Wonder Boy Owned Review 2 stars

This book is more of a sports romance and less dark romance with powerplay. It reads like a first draft, which is a shame because it’s a good story with layered, fleshed out characters, and an interesting plot, all of which I liked very much. There are a few things about this book that are brilliant. The romance doesn’t involve the athletes but rather deals with people in the league front office as they navigate the legal troubles that go with league ownership and operation. Hello! That’s a fresh awesome idea and I loved it. There was just enough legal wrangling to be interesting, but not so much that it slowed the story.
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The story revolves around Global Combat League (GCL) a fighting league. I was never quite sure if it was MMA style or boxing, but that’s not important to the story. What this book does need is to go a few solid rounds with an experienced, tough content editor. The book is 444 pages long according to my Kindle. I found myself skimming through dozens of pages to dig out the story. Honestly the story could’ve been told without a third of those pages and would’ve been a much stronger book with not a good story but a great one.

The three main characters are Jack Doyle, Alex Mercer and Alex’s father Richard. Yes, two of the main characters and the author have the same last name. I have a suspicion why, but until the series is complete, I won’t know if I’m right or not.

The story’s center is Alex. We know a few things about Alex. He’s six-one, thirty years old and freshly barred. These facts are repeated over and over, sometimes multiple times on the same page. The author didn’t trust his readers to remember these facts, and they have nothing to do with characterization, so there is no reason to repeat them. Eventually Alex does turn thirty-two, thirty-three and thirty-four, ages that are mentioned too much. At the start of the book, he’s hired as Jack’s personal attorney. The story spans five years. Four of those years Alex has a forced separation from Jack which is often referred to as thirty-six months, something that confused me since four years is forty-eight months.

What we know about Jack Doyle is he’s fifteen years older than Alex, at five-ten is shorter than Alex with a denser body. Again, facts that are repeated too often. Even Alex’s therapist uses Jack being a few inches shorter than Alex as something demeaning and questions why he’d be in a relationship with a man shorter than him. I thought that was odd.
Cutting just those needless descriptives would probably shave a dozen pages out of the manuscript.

Richard, Alex’s father, doesn’t like Jack. Not because he’s gay but because he he’s a self-made man. Jack literally fought his way to where he is. Jack also knows what a loving family is. He’s a threat to Richard’s plans for Alex. Richard considers Jack crass and classless, beneath his son, who is highly educated, came from wealth and has been Richard’s thirty-year project to create a super-lawyer. A fact the reader is constantly reminded of. Alex is finally reunited with Jack after finding a loophole in his father’s plan, another absolutely brilliant bit of plotting lost in a mire of too many words.

BDSM is fun because there is so much to explore. This couple doesn’t use a lot of toys, but the BDSM and the rules that go with that sort of relationship are solid. The sex scenes, except for one, are flat. The author spends too much time telling the reader what is going on. Facts the reader already knows are constantly repeated. Instead of using less words and sentence structure to let the reader feel the scene the author tells the reader everything happening before, during and after sex, then does do a bit of showing. The majority of the sex scenes are in the first quarter of the book, and there are none between Jack and Alex after that.

There is one scene where Alex has to decide to sign a contract or not. It’s a pivotal point in the story. The whole act of picking up the pen and the decision took up four or five pages, which I ended up flipping through without reading just to get to the end. All those pages could’ve been condensed to 3-5 paragraphs, been much stronger and had more of an impact. The whole book is filled with pages of info-dumps, many are time stamped in some manner.

One of my biggest pet peeves is sloppy POVs. There were too many places the POV changed with no segue or break, and I caught a few times where the POV changed within one paragraph.

There is no true power play or imbalance between Jack and Alex. Jack sees from the start submission is something Alex truly wants and needs. It’s sweet and Jack is a good caretaker. Alex is free to say no to anything they do, a solid foundation to BDSM. Yes, Jack is technically Alex’s boss, but I never felt that they weren’t anything but equals at work and in bed. The one place the author does shine is showing with little actions sprinkled throughout the book that Alex and Jack do, eventually, come to love each other. Another example of great writing that is unfortunately buried under too many descriptives and info-dumps. I didn’t think this was a dark romance, but that’s subjective, others might feel differently. There is a huge powerplay and imbalance between Alex and his father that Jack is caught up in and tries to protect Alex from.

This book ends on a cliffhanger. It’s neither HEA or HFN, thought I think at the end of the series we’ll get a HEA. This book ends on a To Be Continued.

I was given a copy of this book through Gay Book Promotions for a fair and honest review.