Z. A. Maxfield

Rory is in love with the reclusive graphic artist Ran Yamane and decides to pretty much just sell everything and travel through half the country to Anime Expo to meet her. Just that Yamane is not a girl, as Rory assumes, he's a very androgynous boy with a long braid.
Yamane is intrigued by Rory, though, and offers him shelter in his room, since Rory has no money at all left.
But then Amanda shows up unexpectedly, a woman that stalked and kidnapped Yamane before, and things go to hell in no time at all.

This book did not work for me at all.

For once, it is not at all what I expected, when I read the blurb. I did not think that fleeing from the psychotic stalker would take up most of the book. It also get quite dark at times, there's talk of abduction, murder, torture, etc. Most of it off the page, but still, sometimes you just get blindsided by something really bad.
But at other times the book gets slapsticky, silly and over the top. I'm not sure what it was trying to be, cartoony/funny, maybe? Whatever it was, it did not come out clearly enough.
On top of that, I did not feel that the plot made a lot of sense. A lot of it just felt unreasonable, unrealistic or plain strange. It is a weird and inconsistent mixture, that did not work for me.

My major problem was that I could not get into the characters. They feel inconsistent, the characterization all over the place, their actions incomprehensible. Especially Rory was all over the place from naive puppy dog fan to worldly James Bond like player he covers most everything. I felt the author went the lazy way and had the characters contort wildly simply to fit the plot. It just drove me to utter distraction, because I could never figure out why they would act or say what they do, which was mostly silly and unpractical.

I also thought the book was too long, though that might be influenced by my dislike of the whole thing. About half-way in I got really bored and just wanted the whole book over with. I felt it was going in circles and the story wasn't progressing well, or what happened wasn't really necessary to progress anything.

I'm trying to think about what I did like about the book, but I'm coming up blank. I forced myself through it, waiting for something to change, for something I could like, but I'm just coming out of it dissatisfied.
While I still rooted for the romance at the start, even that feels lackluster and pointless in the end.

Schöner zweiter Band (schließt sich zeitlich an St. Nacho's an), guter Aufbau des Hauptcharakters mit nachvollziehbarer Entwicklung. Explizite Szenen im richtigen Maß, Drama und Liebe fürs Herz. Rundum schönes Leseerlebnis.

Eine Gay-Romance-Novel der anderen Art. Der Focus liegt ganz klar auf der Story, der emotionalen Entwicklung des Ich-Erzählers. Gefühlvoll, emotional, manchmal bis zur Grenze der Verwirrung, aber immer mit Liebe sehr tiefgründig erzählt.
Erotik bekommt ihren Raum, steht aber eher dezent im Hintergrund und ist mehr die Abrundung einer schönen, stellenweise auch mal dramatischen Liebesgeschichte.