This was what he’d been struggling to understand since the beginning. If they were cursed, why would the signs lead him to the person who might activate it? The only explanation was that the universe, instead of being indifferent, or kind, wished for him to suffer. And Corbin couldn’t believe that. It wasn’t what he’d ever known. The sky and the trees and the grass and the seasons—no, the universe wasn’t vengeful. And Corbin was so small. [loc. 2243]
Alex Barrow, a successful New York pastry chef, suddenly finds himself without job or boyfriend: at a loose end, he returns to his hometown, Ann Arbor, where he takes over his mother's coffee shop and transforms it into an artisan bakery.
Corbin Wale is one of his first customers. He's aloof, unsociable and strangely familiar, and Alex thinks he's the most beautiful man he's ever seen. Some days Corbin will sit in the coffee shop for hours, drawing as though his life depends on it: other days he's nowhere to be found. Alex gradually pieces together Corbin's story: an outcast at high school, openly gay (or at least not denying it), speaking only to animals and not to his classmates. What Alex doesn't know is that Corbin -- brought up by two elderly aunts, now deceased -- is, like all the Wales, under a curse. Anyone he loves will die. And yet he can't help the attraction he feels for Alex...
This is a sweet M/M holiday romance, very wintry -- though note that the major holiday herein is neither Thanksgiving (boyotted and critiqued by one of the protagonists) nor Christmas, but Chanukah. Corbin feels truly strange -- almost fey but wholly explicable as human -- and there are intriguing hints of the supernatural that never overwhelm the real-world romance. The secondary characters were likeable and well-rounded, and the small-town setting (with its prejudices as well as its sense of community) made me think of old Christmas movies. The love story between Alex and Corbin worked especially well because Alex accepted Corbin, with all his oddness and his imagination: this is something I appreciate a great deal in a romance.
And there was a resonance that nagged at me all the time I was reading this: aha! The author notes that this is her M/M take on Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, aunts and all. Plenty of originality here, though, which is probably why I didn't identify the homage.
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