Cronic Bookaholic

1.75 stars

Copy of this book was received from the author via Goodreads MM Romance DBML program in exchange for fair and honest review.

High school teacher/student love was definitely NOT my usual trope unless it's a YAOI manga and this story triggered my YAOI alarm just from the blurb!

Malcolm Lemeri was a young man, just off his assisting year to be a full Math teacher in high school. On his first day teaching he got attracted to one student, Lucas Emeret. Mal certainly NOT your usual teacher; he actually initiated the anonymous conversation via personal email to his cute student. A bit stalkerish, to be sure. And in this world of Cybercrime what Lucas did was a NO NO: he replied to the anon communications. Thus, started the ill-fated innocent love affair between the two.

Lucas was a bit neglected by his parents since they found out he was gay. He had to have different toiletries as not to defile theirs, had little to no food at all and even had to take part time job to pay for his gas. He even got locked out of his house when his parents went on a trip out of state. The situation ended up with him staying at Malcolm's house for a few weeks. And Lucas's parents didn't call or look for him at all. Weird?
Again, I rarely found this sort of circumstances outside from Yaoi realm. Although I assumed this book set in Australia or NZ (winter in August? Certainly not in US or UK).

I actually enjoyed this story in the beginning. But the plot was just confusingly convoluted. Started from when Lucas "lived together" with Malcolm, things turned to bizzare. For people who barely knew each other, the amount of trust and easy rapport they built were alarmingly quick and way too easy.

And then, halfway into the story, after so little interactions from others, the name "Mitchell" suddenly introduced as Lucas first crush, and Mal - feeling guilty of his "affair" with his own student - encouraged Lucas to really date Mitchell. Soon after, the accident happened...

Worry not, it didn't end up there. There were still period of coma, amnesia, a kinda fake dating, etc before the closing. Busy plot, yes?
Very. And they were Just. Too. Much.
I went from enjoying to confused before turning annoyed then bored throughout the pages.
I tried to like this book, sadly it just didn't work for me!