Kate Aaron's Reviews > Catch My Breath

Meet Elliot...The kid was on the tall side, lanky, almost dorky to tell the truth, but that didn't stop Danny's gut from reacting. He really was beautiful - with floppy brown hair, huge dark eyes and this milky skin that didn't look like it had seen much of the California sun.

Um...or maybe you already have.



Then there's Danny. Danny in his effortlessly cool plaid shorts and perfectly white polo, easy smile, and that shiny auburn hair he flipped off to the side.

Something like this, perhaps?




Together, they become Larry Delly.



Seriously, it's so blatant it kinda distracted from the story itself. Which is a shame because the story is generally sweet and well-written.

A bugbear. This:

Sara squealed and jumped out of her chair to do a spazzy little dance.
"Oh my God! I can't even!"
"Can't even what?" Elliot asked.
Sara rolled her eyes. "Handle you two? Deal with the cuteness? I just... can't." She started dancing and giggling.

Sara, for the record, is no fan. She's been Elliot's bestie for years. So WTF is with her squealing over him like he's some object? Like his emotional life is reduced to something cute for her benefit. Ugh. It annoys me enough when real-life fangurls do that, but at least they don't know the guys they're doing to about. In a way, they are objects to them. But Sara's meant to give a damn about Elliot, she's meant to know him as a person, not just a member of a boy band. So I found all the squeeing over him to be in poor taste.

But the story itself... sigh... I've heard it before. Over and over from friends who, sadly, have been lost to the Larry fandom. El/Harry getting jealous over one of the other guys playfully feeding Danny/Louis? Where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, TXF. When they were all living in a house together for a TV show. Y'know, just like the boys from One Direction. Or is that Static?

The beard, the fake stories that one of them is a veritable manwhore, even the slightly plaintive note sounded in a interview when the shippers are accused of damaging the actual friendship between the boys with their obsession with them being together. Literally word-for-word I heard the same thing in a write-up of an Alan Carr interview.

The result was I spent more time spotting Larry trivia than actually engaging with the characters O'Shea had created. They became more cardboard than they deserved to be, because this story is genuinely sweet - saccharine so at times. I loved the slow build up, I loved that they didn't hop straight into bed and start humping like bunnies, I loved how effortlessly tactile they were.

Because I knew what the conflict was going to be, I can't say I was particularly moved or invested in the drama/angst of it all. The resolution - to me - fell a little bit flat as well. But it was an entertaining, easy read and I'll probably re-read it again at some point... if only to remind myself what the lawsuit was about ;-)