Grey, Andrew. Love Comes Home. [Senses series]. Dreamspinner Press. 2014. $14.95. 162p. PB. 978-1-62798-661-8.
Greg is a single gay dad with a ten-year-old son Davey who loves baseball as much as Greg did when he was that age. In fact, Greg even played in college. Davey, however, is going blind, and he and his father must come to terms with what this means for their lives and how they will cope moving forward. In the midst of this trauma, Greg meets a guy named Tom at a party, and they start dating.
This book feels much more like a quasi-inspirational novel of nontraditional families overcoming obstacles than a romance. The focus is far more on helping Davey overcome his rapid onset blindness and much less about everything else that kind of got shoehorned in. Both Greg and Tom tend to come off as two-dimensional characters: an overly-caring father, defensive prickly Greg would do anything for his son, and Tom is the rich guy with a heart of gold who just wants to help. Immediately after he meets Greg, Tom decides that not only are they going to start dating but he’s also going to set up a beep baseball program (a version of baseball created for the blind) for Davey. Just because he likes to help.
Cramming the start of a romance into 162 pages is a tall order, and these characters don’t come off as believable. So many other characters are thrown in to act as voices for the author that it’s hard to keep track of everyone, for example, at least two other same-sex couples, a young girl, the ex-wife, the ex-wife’s boyfriend, and Tom’s best friend from New York who still has the hots for him.
The characters are so supportive and immediately on board and the narrative is so sweet that the novel left me looking for conflict outside the son’s blindness. The ex-wife who is borderline negligent towards Davey and lives on the other side of the country is presented as being the bad guy. As in some other m/m fiction, the female character tends to be a caricature. Some of these characters are in other novels from the series, and their appearances seemed to be a check-in that they are doing absolutely perfectly.
This book is recommended for libraries with large m/m collections. For smaller collections, other titles may be more appropriate.
Mack Freeman
