Book review: Everything For You

[rainwaterspark]

Everything For You by Chloe Liese

Genre: Adult, contemporary romance (pairing: M/M)

I'm about 80% of the way through this book, though I doubt the last 20% will change my impressions.

Honestly, I probably shouldn't have pushed myself to finish reading this book at all. I just found myself morbidly curious because this author is one of those authors who's written only M/F romance books, but suddenly came out with a M/M romance book.

And look, I'm 100% against forcing authors to out themselves (as someone who will never disclose how I identify publicly), and I've read M/M books by cis-female-identifying authors before that were fine and enjoyable. (The one that comes to mind first is Bidding For the Bachelor by Jackie Lau, which I greatly enjoyed, and though she almost always writes M/F romances, she's had bisexual leading characters before.)

But there’s nothing more awkward than picking up an M/M romance and feeling like “this is basically a M/F romance except with a different coat of paint for one of the MCs.”

 

Literally the lowest bar is making sure your M/M romance doesn’t read like the author tried to map the dynamic of a straight couple onto two queer men.

It just feels so egregious because Gavin acts like an alpha male and Oliver, despite being feisty and spunky, feels like the passive one in the relationship. Which is a rather common M/F trope. (I should probably also mention that I despise the alpha male/spunky female dynamic in M/F romances, too.)

 

Also, the interactions of every cis man in this book make me wonder “does this author know how men actually act with other men in real life?” To clarify, I am all for debunking toxic masculinity and having men be more emotionally vulnerable in romances. But just because toxic masculinity is a bad thing…doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to write a contemporary novel where it simply doesn’t exist.

 

That doesn’t feel progressive. That feels unrealistic.

 

The cis guys in this book talk about their feelings all the time, to other guys, in a very direct manner that cis women will do with each other, that you may be able to get away with in a conversation between a cis woman and a cis man, but that allo cis heterosexual guys are frankly not socialized to do with each other. It's hard to really articulate this, which drives me nuts; my tentative hypothesis is that cis women will generally volunteer how they're feeling, while cis men will usually only talk about their feelings in the context of solving an interpersonal problem. Even if my explanation is wrong, I'll say that if you read M/M romances by queer male authors, like Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall or I’m So (Not) Over You by Kosoko Jackson, you’ll see that the male protagonists do talk about their feelings, but they go about it in a very different way from Oliver and Gavin in this book.

 

Also, Oliver’s brothers apparently all read romance novels and quote romance tropes at each other, which…I’m sorry, this goes beyond “wish fulfillment cis guy behavior” to “flat out unbelievable.”

 

Another major issue? There’s no discussion of queer identities/experiences at all. I don’t expect every queer romance to have a struggle over identity as the main plot, but even if Oliver and Gavin are comfortable in their identities, their queerness still impacts how they move through the world. This book takes place in a world where there is no homophobia or biphobia in the world of competitive sports, except for one instance of a homophobic slur being hurled at Oliver for the purposes of giving him a panic attack so Gavin could go all White Knight. Which is...super ick.

 

And I’m sorry, but if their teammates are all allo cis heterosexual men, I expect the topic of romantic and/or sexual relationships to come up at some point in casual conversation or locker talk or whatever.

 

Plus, Oliver and Gavin don’t have queer friends (I mean, Gavin’s friend group of septuogenerians includes a queer couple, but that seems incidental) and never talk about needing a queer community or wanting to connect to other queer people on a platonic level. Oliver never talks about what it’s like to be the only queer kid among all his siblings, or the only queer guy among his (five or however many, I lost count) brothers.

Also. This book pulls the "one MC sees the other MC with a side character and thinks they're in a romantic relationship so they get all jealous" trope. Except said side character was Oliver's SIBLING. And the book pulls this TWICE, with TWO of Oliver's siblings. I don't know about everyone else, but "mistaking a sibling relationship for a romantic relationship" majorly grosses me out.

Basically, I disliked this reading experience. Aside from the issues I described above, everyone was hyper quirky in a way I don't like in romance, and the Latinx members of the soccer team spoke Spanish all the time to the white people, (a) which is not how bilingualism works, but many white authors do this because they feel the need to remind the reader that the character is non-white, and (b) even though this is a Los Angeles soccer team, so I assume many if not most of the Latinx soccer team members were born and raised in America so...why...would they be tossing out random Spanish words...to the white people...

In short: Do not recommend, if you want to read a M/M romance, read one by an actual queer male/enby author instead.