Salt Island Love Book 1
Contemporary, Gay Romance
Independent
Apr 10, 2024
Kindle
230
Amazon
When was the right time to tell someone that silver flames were shooting from their hair? And that your own tranquil green desired nothing more than to tangle with them, if only it could escape a malevolent orange flare hounding your every move?
Over-stressed businessman Charles Heyer is not like most people. With a rare medical condition that scrambles the senses, he experiences emotions as flashes of colour, giving them the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. Alone in his over-vivid world, a devastating bereavement leaves him mentally scarred and recuperating on the picturesque French island of Ré where, through a chance encounter and a good deed, he is introduced to Florian, a flirty local salt farmer.
What with trying to protect the island salt cooperative from a corporate takeover and keeping a watchful eye on his errant grandfather, handsome Florian is not as carefree as he appears. Falling in love with this odd Englishman is as unexpected as it is welcome. Both exploring new feelings, the lazy days of summer stretch out for miles until a visitor from Charles’s London life throws their peaceful idyll into a kaleidoscope of chaos. And, all of a sudden, the island’s glorious palette of colour turns several shades darker.
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
Fearne Hill is very good at this, and yet she does it without getting trite or predictable.
Within a somewhat classic British class-crossing age-gap romance scenario, Hill introduces her readers to strikingly different characters—Florian and Charles—whose connection, nonetheless, feels like destiny.
What drives the interest in the story is two factors: Florian’s occupation and Charles’s affliction. Charles is a high-powered corporate money-maker from London, recuperating from something serious on the little Isle de Ré off the French coast. Florian is a younger man, fully devoted to his life as a salt farmer, as his family has been for generations.
Charles’s affliction is synesthesia—something I’ve read about but never experienced as part of a narrative. He experiences color in connection with strong emotions. His synesthesia is only an affliction because of his extreme experience of it. Fearne Hill makes this both poetic and intense—ultimately taking the reader deep into a harrowing example of its extremity.
Florian’s only problem is that he is a little lonely. He’s gay, and while the teasing from his local community is gentle and good-natured, he yearns for a companion. Florian is also faced with the evidence of his beloved grandfather’s emerging dementia, and is determined to care for this man who means so much to him.
It’s a marvelous setup. Charles sees Florian as a shimmering silver presence (contrasted to his own forest green). He is as fascinated by Florian’s devotion to his unusual career as Florian is with this somewhat older, obviously wealthy Englishman. He is charmed by Charles’s relatively good French and his gentle kindness.
And that’s it. We get to know both men as they get to know each other—with the crisis coming (as it must come) after Charles leaves the island under pressure from his business partner to return to London and start making money again. Hill manipulates her readers’ emotions with great dexterity, making the final outcome of the story emotionally powerful and endearing.