Destined Gay Romance, Contemporary Romance, LGBTQ Fiction
Dreamspinner
June 6, 2023
Kindle
120
Amazon
When Jay and Wallace first meet at an LGBTQ group, they have no idea they’ll be dating six years later. In fact, they quickly forget each other’s names. But although fate continues to throw them together, the timing is never quite right. Finally they’re both single and realize they want to be together... but now they can’t find each other!
With determination and the help of mutual friends, Jay and Wallace can finally pursue the relationship they’ve both wanted for so long. It’s only the beginning of the battles they’ll face to build a life together. From disapproving family members all the way to the state legislature, Jay and Wallace’s road to happily ever after is littered with obstacles. But they’ve come too far to give up the fight.
Review by Gordon Phillips
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
“Destined” by Jamie Fessenden is a truly delightful romance story. The main characters, Jay and Wallace, are well-developed, interesting, and both likeable in their different natures. The writing style is effortless, the pacing good. The closest the story comes to having a glitch is a slackening of narrative tension midway through when the couple have more or less solved their relationship issues and the reader is left wondering what challenges the second half of the story will contain. A little foreshadowing would be helpful here, a sense that the couple were aware that even in the twenty-first century it is not only relationship issues that gays must face. Fortunately, this realization comes quite soon after as the societal challenges are encountered.
Fessenden being one of the most successful American writers in the MM romance genre, expectations are necessarily high. (A recent encounter with his writing, a collaborative novel with F.E. Feeley Jr., Borderland, was highly enjoyable, though an intense love of the supernatural genre led to a few private disagreements (not issues) with the authors’ choices in the supernatural elements of the story.
“Destined” announces itself in the dedication as autobiographical, with the caveat: It isn’t 100 percent accurate, but memories rarely are. And this is our fairytale, so I reserve the right to make us handsome, charming, and maybe even a bit heroic. As a “fairytale,” the question arises as to which of the story’s elements might be deviations from fact, while its status as autobiographical raises a concern about whether a story as based on real events might turn out to be a little flat.
Happily, neither turned out to be a problem—not in the least. The story is excellently told and the characters really came to life; and the little descriptive touches were deft and well-chosen. Also, the events themselves were sufficiently compelling, with no need for more extreme happenings, because they dealt with what is perhaps the archetypal challenge: two hearts searching for love and striving to build a home together—a formula that has gripped readers since the time Jane Austin’s novels.
The story’s alternating point-of-view style, favored by Dreamspinner Press, took a little getting used to. (Even writers of the stature of P.G. Wodehouse were well aware of the effect of discontinuities, which Wodehouse described as an unpleasant necessity of the storyteller’s art and apologized for!)But, as the story developed, the alternating point-of-view between the lovers showed its worth spectacularly; it allowed the author to share what E.M. Forster called “the hidden life” (the subjective inner experience of the narrator) of both main characters.
What is striking is how the inner experiences of the same events are so different for the two lovers, reflecting their different personalities. It is the juxtaposition of each person’s experiences with the other’s necessarily limited sense of them (being viewed from the outside), that creates the depth of the story. For it is in the appreciation and earnest desire to accommodate the other’s nature, both felt and acted upon, that shows the beauty and true nature of love in the nuts and bolts of a relationship. It is this that weaves the story’s magic (the only sources of magic in life being beauty and love in all their forms). The affection and kindness, the consideration shown in Jay and Wallace’s actions towards each other as they build their home together, is what makes the characters truly loveable, the story so heartwarming.
And, given that real literature is supposed to relate the deeper aspects of human experience, “Destined,” for all its being a simple story, does approach that level. It is a pleasure to read and an enriching experience as well, making the reader think about the values and the vicissitudes that necessarily lie in the path and at the core of all our lives.
