Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Amazon Link: Amazon
Fearne Hill puts her heart and soul into her books, and she also does everything in her power to make each of her stories a different experience. They don’t just entertain; they inform and make the reader think. “Oyster” has that in spades.
Once more we are on the beautiful little island off the French coast where “Salt” took place. Instead of salt farmers, however, we’re with a family of oyster farmers—a father and two sons who carry on a tradition going back over a hundred years.
Nico is a tatted bad boy-turned-dutiful-son. In his late twenties, he is something of a player, but mostly because no woman has ever struck him as “the one.” It is a familiar trope, and a comfortable one for readers like me.
At the end of a long night of harvesting oysters with his father and brother, Nico rescues a young woman who is staggering around in the chilly surf at dawn. There is something rather mythological about this scene and its setting—a sea nymph in distress? A goddess in disguise? The woman is very drunk, and Nico helps her back to her luxurious beach house above the dunes. Then he recognizes who she is.
Well, to start, this isn’t technically an MM book, since it is about a man falling in love with a woman. In fact, with the whole LGBTQ+ rainbow, there’s no G in this book at all except for Nico’s lifelong best friend, Florian, the subject of the first book in this series, “Salt.” I (a lifelong G) was glad to have Florian on hand, even in a supporting role, since his presence gave me a sort of an emotional anchor as I ventured on this journey with Eti and Nico. As Eti herself says in the book, the G and the T are totally different. This story covers a lot of unfamiliar territory and stretches the boundary of what MM fiction is.
Nico, an insistently straight man, is the revelation here. Hill digs deep into his heart to find a romantic hero that nobody—least of all he himself—has ever seen before. Both Nico and Eti have traumas hovering over their lives. Interestingly, Eti herself says that her trauma, which will be life-changing, is nothing compared to what Nico faces. “Oyster” is the tale of a man becoming more.
I can’t really say more about this because I am avoiding spoilers. This was not an entirely comfortable book for me, but I have learned to trust authors to know where they are going and where they want me to follow. Fearne Hill knows what she’s doing, and surprises us along the way.