For Real has been sitting on my TBR for a while. Actually, Hall’s Spires series (contemporary romance where each focuses on a different couple) has appealed to me since I found Waiting for the Flood to be an interesting Romance that … well that wasn’t a copy/paste of something else out there. The whole series tackles some more serious and unusual takes on romance genre conventions, but ultimately still very much still feel like Genre Romance. For Real isn’t making my list of favorite romances, but it was well-worth the weirdly large amount of time it took for me to hunt a copy down.
The Premise:
Laurie is a trauma doctor who still isn’t over a relationship that ended 6 years ago. On a whim, he takes 19 year old Toby home from a BDSM club, as Toby is clearly very new to being a dom. Unfortunately, Laurie is emotionally unavailable which leads to him fucking up pretty much everything other than the sex.
Read if You Like: relentless trope subversion, quality queer romances, not every conversation focusing on falling in love
Avoid if You Dislike: light to moderate BDSM elements, protagonists who don’t look like marble statues, characters who are kind of shitty but are working on it
What Worked For Me:
Hall is pretty open that this was a reaction to the Fifty Shades of Grey mania, with an attempt to subvert a lot of the patterns that come up in BDSM romance. Especially when age differences come into play, you’ve typically got a very experienced older man who likes being in charge. Inevitably, he chooses a twink that’s more or less a self-insert for the reader and has no fucking clue how to set appropriate boundaries. Behold! The inversion of so many things. Doms can be younger, awkward, and have an acne problem. Being submissive doesn’t mean that you’re a bottom. Surprising nobody, when you remove a lot of elements that line up with straight romance tropes, it makes room for something that is delightfully and unreservedly queer. Because queer doesn’t have to mean countercultural clothing or tinkering with the norms of gender presentation (though it absolutely can), which is something a lot of writers get wrong. Hall did a lot of good work here, and it honestly highlights how shallow so much of the romance market is.
Truly, I think this story will ride or die based on how you feel about Laurie. Toby’s easy to like. He’s a ray of sunshine without being annoying. He’s got more energy than a Labrador Retriever and a bundle of insecurities that he’s fucking up his life. He should speak up for himself more, but that’s understandable given the dynamic at play. He’s got a lot more dimensionality than his type of character typically receives, but ultimately is easy to love even when he fucks up.
Laurie is more complicated. He isn’t over his ex, and is frankly kind of mopey about it. He doesn’t confront his emotions until he loses the things that make him happy. Frankly, he treats Toby fairly poorly simply because he’s unwilling to be vulnerable again (this sounds so utterly cliche, but it felt so much more realistic to me than other ‘learning to talk about my emotions’ romance leads). He struggles to accurately think about the fact that he’s the one without all the power, because he’s perseverating on the ways he has power that don’t really matter. He slips into some unintentionally preachy ‘you don’t have your life together and I want to help you’ energy that is very authentic to the age gap flings from my youth. For me, it all worked and felt very realistic. This is not a romance where no protagonist ever does anything wrong. The elements holding the characters apart are all internal, and none of it felt forced for the sake of drama. Buckle up for some self-improvement and tough realizations, but it always felt real and earned.
What Didn’t Work for Me:
Honestly, nothing major? I think my biggest complaint is that I never lost myself in the story. I never had to stop reading because of how stressed I was. I was never tearing up at their declarations of love. It was a great book, but not one that had me entranced. Most books don’t get to that point though, so I can’t fault it for that. Usually I’ve got more of a sense of why I hadn’t fallen head-over-heels in love with a story. Here, I don’t have much concrete to point at that kept it from being transcendent.
Also, this is a BDSM romance. Not a super intense one, as far as they go. But if you aren’t interested in some moderate kink in the sex scenes, stay far away from For Real.
Conclusion: joyfully subversive to genre-Romance standards
- Characters: 4
- Setting: 3
- Craft: 3
- Themes: 4
- Enjoyment: 4
Marked for Plot 