Leap The Hard Way Home Book #3
Gay Fiction, LGBTQ Science Fiction
Lilith Frost
Oct 6, 2021
Kindle
600
Amazon
Review by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Guild Review Team
Wow. I guess I’m a Lilith Frost fan, since this is the third book in her “Hard Way Home” series and the fourth book of hers that I’ve read and really enjoyed.
In my elderly mind, Lilith Frost is a young writer. There is a certain lack of discipline in her writing that feels “young” to me. There are also moments when the characters in her books sound like my own twenty-something children. That always makes me smile, and sometimes makes me laugh out loud. Such snippets of unexpected humor are wonderful.
Whatever her periodic disregard for the details of grammar might be, they are more than overwhelmed by Frost’s enormous imagination and intense understanding of her characters. The wildly wide-ranging plots in this series, which veer from space travel, to post-apocalyptic America, to crazy futuristic technology, to fae, werewolves and vampires—all of it somehow comes together in an epic narrative that totally sucked me in and made me care for the people. And also made me think.
It’s not just the romantic triad at the center: Bryan, Brennan and David; but also the rogue werewolf, Corinthia; and Bryan’s more-than-human daughter Indira. Each of these folks gets microscopically close study from their creator. In each book, our understanding of the characters gets deeper. In this third book, Indira is the “Leap” of the title, but she is not the most important person. We learned in book 2 about Bryan (aka James) and his bizarre life. In the third book we learn a great deal more about Corinthia (aka Jane North) and her relationship to the world of werewolves. Most importantly, we dig deeply into the stories of Brennan, his big brother Colm, and David.
The dirt-poor Irish boys and the spoiled English toff seem an odd crew, even before the other-worldly American Bryan gets dropped into it. I was totally gripped by the angst and the truthful struggle of their three-way marriage. David is a hot mess, a fussy, priggish type all too familiar to me. Brennan and Colm are far more messy than mere archetypes. David, it so happens, is also the only purely gay character in a story whose players run the gamut of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. Frost is very intentional in this deliberately loose assignment of gender and sexuality. She helps me embrace a world outside my own post-Stonewall Kinsey 6 perspective.
In the end, David’s plight as an unwilling werewolf, and Bryan’s role as an unwilling superhero, somehow knit the whole thing together into a multi-faceted journey of self-discovery and family creation.
I’ve never read anything quite like this, and while this volume appears to be the last book in the series, there are a few loose ends. I wouldn’t be against reading another one. Just saying.