Faker

Forever Family Trilogy, Book 3

De: Kiki Clark

Narrado por: Liam DiCosimo

Duración: 2 h y 45 m

Resumen del Editor

Falling for your straight best friend while he pretends to be your boyfriend is something not even Samuel would be foolish enough to do.

And yet...

All Samuel wanted was to not show up to his ex's wedding alone, but his friend Will has a better idea: go as fake boyfriends to make him jealous.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters, Samuel’s ex knows Will isn’t gay. Of course, Will has a solution for that too.

They’ll just have to convince him. By whatever means necessary.

As the big day approaches—and he and Will keep practicing how to pull off their charade—Samuel’s not sure he’ll make it through the wedding festivities without losing some of his dignity.

And maybe his best friend.

Faker is the final installment in the Forever Family Trilogy but can be enjoyed on its own. It features a 30-something former marine who maybe likes pretending more than he should, a 20-something social worker trying his hardest not to forget none of it’s real, practice dates with more PDA than sense, and the use of praise in very creative ways.

©2023 Kiki Clark (P)2024 Kiki Clark

Competently written

I’m not going to complain that this book, like all modern romance novels, is nothing but a collection of tropes. Friends to lovers, bi-awakening, fake boyfriends, it’s like someone picked a bunch of candy hearts out of a jar and those were the words written on them. I’m also not going to complain that every so often the action stops dead so the author can lecture us on the Issue of the Day™ such as informed consent or whatever. Because again, that’s every romance novel written after 2020.

Ok in reality I’m going to complain a little about both those things because I already did. But I’m not going to complain MUCH about them. What I am going to mention is that the m/m romance genre suffers greatly, and this book has a PARTICULARLY bad case of it, from being written both by and for women, and as a result can be described as anywhere from unrealistic to borderline homophobic.

Samuel, in this book, basically IS a woman. You could replace him with a female character and, with surprisingly few edits such as removing Will questioning his sexuality, you’d have the same book. In fact, in all the gay relationships in the book, and I’m assuming these are from the other books in the series, there seems to be one “man” archetype and one “woman” archetype, and I just have to wonder, does this author actually know any male couples? Because our relationships don’t actually work like that, and I thought we’d left the question “so which one of you is the ‘woman’” somewhere in the past.

What’s worse, it seems like in every relationship in this book, the gay character is the “woman” and the bisexual character is the “man.” This is also something completely divorced from reality, and quite honestly pretty insulting. Actually I’m not sure where female authors got the idea that most male couples must consist of one gay man and one bisexual, because that’s not really all that common a situation in reality.

But whatever, I guess that’s what you get when you read “bi-awakening” novels, which used to be called “gay for you” and were perfectly fine pieces of romance novel fluff until someone somewhere got the idea that they needed to legitimize them somehow and now every one of them has a scene where the straight guy has to ruminate on how fluid sexuality actually is, eyeroll.

Anyway sorry, I’m becoming super jaded as a gay man reading gay fiction written for women, so who knows, maybe most people who buy this WANT a very obvious female self-insert and they’ll actually love this book. It’s certainly perfectly competently written and the actual plot is well-crafted even if it is just tropes. So go for it, if that’s what you’re into. But please keep in mind that in real life, gay men are actually also men, and we don’t typically sit around depending on our bisexual partners to protect us from the big bad world and tell us that it isn’t ok that our ex was sexually pushy. I don’t even OWN a fainting couch, believe it or not.

Liam DiCosimo is a good narrator even though his “older man” voices are a bit awkward. I don’t know, this book isn’t any worse than most m/m romance novels, really, I’m just getting so sick of the whole thing.