Title: Shared Revelations
Author: Andrew Grey
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Pages: 63
Characters: Eddie, Jack, Johnny
POV: 3rd Person
Sub-Genre: Contemporary
Kisses: 5+
Blurb:
It’s the sixties, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to be different. Eddie Baronski spent his high school years looking out for his partially deaf friend, Jack Emmons. Now that they’ve graduated, they spend their free time at Green Bay’s newly renamed Lambeau Field, taking in the practices.
When Eddie’s crush, Johnny Grant, a new Packers team member, offers him a ride home, Eddie thinks it’s the start of a grand romance. But Johnny and Eddie may not be on the same page, and love—true love—sometimes comes from an unexpected quarter.
Review:
Eddie is a closeted gay living in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1966. Fresh out of high school and working in a paper mill, he and his closest friends enjoy the privilege of attending the Packers football team pre-season field practices. He has become enamored with one of the players, Johnny Grant, and secretly fantasizes about him in his bed at night before allowing self-satisfying sleep to overtake him.
One day circumstances present themselves that find him accepting a ride from the one and only object of his dreams and to Eddie’s surprise a budding friendship ensues. On a day much like all the others Eddie finds himself believing in the truth of Heaven when Johnny kisses him and over the next few weeks Eddie slowly begins to believe that love with another man is possible until he proclaims this love to the man of his heart and gets dumped for his troubles.
Begging off the practices with his friends, Eddie isolates himself to the point where his best friend, Jack, confronts him on this uncharacteristic behavior. Eddie finally gives in to Jack’s unrelenting pleas for an explanation and tells him the whole story, believing that Jack will find him repulsive for his romantic actions with another man. But Jack’s response is not what Eddie is expecting!
If you are a true romantic, and since you have chosen to read an Andrew Grey story then I must assume that you are indeed just that, then you must first be sure to have an ample supply of tissues within your immediate grasp before embarking on this delightful tale. Mr. Grey once again entices the reader to enter into his realm of friendship and romance, sprinkled with a bit of intrigue and layered in unrequited love.
Those who are of the age to remember the era of this story will find themselves once again on the threshold of manhood not quite believing in a happy-ever-after for gay men but still hoping beyond hope of its possibility. For those of a younger age you will gain firsthand knowledge of the plight of the homosexual male in the mid 1960’s. In either case, here you will be entertained to the point of believing you too are a character within the story, feeling the love held within friendship and romance, as this author always dictates you must!
Reviewed By: Jymbo
