This book was incredible and absolutely brilliantly written. It's also snarky, passionate and painful. It brings to light something that makes me feel like finding my soapbox, which I will try not to do here. As the mother of a wonderful gay son who has been married for 15 years to the most precious man, I have ever met...I see red when I hear anyone suggesting conversion therapy as a "gay cure". However far beyond anything else, the way the therapy part was handled is what gave the book the incredibly real feeling. I can't find enough adjective to describe it so I will just say bitterly honest, heartbreaking, funny, emotional and sweet should just about cover it. Tyler and Josh will make you laugh one minute and cry the next. It's a very long story...over 420 pages, but each page is an adventure as we get to follow these two men while they are falling in love and fighting for their right to do so without judgement. It wasn't an overnight "flip of the switch" thing. It happened over time until that moment that Josh realized that everything had changed. I loved Purvi, Tyler's friend. She didn't pull any punches with Tyler...but told him how things would need to happen if he and Josh wanted any chance at happiness. Everyone needs a best friend like this. ( )

This is one of the cleverest romances I've ever read - plot, character arcs, dialogue, sub-plots, all of it. The sweet neurotic one adores the rude damaged one SO MUCH... It's just amazingly good all the way through. Nothing's left unattended-to, nothing's ever boring, and it's just exactly the right dose of sweet snark all the way to the end. CW: cutting, neuroses aplenty, abuse including off-page child rape (hence the damage). But the heroism in unusual packages? Oh, I am allll for that! ( )

3,25 stars

This books was neither good nor bad for me, to be completely honest. It did have a lot of potential, though. Mostly I just felt like the author had too many ideas and not enough pages to cram it all into. I mean, honestly, this book could have easily been split into at least three different books with complete story lines.

The characters were pretty good for the most part, and I would have enjoyed reading a lot more from Cynthia's point of view, in particular. Tyler was a hard character to read, and Ryan was the most unrelatable, because I could not understand him at all.

One major thing this book managed to do was trigger the shit out of me (and I'm writing this knowing full well how Tumblr I sound.) I'm not easily triggered by fiction in general, but I don't remember the last time I wanted to hurt myself this badly. (I mean, it's been at least a decade for me, and still for a bit there I actually entertained the thought of revisiting those shitty times.) ( )

Absolutely loved it!
There's the whole predictable fake boyfriend thing but Ty and Josh have so much depth and the way Josh learns his way around Ty's problems and the self-harm moments in the middle of a whole lot of drama was very interesting and I just couldn't stop reading it. ( )