A Fine Bromance by Christopher Hawthorne Moss

A Fine Bromance
by Christopher Hawthorne Moss
Pages: 180
Date: August 11 2016
Publisher: Harmony Ink Press
Series: None

Review
Rating: 3.15 to 3.35 out of 5.0
Read: August 3 2016

*I received this book from NetGalley and Harmony Ink Press in return for a fair review.*

Unfortunately this book is just slightly different than I expected. The description, or probably more accurately, the idea that I got from the description, lead me to picture a book a book about two male friends just starting their senior year in high school. With a slight difference from most other boys in the school – one of the two is asexual; the other is transgender (FTM – female to male). They would come together and face the world as friends.

What I found? Well . . . that, but slightly not that. As I noted, the book is only slightly different, not completely different. Instead of an asexual and a FTM person meeting and becoming friends, the book instead has more and less than that. Robby, the asexual of the pair, hasn’t a clue what he is (at first) – he enters the book knowing that there is something ‘different’ about him (no sexual attraction to either women or men), but not why that might be, or why he is different (the feeling is ‘why he is broken’ though I am not sure if that exact phrase is used by him). There’s a really huge amount of stuff (okay, not really, but more than I wanted to read), about how he is able to give himself an erection, but only if he happens to rub himself. Picturing anyone at that moment, male/female/etc., does nothing to add to the situation. Seeing/feeling/hearing/being near men or women does nothing to spontaneously generate a ‘boner’. And, added to the ‘more than expected part’, is the part wherein the two, the asexual and the FTM, decide to have an actual romance (while it is true that the book includes ‘bromance’ in the title, I’ve only ever heard/seen it used for two men who are friends – not two men who have a romantic relationship with each other).

And so.

Andy has great parents and brother. When he realized that he had been born in the wrong body, and finally got around to expressing this belief to his family, they accepted him. Helped him. The father even changed jobs and the whole family moved so that Andy could go to a new high school so that he wouldn’t have to interact with people who only know/knew Andy as a young woman. He is self-conscious about his small size, and how people might react if they found out that he calls himself a boy, is a boy, but currently inhabits the body that has characteristics more in keeping with a woman (breasts/pussy). As he explained it in the book, Andy has the brain of a man, and the body of a woman.

On his first day at his new school, Andy bumps into a bunch of young men. Who immediately accept him as a man. And befriend him. One in particular, a man named Robby, is a tad friendlier than the others in the group, at least in the sense that he helps this other boy try to find his first class, and develops a closer connection to the others in the group.

As is somewhat normal for me, I did what I kind of always do in situations like this – I started off, at least when I turned to the plot section, describing things in reverse order. At least in terms of POV. Since the book opens in the POV of Robby. Even the first meeting between Robby and Andy is from Robby’s point of view, despite my reversing it here. Though Andy does have his own point of view, and it does begin immediately adjacent to this first meeting.

This is an interesting book. There are certain issues that I had with it – like how much kissing this ‘asexual’ man got into (hey, he’s young and doesn’t know what he is and is somewhat frantically attempting to find out, a little experimentation is normal, eh?); and falling into a boyfriend type of relationship at a drop of a hat was also unexpectedly faster than I expected to find (well, considering I didn’t expect a relationship at all, any relationship, I guess, would have been quicker than expected, eh?). But still, despite my ‘issues’ (expressed and unexpressed (there’s one I thought throughout the book but I do not know how to express the idea – the part wherein the writing was a little less than smooth than I would like, though that isn’t exactly the issue, and hence my indication that I do not know how to express this issue), I still enjoyed my dip into this book.

I’ve read several books now that include asexual characters. It is vaguely strange how many of them involve said characters kissing a lot and getting into relationships, but eh. Overall, I would probably rate this book somewhere around 3.15 to 3.35 stars.

August 3 2016