A review by wardenred
Pretty Pretty Boys by Gregory Ashe

dark emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The past stayed with you. The past was like poison, and it built up in you like poison, like lead in your tap water, until it killed you.

Funny thing: I kind of struggle to pinpoint the genre of the book. On one hand, it's frequently recced in m/m romance circle alongside many of my favorite mystery-romance hybrids like the Big Bad Wolf series by Charlie Adhara or The Spectral Files by S.E. Harmon. Books where the crimes and the investigations are inherently important to the plot, sure, but there's always a classic romance arc with all the predictable beats at the heart of the story.

Here, on one hand, this is more like... just a mystery where one MC happens to be gay, the other is somewhere between bicurious and undecided, and they happen to have moments of chemistry while one of them actually starts off in a (failing) relationship with a completely different guy and then pursues yet another different guy as a rebound. Nothing happens between the MCs over the course of the story. Their interactions, more often than not, are focused on the investigations and on figuring out how to be work partners given their complicated history. The main complication being that one of them bullied the other relentlessly while they were in high school.

In other words, practically none of the things you expect to happen in a genre romance novel do not, in fact, happen. And yet I keep thinking about this book as a romance, because of how the story is told. There's the dual POV with switches happening at very specific emotional highs and lows. There's that particular way both leads focus on each other whenever they interact. And there actually are those familiar romance beats, too, except they're super spaced out and the progression of the romance arc is slowed down to something beyond glacial. This is an almost 400-pages book, and if you apply the Romancing the Beat structure to it, I think by the time the whole novel ends the MCs have barely crawled to the late Phase 1, hovering somewhere in the beginnings of the Adhesion step.
Poking at the internet for spoilers tells me they're gonna get together at the end of book 4, which tracks.


So, I guess, it's a Schrodinger's romance: if you only look at what happens in the book, it doesn't belong under the genre umbrella, but when you look at how the story's told and if you're good at identifying the beats and the vibes, it absolutely does. Which alone makes it a super interesting experience for me. I'm very much a fan of all things slow burn, by the way, and I do feel like super, super slow is the only way a relationship with such a heavy background can develop. Like, honestly, even with this crawling speed of developments, I don’t feel like I’m fully sold on this relationship due to the background; if I was expected to see these two as romantic partners by the end of book 1, I’d probably bail. Still, this kind of pacing of the romantic storyline feels weirdly unexpected.

The mystery component is paced pretty slowly, too, and in this case, there's no such easy justification. Honestly, I don't think I liked the mystery part very much, sadly. I think to keep the reader invested in an investigation there has to be some sort of urgency, or importance. Here, the narrative was constructed, again, in a way more suitable for the romance genre. The MCs kept investigating the thing, kinda. But there were all those asides into how it makes them feel, and how their pasts, both shared and independent, define their view of things, and also structural asides about whatever's happening around them with work, people in their lives, etc. The mystery was the central plot that was handled like a plot device existing to help us to know the leads, and it resulted in lots of clunkiness.

What I really enjoyed about the book was the prose and the strong atmosphere created with each descriptive passage or a strategically placed one-liner. Every location came alive on the page in a matter of seconds, and the changes in the characters’ mindsets and emotional states were always conveyed clearly, even when the reasoning behind those changes wasn’t yet clarified. The author has a clear talent for picking out metaphors that enhance the mood. Another strength is the sheer vileness of villains: the bad guys here are mainly nazis/white suprematists, and this is one of the few times when, reading about such villains, I came rather close to understanding why they are that way and what makes them believe they’re doing the right thing. (I want to make it very clear that the book does *not* justify these views or excuse the characters who practice them! All of the awful badness is portrayed for what it is. But the villains are very convinced and convincing and that’s what makes them so scary).
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