A drumming gig with one of the world’s biggest up-and-coming stars. The looks and charm to get him any woman he laid his eyes on. All the friends he could ever ask for.
But something was always missing.
That is, until he receives a letter, telling him that he’s a father to a fifteen-year-old boy.
Now, with the addition of his son, a love interest he never expected, and a whole new set of responsibilities, Sebastian finds himself happier than he’s ever been.
But old habits die hard, and when life finally gives him everything he wanted, he’ll have to find a way to keep his past from ruining the present.
Comment: What made me interested in this book was actually the sequel. I saw it recommended somewhere, it would feature a young man fearing how to tell his rock star father he was gay and I thought it would be an emotional book to read. Then I saw the father had a book too, this one, and the blurb made it look very appealing so I decided to start with this, to read in order.
In this book we meet Tabitha, a career woman who is raising her nephew since his mother has died. However, Greyson is now a teenager and she feels she needs help which means that when she finds out letters her late sister kept, where the identity of the father is revealed, Tabitha decides to contact him and let him know he has a son.
She is surprised by how quickly he replies and shows up to know Greyson and even more so to see how good looking he is. She decides to not let that get in the way since she wants to keep things easy for her nephew but, of course, they are more alike than what it first seems.
Sebastian is a drummer in a rock band, he is an easy, laid-back guy and not that angry to discover he's a father. He also feels like he wants to peel of Tabitha's layers, she intrigues him like no other but it seems she hold on to so many rules.
Will these two find more in common than what they think?
Well, what can I say about this novel... it was certainly not the amazingly heartbreaking story I envisioned nor the cute and warm romantic comedy I hoped for instead, once the first pages broke me out of my expectations.
By the cover, I thought this would be something sweet, a little simple in execution but with enough emotional punch to sustain it.
I could see the tone of the book was less intense than what I imagined but more than Sebastian's personality (lighter than anticipated too), it was the superficial way things were dealt with that made me bring the grade down.
I mean, there are important subjects in the works here: Greyson lost his mother, his mother's behavior and how it affected her demise and those around her, how he would connect with an unknown father until that moment, Tabitha's desire to provide and to be proper but clashing with her carefree youth...
However, despite these things being addressed somehow, I found the overall style of the story to be too simple, the feel of everything was based on an execution that wasn't really complex. For me this means the book had several boring parts and the characters were not developed as deeply as they could have. Therefore, they reached their goals but I failed to have any connection with them.
I think the relationship between Tabitha and Sebastian takes too much of the plot. It's obvious they will end up together and it was good how we got to learn small things about them and how they suit one another through this and that. I just think more focus should be given to Sebastian and Greyson and Sebastian's relationship with Tabitha should feel more natural or more romantic. It actually started to feel like a task to be solved, there was even another love interest for Tabitha which was totally unnecessary and the plot was set on something really thin.
I'd rather have the story to be only about relationships because the secondary stuff was irrelevant, except perhaps, Sebastian's family: they were all great.
For a teenager who lost his mother and finds out he has an idol of his for a father, Greyson seemed too bland. The way he evolves and interacts with the others has its moments but he does feel very basic and not that deep as a character. I'm a little worried to see how he goes from what we see of him in the end of the book (for all purposes, happy) to how he is described in the blurb of his book. I'm not talking about his person, but his attitude towards life. Let's see...
I also would have liked more scenes of him and his father. At some point everything felt so easy...as if the author wanted this done, the words to sound well but the emotion wasn't always there.
I'm still going to read Greyson's story but now I'll have lower expectations regarding the type of execution I might find.
This story had great ingredients to work out and unlike other readers, I didn't dislike Tabitha nor her issues, but the way she and Sebastian so quickly hook up, how he so quickly likes her, how quickly she goes from wanting to dislike him to have sex with him, how they both don't sit and talk to Greyson, how things are simply expected to work between them... I just think the book turned out to be boring. It could be more touching or funnier, depending on the author's choices, but it just went nowhere for me.
Grade: 5/10
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