefully crafted plan for all their children to enter the firm while demanding perfection, he is never really happy that everything isn’t “perfect”. He keeps second-guessing himself about the pub, wondering if he has made a mistake. Even though he loves it  and it makes him happy, he still wonders. “But is that slice of joy a measure of success?”

Noah notices Brody though.  “There was something sad about them, his eyes. Like he’d lost someone or something. Like the weight of the world was on his shoulders.” Sometimes he doesn’t realize how his very direct actions may look to others. Such as when he decides he wants to have sex with Noah, so he waits for him outside the pub after closing. When Noah asks if he was stalking him, Brody realizes.

“Yes, I was unusual in the way I went about things. I chalked it up to being on the autism spectrum. I was high-functioning but I had quirks. What might be normal operating mode for neurotypical people didn’t apply to me. I know it made me awkward and I came across as cold and unfeeling…”

Of course, he isn’t either of those things. Awkward at times yes, but so not cold and unfeeling. His father is not good. “My father had made it quite clear while I was growing up that queers weren’t to be tolerated.” But he has his mother and he has his assistant, Alesia, who is there for him. After the awkward phase, he also has Noah as a friend. It was interesting to me (and really, how the world should be) that Brody knows some things are still not clear to him.

“In elementary school it never occurred to me that boys weren’t supposed to like other boys. The concept of only liking the opposite sex did not compute in my brain. Why not just like who you were attracted to?”

I am wholeheartedly with you on that one, Brody. Brody is a Crown Counsel lawyer and ends up coincidentally helping out the LBGTQ youth center where Noah volunteers after some homophobe steals their computers. Yet another thing Noah’s uptight parents are jerks about. When they throw a huge gala  for underprivileged children Noah reminds his mother about the center. “Your little organization doesn’t hold the same appeal for the donors as what it does for benefitting normal children.” Seriously, I wanted to slap her. She says, oops, slip of the tongue but Noah knows better. Luckily for Noah, his brother and sister, while both are lawyers, are decent humans and love him.

I loved seeing these two navigating their baggage. Brody went through a family secret that was so messed up, plus had a long term boyfriend, Ricky, who cheated on him repeatedly. Noah has his family expectations and nastiness of his parents.

Two relatively small things kept it from being a 5-star story for me. One, and it’s a teacher thing, the word is “glans,” not “gland,” and it appears a couple of times. The second was a random appearance by Ricky that made no sense and really pulled me out of the story. It seemed to be there just to cause conflict, and there were so many better ways to do that.

But when Brody steps up for Noah, it’s magic. “I hadn’t simply torched a bridge; I had burned down the entire damned town leading to it.” Yes you did, Brody, and it was perfect.

RATING:

BUY LINKS: 

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