Review: Autumn's Light, Aurora Rey

I wanted to love this book. It has a lot going for it: two interesting, adult characters, with lives and families and careers. Matt, a lobsterman (female lobstermen apparently declining to be known as lobsterwomen) working in her family’s business, balancing her large conservative family and her gay casual dating life by keeping the two separate. Graham, a naturalist on a whalewatching boat, who has decided after a limited serial monogamist experience to try playing the field. Cue sparks flying, etc etc. And the dynamic between the two of them works, and is a key part of what kept me reading. The erotic scenes were sparking, not over-done, and interestingly varied. IMHO that’s a major plus - many f/f books out there are either painfully bland, clunky, or strangely improbable given that the majority of authors are women and you’d think that would lead to physically plausible scenarios.

I am grateful to Bold Strokes Books for sending me the ARC of this, and have high hopes for some others from their range, but beyond the sex scenes I have mixed feelings on this one.

The two factors I loved most were, one, the side characters - especially Matt’s cousin Dom, a trans guy with a traditionalist heart, and his lady-love Renata. There were interesting characters on Graham’s side of things, but they got less time, I think because they were covered earlier in the series. Second great factor was the level of detail on the lobster-fishing industry. Does anyone else read romance novels to learn new socio-economic facts? Because I think I do. It might be the key reason why romance novels and crime are so easily interchangeable in my reading schedule: good ones of both are a tourist trip through a well-researched present or historical social or economic niche of some sort.

Things I didn’t love: now the first one is a Your Trope Is Not My Trope problem, some people might love it. But basically you’ve got your two leads deciding to embark on casual sex, and the narrative is so heavy-handed about being clear that both of them are fooling themselves. Not just about this one hookup, but about the sustainability of casual hookups at all. (I also… look, either I know very different people to your average romance writer, or it’s actually perfectly normal to hang out with your casual partners outside of the bedroom, and the Friends part of friends with benefits is actually pretty important. I can produce academic citations for this, in fact! But anyway. Heavy leaning on the ‘oh no we did something together the morning after’ trope.)

Done right, ‘commitment phobe discovers actually there is a place in his/her/their life for love with THIS person’ is catnip to me. The latest KJ Charles does it really well, for instance. And then some takes on the trope rub me all the wrong way, and this one did. Your mileage may vary.

Technical problems: beyond my issues with the trope, the pacing seemed off. Too much heavy-handed repeat telling of ‘she was definitely okay with casual sex, yes, never mind that she was daydreaming about their grandchildren’ early on; toward the end the character work got rapidly more complex, only for a whole bunch of new issues re: family to just be left… hanging. Apparently it’s supposed to be HEA that our two leads hooked up, but I for one really want to know how they solved the family problems. No, one happy family mass party scene doesn’t suffice, IMHO.