Fool Hearts by Emmy Sanders

Narrated by Blake Lockheart

This first book in Emmy Sanders’ Plum Valley Cowboys series is an angsty, slooooow-burn friends-to-lovers romance spanning over thirty years. It’s quiet and character driven but packs quite the emotional punch as we watch the two protagonists grow and love and yearn through good times and bad before finally reaching a well-deserved HEA. There are a couple of things that didn’t work all that well for me, but I nonetheless enjoyed both the story and the excellent performance by Blake Lockheart.

After a short prologue, the narrative of Fool Hearts is divided into four parts, each part consisting of a series of vignettes in the lives of Wyatt Montgomery and his best friend, Easton Moore. The opens in 1991 when Wyatt and Easton are eleven years old; they’ve been best friends for years and are practically inseparable, and that summer is when Wyatt admits, for the first time, that he doesn’t think he likes girls. Easton takes it in his stride and swears not to tell; both of them know that being different in Plum Valley is probably not a good thing to be. They’re sixteen when Wyatt is guiltily starting to realise that he’s seeing his best friend differently, noticing how he’s filling out and building muscle, noticing the deep blue of his eyes and the smoky rumble of his voice… but Easton is his best friend in the world and he’s not about to do anything that could ruin that.

Then one day, when they’re twenty, everything changes. Easton has been going out with Becca (his first – and only – girlfriend) for a couple of years and has decided it’s time to step up and ask her to marry him. Wyatt is devastated. He’s in love with Easton and has known it for some time; he knows nothing was ever going to come of it because Easton is straight, but somehow, he’d not foreseen this eventuality, that Easton would get married and there would be someone else in his life to take Wyatt’s place.

He decides it’s time to leave and hopes that maybe being away from Easton will enable him to fall out of love. But it doesn’t. Two years later, he goes back home for Easton and Becca’s wedding, and although it kills him to watch the man he loves marry someone else, the most important thing is that Easton is happy and that he and Becca are good to each other. Wyatt leaves immediately afterwards, thinking he won’t be going back.

Of course, fate has other plans. Wyatt returns to Plum Valley to be with Easton after tragedy strikes, helping him to care for his newborn son and making sure Easton takes care of himself in the wake of Becca’s unexpected death. Wyatt is still in love with Easton, but that’s not important now; Easton and baby Will need him to be there for them and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep them both safe and well. As the months pass, the two men slip seamlessly into a routine, partners in the truest sense as they care for Will and become a family of three – and so what if people look at them funny or mistake him and Wyatt for a couple? Having Wyatt back in his life helps Easton to start moving on from his grief and start living again; now he can look forward to what the future may bring.

Fool Hearts is one of those books with no real plot – it’s a love story, plain and simple, one full of yearning and heartfelt emotion that captivated me and brought a lump to my throat more than once. Wyatt and Easton are good people, and their friendship is so beautifully written and so well grounded that the strength of their feelings for each other is almost palpable. There’s never any doubt that they love each other; they go through a lot together and build a life – albeit a platonic one – that makes them happy, and it’s clear how much they both love Will and that he’s as much Wyatt’s son as he is Easton (and Becca)’s. I loved listening to Wyatt growing into a wonderful father figure and Easton’s solid constancy, but as they reach their mid-thirties, and after a lifetime of unrequited love, Wyatt starts to realise that he wants more from life, and that if he’s ever to find someone who wants to be with him in every sense of the word, it’s time to finally let Easton go.

As I said at the outset, the romance is a VERY slow burn – which I loved – with lots of pining and longing on Wyatt’s part and lots of obliviousness on Easton’s, but that works because it’s made clear early on that Easton is demisexual – he needs to feel an emotional connection with someone before he is attracted to them. Sex isn’t something he gives much thought to until… well, the day he does and suddenly starts seeing Wyatt in a different light. That’s one of my favourite things in friends-to-lovers romances, when one (or both) parties starts to see the other with fresh eyes, but I wasn’t wild about the execution here. I can’t say much without spoilers, but the manner in which the author has Easton’s libido wake up and take notice didn’t work for me. Still, wake up it does, and Easton can’t believe he’s lusting over his best friend – and I appreciated that it’s the ‘best friend’ thing rather than the ‘guy’ thing that confuses him. Another niggle; when they do (finally!) get together it happens really fast and again, the execution isn’t the best. It wasn’t what I was expecting after more than twenty years of pining.

We then get several chapters spanning a few more years after they become a couple, so there’s time for the HEA to embed, but this section is a bit meandering and overlong. On the one hand, it takes twenty years of missed chances and bad timing for Wyatt and Easton to finally get together, so they deserve to be happy and WE deserve to see it! But on the other, it drags – and sometimes, less is more.

My final niggle is that Becca comes off more as a plot device than as a real person, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to like her or not. She’s friends with both Wyatt and Easton when they’re teens, she obviously realises how Wyatt and Easton feel about each other, and that Easton has no clue, either about Wyatt’s feelings or his own … but she goes for it with Easton anyway. It’s Easton’s decision to be with her of course, so I’m not casting her as the Evil Other Woman, but I also can’t help feeling, just a little, that she took advantage of Easton’s cluelessness.

But with all that said, those things didn’t spoil the story for me. I enjoyed Fool Hearts a lot, and the excellent narration by Blake Lockheart – who I haven’t listened to before but who has been on my radar for a while – only added to that enjoyment. He has a pleasant, mid-range baritone and the performance is very well paced and expertly differentiated; there’s never any confusion over who is speaking at any given moment, his female voices are very good, and his portrayal of Will from the age of ten upwards is nicely done. His interpretations of Wyatt and Easton are pitch-perfect; Wyatt’s sunny-nature captured by the upbeat delivery and gentle humour, his slight drawl a nice contrast to Easton’s deeper, more serious tones, which exude a sense of solid dependability. Best of all, though, is that he absolutely nails the truth of the central relationship, right from the start. It’s clear these two boys mean something special to each other from the warmth and affection in his tone, and as the story progresses, we can hear every emotion – even the unspoken ones – through all the ups and downs of life they experience. It’s a terrific performance in every respect, and I’ll definitely be adding Mr. Lockheart to my list of trusted narrators.

Fool Hearts is one of those books I took a chance on; I hadn’t heard much about it or read any reviews, I just read the synopsis and liked the sound of it. It’s one of those punts that worked out – I was impressed by Blake Lockheart’s performance and I really enjoyed the story despite my few reservations – and I’m more than happy to recommend it.

Caz

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