BLOWING IT by Kate Aaron

BLOWING IT by Kate Aaron

 

Pages: 310

Date: Feb 23, 2015

Details: copy received from Author

Kindle

The blurb:

“Owen Barnes never expected writing to make him rich, much less with a YA novel written for a bet. Being nominated for the Carnegie Medal, the most prestigious award a children’s author can win, is a dream come true. But Owen’s newfound fame comes at a price, and not just changing his surname to Black.

Gruff, gentle building surveyor Magnus Cassidy is the first man to catch Owen’s interest in almost two years. Owen’s agent, Max, might be trying to control his image, but Magnus sees the real Owen: the eyeliner, drainpipe jeans, and sexy underwear, not the Young Conservative in a tweed jacket Max is turning him into.

When a photo of Owen and Magnus appears online, just weeks before the Carnegie ceremony, Max starts damage limitation. Out and proud since he was fourteen, Owen isn’t going back into the closet without a fight, and he refuses to let his agent erase Magnus from his life. Encouraged by his friends, Owen lashes out, not realising his behaviour could hurt the man he’s doing it all for. Can Owen find a way to reconcile his public and private lives, or has he already blown it?

Contents: passive tops and slutty bottoms, bitchy best friends, bad jokes, sexy underwear, an excess of beards, and a smattering of angst. May contain nuts.”

My thoughts:

“...that’s what love is. It’s giving someone the power to hurt you and believing they won’t.”

There’s something magical about Kate Aaron’s writing. When I read the Free Men trilogy a few months ago I fell in love with Kate’s words, her characters and her descriptions of the world they live in. Since Free Men is a fantasy while Blowing it is a contemporary romance, there are an endless amount of differences between the stories. There are powerful similarities as well though. Both books contain characters so clearly drawn you can see and hear them. The descriptions in both books are so well worded the surroundings are easy to picture. And both stories draw you in from the first paragraph and refuse to let you go again until you’ve read the last word.

I love that Kate Aaron isn’t afraid to write flawed characters. It is because neither Owen nor Magnus is perfect they work so well. They were real and beautiful, smart and silly, stubborn and forgiving, understanding and unreasonable and totally recognisable because of it.

Although this story does contain its share of angst, this is for the most part a light-hearted, sweet and at times very funny story, yet it deals with a serious subject. How sad is it that we live in a world where people are made to hide who they are because being true to themselves might mean the end of their career. And that is NOT a fictional problem and it is not only a reality for people in the public eye. Only the other day a lesbian teacher entered a competition to win a dream wedding here in Ireland and felt the need to pixilate her image on her video entry.

Kate Aaron spins a web with her words and getting caught in it is a pure pleasure.

I leave you with the following quote, just because I love it.

“People think writing is a wishy-washy sort of occupation, not realising manuscripts have to be bullied into shape, whole chapters cut or rewritten, characters’ motivations tweaked or twisted or, in some cases, completely slashed and burned.”