Mmmmmm, "hard sell". Does it refer to what a powerful presence and persuasive man Danny is? Or that Tobin, as the little brother, has the devil's own job selling his independence to his family? or Danny's and Tobin's attraction for each as deserving of a relationship? It's a good title, but a little harsh.

In the hands of narrator Tyler Tetsuda there is such a gentleness in the way these lovers talk to each other. Danny in particular. He is all serious, lovestruck, in denial devotion. The younger Tobin is heart wrenchingly abject, frustrated, despairing, when he's not in Danny's arms.

It all sounds a bit soapy, but it absolutely isn't in my books. Even though I cried a few times ... from the pain of heartache and thwarted love!

How would I have come across such a hidden gem if I hadn't been referred to it when I read someone's list of best romances - thanks whoever you are!

...

Oh, I just read the terrific comments below that draw out more to think about with this novel. The person who says it is slow and repetitive is not wrong, also the people who say things in the plot clash and clang. However, by the end I'd forgotten the pitfalls, and perhaps they successfully mimic the chaos of Danny and Tobin's drama.

I too loved that the novel has some Asian community context (I don't want to make too much of this and paint it as a minority novel or some such thing).

Great cover by the way. ( )

DNF, stopping at 21% because I can't dredge up interest in the next chapter, which looks like more of the same. The pacing so far is both glacial and repetitive, and yet there was also an annoying jump in time? I know, I can't explain that, either.

The author seems to have some knowledge of the financial world (I wouldn't know) but fails to keep narrative tension. The first is just research. The second is critical to good story-telling. ( )

Good writing but unfortunately a lot of plot points that I didn’t really enjoy reading.

My big issue with this book that I want to state first is the role of lying in this plot. Danny's lying is the cause of a majority of this book conflicts and I almost never like that as a plot point. The particularly frustrating thing is that it really didn't feel like that needed to be the cause of the conflict. The conflict could have been the fact that Tobin and Danny are on opposite sides of a work situation and the person they are both working for is a bad person. This business element really took a backseat when I was expecting it to be the main focus. Things about this were brought up that went nowhere, like the weird aside into sex trafficking, which will always drive me crazy because of the way sex trafficking statistics are used to make it seem like a much bigger issue than it really is. I just wanted less lying from Danny and more outside business-based conflict.

As far as the characters go, they weren't bad but I never felt like I actually got a sense of them as characters beyond a few character traits. Like Danny is married to his job but isn't super happy in it anymore and Tobin wants to be independent of his family. There were also times that these felt like they were weirdly overlapping. Like at one point Tobin seems to be expressing dissatisfaction with his job even though that wasn't really part of his plot and Wei, Danny's friend and Tobin's brother gives Danny a speech about allowing others to help him, which seems much more Tobin's issue.

Tobin and Danny have also known each other basically their whole lives and slept together seven years before the start of this book. Because of this, their attraction at the beginning felt really sudden and almost like insta-love because we never get to see their growing feelings for each other. I don't always like flashbacks but I think in this book they would have been nice so we could see how they first got together and it would make their attraction for each other seem less instantaneous.

As I said, the writing was good in this and it was really more of a plot that I don't tend to like that made me enjoy this less. I would still read the second book in this series and I think this author has really good stuff ahead of her, this one just didn't quite work for me. ( )

Interesting Dichotomies. This book, for me, was more about the interesting dichotomies than anything. You get a MM romance... with both an FF couple as side characters and set within the Asian community, which isn't overly common. (Maybe not as hyper-macho as wildfire firefighters, but seemingly near that level in rarity.) You get a hyper successful financial type... who isn't being his normal hyper successful self, and in fact is desperate for a win and who comes from... less successful... beginnings. You get a black sheep who feels he must prove himself apart from his ultra-successful family. And you get the particular blend of tech and finance that I could have felt was a bit too close to my own "real" world (where I work in IT for a Fortune 50 financial firm) that it could have been *too* real. And yet it all worked. And worked well in fact. On the actual romance side, you get a fairly standard will they/ won't they / this is a freaking romance novel so you know they do. You get the whole "best friend's sibling" dynamic, with its usual problems and resolutions. And you get a *crap ton* of angst. If you want your romance novels bright and breezy... this aint it. But if you want a romance novel unlike most you've ever seen before... this one is probably *exactly* that. Very much recommended. ( )

This is my first book by this author and the start of a series. I will diffidently be reading book 2. I really liked the story once I figured out the direction the author was trying to move the story. From the beginning, there were two plots...one involving competing work issues and one involving family issues. Each plot could have easily become the main plot and had the story advance around it. I became aggravated fairly soon into the book with the attitude of Tobin's brother, Wei. He treated Tobin like a baby and tried to make decisions for him like he was 6 years old...and more aggregating was that Tobin and Danny actually allowed it and tried to base their relationship around it!! I don't know very much about Asian culture but it seemed fairly unreasonable considering that Tobin was 26 years old. Overall it was a good beginning for what I hope will be a longer series than most books of the m/m genera. ( )