Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Airlie Porter has a secret. A deep, dark, destructive secret that threatens to engulf her if she can’t find the courage to face who she really is and who she really wants to be with.

On a working holiday in Ireland, Airlie finds herself embarking on much more than a drunken year guzzling Guinness in Dublin. The previously protected bubble of denial, harbored deep within her, has threatened to pop for many years, but after a harrowing experience in a Dublin bar, the bubble violently explodes. Lost and alone, she turns to Olivia Swanson, the only person she’s ever truly loved. Married and unsettled, Olivia has her own demons to battle. Drawn together by something inexplicable, pulled apart by fear, how long does it take to become you?

Book Review

Coming out stories abound in the lesbian romance market, and they’re often formulaic and overall pretty happy affairs. Which doesn’t make them bad, but this book takes that trope and plays with it in a very different way that is brave and honest.

Airlie and her friend Hannah depart from Australia on a working holiday to Ireland. Airlie has just walked out of an engagement to a nice bloke called Sam, for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself never mind to him. Airlie knows, deep down, what is “wrong” with her, but she’s doing everything she can to avoid facing up to it. She and Hannah meet Olivia on the flight over, who is also Aussie but lives in Ireland with her husband Gavin. They get on so well Olivia invites them to stay with her and Gavin for their first couple of weeks in Ireland. A good friendship forms between Airlie and Olivia, and even after Airlie and Hannah settle in Dublin, some four hours away by car, Airlie often spends weekends at Olivia’s place.

While this is going on, feelings start to emerge in Airlie that she has tried to bury for a long time. And this is where this book goes brave – Airlie does not remotely want to be lesbian, and embarks on a self-destructive journey of drinking, partying, and generally getting herself into some awful situations as a means of dealing with her self-loathing. At times, I’ll be honest, I struggled to sympathize with her level of self-flagellation, mainly because it was never entirely clear to me why she felt so strongly that being lesbian was so wrong.

Once she does face up, to some degree, to her sexuality, Olivia is the first person she talks to about it, who is appropriately sympathetic and supportive. Of course, Airlie then begins to realize that those are not exactly the feelings she was hoping to engender in her friend. Airlie does find romance with someone, but when that first romance falls apart, with yet more pain and anguish for Airlie, it’s Olivia she turns to again, only this time, it’s not just friendship between them…

There are a lot of issues in this book that many lesbian readers would shy away from—heterosexual sex scenes, cheating, copious amounts of angst—which is another reason why this book is so brave. That said, I did feel the angst was overdone in some places; there was a lot of this book that really wasn’t happy at all, and I couldn’t read a huge amount of it in one sitting. But Airlie’s trials and tribulations did have me wanting to find out what happened to her, and I’m glad I stayed the course because the ending was satisfying and Airlie’s character developed enormously once she’d come to terms with who she really was. The writing style was good, and although there were a few slow passages, the pace worked well for the type of story it was. Certainly a very different read compared to much of what’s out there.

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the publisher or author. This book has been provided by Bold Strokes Books for the purpose of a review.

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novel, 264 pages/81000 words
Heat Level
Publication Date	01-February-2017
Price	$9.99 ebook, $16.95 paperback
Buy Link	https://www.boldstrokesbooks.com/books/becoming-you-by-michelle-grubb-2027-b