Narrated by Greg Boudreaux
I like a good relationship-in-trouble story and I also enjoy ménage romance so I was happy to sign up to review Hiatus, an MMM romance.
Nate Keller is an up-and-coming rock star, on tour with his band. His boyfriends, Cam and Theo are a married couple. Nate, Cam and Theo have been in a triad relationship for nearly five years. When the book begins, Nate is excited to see Cam and Theo for a night after weeks apart. But when he goes to the hotel room only Cam is there. Cam has some bad news; he and Theo are separating.
Thus begins the story of the slow spiral downwards in all the relationships – Nate’s with Cam, Nate’s with Theo, Theo’s with Cam (and vice versa). Despite everyone’s best intentions, Nate is necessarily drawn into the mess that is happening between Theo and Cam.
Cam and Theo have clearly got some mental illness issues (anxiety, depression) which need to be addressed and both are in some serious denial about them. Not only do they not admit these issues to each other, they do not admit them to themselves either. I admit I found this a little frustrating at times. However, I think it was probably a very authentic examination of the breakdown of a relationship where each party is too frightened or too tired or too something to say anything and everything gets worse and worse.
Nate’s relationship with each of the other guys is fairly good for a lot of the book but everything devolves as Theo and Cam struggle to fix what’s broken between them. There are some flashbacks to the trio’s first meeting, to them getting together and to special occasions etc but a lot of the book is fairly depressing and frustrating as the men fail to communicate over and over again. It’s very authenticity made it a somewhat difficult listen because I just wanted to grab the guys and bash their heads together at times! But I’ve seen that kind of devolution in real life before so as much as it was a bit of a downer, it was realistic too.
Unfortunately, the happy bit of the story was very short-lived and was not quite the payoff I’d been hoping for, only taking up maybe the last 45 minutes or so of the listen.
There is a lot of sex in the book. Nate and Theo and Nate and Cam have sex together throughout the book and even Theo and Cam do at one point. Plus, there are flashback scenes of remembered intimacy. I admit I skipped ahead in some of them because they weren’t moving the story forward and I really wanted to know how the guys were going to start digging their relationship out of the ditch.
One of the challenges with narrating a same sex romance is that many narrators don’t have good distinction between same sex character voices. (Of course, when a narrator doesn’t have good distinction between any character voices that’s a bigger problem!) Greg Boudreaux has a broad range of character voices and certainly there was good differentiation between Nate and Cam. However, Nate and Theo sounded very similar indeed and in their scenes I was not always sure who was talking, having to take my cues from dialogue tags and context a lot of the time. There is also a fair bit of internal dialogue and it wasn’t always obvious to me when a character was speaking out loud or thinking to himself.
Mr. Boudreaux did a stellar job portraying Cam’s anxiety and Theo’s depression and Nate’s frustration that Cam and Theo didn’t appear to be doing much to fix what was wrong. The emotion he brought to the narration was excellent.
Another thing which impressed me is the way the editing of some of the conversations was done; in some conversations, it seemed to my ear that one character began speaking almost before the other was finished. That lent an extra level of authenticity to my listening experience.
I’m a little bit fascinated as to how poly relationships/triad relationships work in practice. Most poly romances only cover how the parties get together and not what happens after. In Hiatus much of the representation was pretty dysfunctional, as the relationships were all falling apart for most of the book and so I didn’t quite see what I was hoping for. However, I imagine the book would have been pretty boring if they had all been happy. After all, books do need some kind of conflict to keep them interesting.
Kaetrin
Buy Hiatus by L.A. Witt on Amazon
