Title: Love Means… No Limits (Farm #9)
Author: Andrew Grey
Cover Artist: Catt Ford
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Buy Link: Love Means… No Limits (Love Means… Series)
Genre: contemporary
Length: 200 pages
Rating: 2.25 stars out of 5
A Guest Review by Andrea
Review Summary: Unnatural dialogue and an inability to connect with one of the main characters made for a less than stellar read.
Blurb: Bart van Andren, aka Spider, has been running away from life with a lot of chemical help. When he wakes up in a hospital, he discovers he’s picked up a champion. Duane must see something in Bart no one else ever has, because he finds Bart a job at Laughton Farms, where the people show Bart kindness and patience. He might even kick his drug habit with a little help from his new friends Geoff, Eli, and especially Tyrone.
Tyrone Jackson works at the farm despite the disapproval of his traditional black family, who find it suspicious that he works with gay men. Tyrone knows he’s gay, and until now, he’s kept his home and work lives separate.
Though Tyrone resists his feelings for Bart as long as he can—he’s seen enough of the drug culture to last a lifetime—he can’t deny their attraction forever. But before he and Bart reach for more than friendship, Tyrone has to face his family and Bart has to close the door on his past—a past that could put Tyrone, the farm, and everyone he’s come to care for at risk
Review:
I originally started reading the Farm series because one of the characters was Amish. My best friend has told me stories of a local Amish guy who would show up at the only gay bar in the area with his horse and buggy. I’ve always wondered what that guy’s life was like. Anyway, when I saw the cover for Love Means… No Fear, I knew it was a series I had to read. I started it a while back and was impressed with how realistic Andrew Grey’s Amish characters were. The series has since moved on and I’ve kept going with it.
Love Means… No Limits is the latest in the series and my least favorite. I had trouble connecting with the story and one of the characters right from the start. My first glaring problem was with the drug lingo. It put me off immediately. The words were OK but the way they were used in conversation felt forced and unnatural. I kept thinking I would eventually get over it but I didn’t. Actually, the dialogue bothered me throughout the entire book. The conversations kept striking me as being very strange. The characters were either over-explaining their thoughts and actions or they were using language that didn’t quite fit the characters. It was a constant annoyance I was never able to move beyond.
Moving onto the plot and characters, I have to say that I loved Tyrone. He’s a young black man from a large, close, but very intolerant family. Coming out will mean severing ties with his family, but keeping his secret is becoming overwhelming. Tyrone is at a turning point in his life and I wish more of the focus had been on him rather than Bart. I liked it much better when the romance was seen through Tyrone’s point of view. His confusion over suddenly finding a skinny white guy hot was great. Bart never really worked for me. Most of the drug talk surrounded him and my lack of belief in that transferred onto Bart. I simply couldn’t connect with him at all.
Unfortunately, no matter how much I liked Tyrone, my lack of connection with Bart was too much to overcome. I never managed to get into the story, not even the suspense scene at the end. I kept checking the bottom of my screen to see how many pages were left. That’s never a good sign! Other than Tyrone, the only thing making this a worthwhile read for me was an interesting speech by Geoff at the end which introduced another book, By the Creek. It’s a new young adult book which goes back to the original couple, Eli and Geoff. Eli was the original Amish guy and is still one of my favorite characters. The intro must have worked because now I’m intrigued and have to read By the Creek too.