Title: Good To Know
Series: Good to Know: Book One
Author: D.W. Marchwell
Genre: MM / Contemporary
Length: Novel
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press (October, 2009)
Heat Level: Explicit
Heart Rating: ♥♥2 Hearts
Reviewer: Thommie
Blurb: Jerry McKenzie is a reclusive and antisocial artist, quite content to ride his horses and work in his studio, keeping to himself. It’s not any kind of life for a child, and when Jerry finds out he’s been named his orphaned nephew’s guardian, he panics. He doesn’t know what to do with a child and isn’t sure he can give William the affection and the love the boy so desperately needs.
Then Jerry meets David Loewenberger, the new teacher William becomes immediately attached to, and he starts to see how they could make a family together: a family to replace the one William lost, a family David had given up on ever finding… a family Jerry never knew he wanted.
Product Link: http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=167&products_id=1566
Review: William Baldwin Pruit III is a ten-year boy, living for the last five years of his life in a boarding school in Switzerland. That all comes to an abrupt end when a lawyer shows up to inform him that his parent died in an accident and as they decided in their will William is to go and live with his only relative alive, Jerry McKenzie.
Jerry is forty-six years old and has no family. All he wants and needs is his art and the occasional twink to get off. When a lawyer shows up at his front door telling him he has inherited a ten-year old kid, his first reaction is to tell him he doesn’t want the responsibility and that they can take the kid back to boarding school. But, after realizing that William is in the back of the car and listening at his words Jerry caves in and gives it a trial. After all, even if the kid is the only family he has, Jerry has been alone for so long he is convinced he doesn’t need one now.
Just when Jerry is about to freak out with the changes in his life and a little boy who needs him, David shows up. David is going to be William’s teacher and offers to help Jerry in this new role. But, while they start a platonic friendship it quickly becomes clear that there is so much more for the two men.
This book had all it takes to be a really, really good one. The kid character was perhaps one of the best to start a story with and I feel that it went to complete waste, because while the opening scene was perfect, the rest was just downhill.
It made quite an impression to me that while the two main characters were supposed to be forty-six and forty-two years old their entire behavior was that of teenagers. It made quite an impression on me that a teacher makes a house-call and in the very same day hooks up with the child’s guardian. It made quite an impression on me that said teacher keeps claiming not wanting to hurt the kid yet his entire behavior was selfish and childish. It made quite an impression to me that while this story started with the little boy and how lonely and unloved that kid felt, it continued to be one enormous case of games between the adults and the child was left on the sides only to come forth when needed as a shield. It made quite an impression to me that while this book was about middle-aged men who finally find a family and have to work through it, there were so many tears and melodramatic scenes that would be more at home in a young adult soap-opera.
No, I did not like the writing in this novel at all. The dialogues were beyond surreal, they had this wistful touch all over them and they were literally quite sappy, not what I expected from this kind of read. It was too much on every account. Too fast to fall in love, too fast to make commitment, too fast to break it up and too fast to come back together.
One other thing I didn’t like was the logic behind the events that followed. The logic behind the “villain” in attacking a tenured teacher, the logic behind the “villain” in attacking a little boy without consequences, the logic behind the pair’s final falls out. Oh I really didn’t understand that one. Was it the fact that the characters kept interrupting each other and no one ever made a full sentence? Or was it the fact that there was no reason for their fall out at all. I don’t know, it made no sense.
Bottom end the plot was not attracting at all. They fell in love, things seemed great, a bad guy shows up and creates a bit trouble and after a huge melodramatic scene everything fell in place as if by magic. The characters were too immature and the erotic part was too much. The only thing that held my interested was the child character; everything else was a big no for me.