M/M Novels

Save the Date Novel

Novel: Save the Date

Author: Annabeth Albert, Wendy Qualls

Genres: Romance, Drama

Released: 2017

Part of Book Series: Standalone

Summary: Randall Young has one duty as his sister’s “man of honor”: to ensure she has the best wedding ever. That includes an epic bachelorette pub crawl, leading him to Portland’s most popular gay bar… and into Hunter Mitchell’s well-muscled arms. A one-night stand with a sexy soldier is the perfect way to ditch that pesky V-card and get himself in the mood for a weekend of flowers, cake, and nuptials.

Hunter wants to blow off some steam before he stands up as his best friend’s best man. He’s already married to his military career, not looking to settle down. He certainly doesn’t intend for the one guy he met (and, okay, got off with) in Oregon to be his counterpart in the wedding party. Or a virgin. Definitely wasn’t intending that. Luckily, they have the rest of the weekend for Hunter to show Randall what he’s been missing.

The more they’re thrown together by the wedding, the more Randall and Hunter grow together outside the bedroom… which is dangerous because there’s a lot more than 2500 miles standing between them and a happily-ever-after. If they want a future beyond their wedding weekend hookup, both must find the courage to take a chance on love.


Post’s Author Opinion:
Note: This is a personal opinion, it does not reflect YaoiOtaku’s official position towards the novel.

Ugh, where do I start? The book started off pretty well, got me interested. It seemed to be a fun read and I did enjoy most of it, until the last three chapters when I almost seriously thought about dropping it. But, well, only three chapters to go so I went ahead.

We have an unlikely pair here, Hunter, a military man, and Randall, an astrophysicist. Right from the start Hunter rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t say why because he hits a lot of the things I like in a character, but he felt kind of… slimy. As I advanced I started liking him more, though, so that’s good. Randall was fine, I thought he was fun at first, but as I read, I got to not like him very much. He was this pretty great guy until he wasn’t. I have no idea what happened there, but things shifted a little to the left and all of a sudden Randall was acting dumb. No, he was plain stupid, claiming Hunter owed him an apology for some mysterious reason. On top of that, what started like an interesting fresh book turned into a heap of clichés one on top of the other. Going through the last few chapters was a struggle, it all went downhill really hard after the ‘I don’t recognise you anymore’ line.

The book also felt a little rushed and there was no actual plot development or character development or any kind of development. The whole thing happens over the span of a long weekend (who even throws a wedding weekend? Just how loaded are these people?) so the relationship didn’t even begin to get deep, yet the main characters went through all kinds of emotions (supposedly, because none of those really reached me). It kind of reminded me of those short parody films that go through a whole relationship, from first date to break-up. Not sure that was an emotion the authors wanted to evoke.

So yeah, what started promising turned into a cringe fest for me. And don’t get me started on how cheesy it got or about all the stereotypes. Or about whatever the side characters were doing, or not doing.

I really tried, this is the fifth book I read from Annabeth Albert and out of those five I really only enjoyed two. More like one and a half. Needless to say I’m probably going to skip any other books from this author.

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About the author

kujaku

One fateful day I came across the anime 'Gravitation' and I've been hooked ever since.
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¹most of my novel reviews can also be found on goodreads under the username nigma-tll
²most of my manga reviews can also be found on myanimelist under the username Nigmatillium