“But this was Ellis. Ellis! The guy who kissed me. Ellis! The sexy soccer player who invaded my dreams every night.”
In a word: Maybe read the thing? I’m thinking that this book just wasn’t for me. There really wasn’t all that much I really liked about it. At most it was a ‘meh’ read for me. The two leads are Cole and Ellis; Cole grates on my nerves most of the time (which really sucks because the majority of the story is told in his first-person point of view), and Ellis doesn’t seem to have much personality beyond ‘walking sexuality crisis’. A lot of Cole and Ellis’ problems getting together could’ve been prevented by them just communicating like the adults they are supposed to be (they’re both a few years into college), but they don’t, naturally, because drama. There are also a few friends of Ellis’ that show up quite often, but I still can’t really decide what to feel about them. On the one hand, they’re nice guys, but on the other they also kinda rub me the wrong way (a part of that is due to the large-ish focus on religion I wasn’t expecting). Also the story just trucks along with misunderstandings and low-key drama until suddenly there’s some major hate that shows up near the end. That felt kinda weird and out of place. On the whole I’m thinking that the story just wasn’t the right fit for me; the humour fell flat, the narration got on my nerves, and I couldn’t really make myself feel much for the two leads.
The Summary: (from Goodreads) It’s easy to become cynical when life never goes your way.
Cole Reid has been a social recluse since he was fifteen, when he was outed by his high school baseball team. Since then, his obsessive-compulsive behavior and sarcastic nature have driven away most of the population, and everyone else hates him because he’s gay. As he sees it, he’s bound to repulse any prospective friends, let alone boyfriends, so why bother?
By the time Cole enters college, he’s become an anal-retentive loner—but it’s not a problem until his roommate graduates and the housing department assigns Ellis Montgomery to move in with Cole. Ellis is messy, gorgeous, straight, and worst of all, a “jock”!
During a school year filled with frat buddies, camping expeditions, and meddling parents, Cole and Ellis develop a friendship that turns Cole’s glass-half-empty outlook on its head. There must be more to Ellis than a fun-loving jock—and maybe Cole’s reawakening libido has rekindled his hope for more than camaraderie.
[available for purchase at Dreamspinner Press, Amazon.ca, Book Depository, Chapters, and Barnes & Noble]
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS
The Series: This is the first book in the Jock series written by Wade Kelly. Each book in the series is about a different couple, one half of which is (I’m assuming) a jock.
The Trigger Warning: This book contains instances of homophobia and racism, and hate crimes.
WHAT I LIKED:
- Ellis: Although I got frustrated with him over some of his behaviours, Ellis Montgomery was probably the only character in the book I actually liked. Though, having said that, I really didn’t find that there was much to him. It really doesn’t help that I can’t remember actually getting anything from his point of view. Ellis is one half of the romantic couple in this book; the jock roommate from the title. He’s assigned to live with Cole when Cole’s previous roommate graduated and moved out. There’s a bit of friction between them at first, which is pretty much all on Cole, but they do eventually become close (not that we actually see it happening, but whatever). Ellis is a bit of a quiet guy with a small group of close friends. He’s on the college soccer team so that’s where most of the people he hangs out with come from. He’s big into sports, but he’s also big into school work. He’s an English major, and I think he mentioned his partial scholarship being an academic one. He both does and doesn’t fit Cole’s impression of the average jock. He’s also going through a bit of a sexuality crisis during the story, where he’s both attracted to Cole but unsure of whether or not he actually wants to identify as gay (he is, though, no real way around that). When I wasn’t getting annoyed with him about his back-and-forth interactions with Cole, I thought he was a pretty sweet guy. All around generally inoffensive and lowkey funny at times.
- The Comic Relief: Ellis has two really good friends at college, Rob and Russ. The two of them sometimes got a few laughs from me whenever they were around and I really think that one of their main functions in the story was to provide humour. Cole’s more cynical brand of humour is what we usually get, but Rob and Russ seemed to be there to lighten things up a bit. I really liked these two in small doses. Their banter, though sometimes a bit juvenile, was usually pretty funny. As long as things didn’t focus on them long enough to get awkward, they were a good addition to most scenes.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:
- The Writing: The other half of the romantic pairing, Cole Reid, is rude, sarcastic, cynical, and very ornery. That said, I’m mostly putting it down to the writing as to why I couldn’t get myself to like him much. The story is mostly written in Cole’s first-person point of view (there are a few chapters from the third-person point of view of other random characters), and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t even Cole’s personality that turned me off to him, though he did grate at times, but I just couldn’t make myself like the writing. This is not good first-person writing, not to me at least. Not that I think it was much better in the third-person sections, but it was more annoying in first-person. Cole’s chapters are basically written in his voice, which got very annoying very quickly. Cole himself I didn’t have much of a problem with; he’s sometimes uptight and very negative, but overall I thought he was a good enough guy. I just couldn’t get past the writing, and that made me dislike him. A bit unfairly, I feel. He and Ellis were pretty good together, anyway. Although the writing did make the sex scenes a bit of a chore to get through (the first one especially made me twitch, which was less about the writing style and voice and more about the direction things ended up going in).
- The Comic Relief: Rob and Russ make for some good laughs, but when they overstayed their welcome I got annoyed with them fairly quickly. Though, really, the biggest peeve I had about these two were their opinions on Ellis’ coming out. They’re both Christian, in a way that made religion a bigger part of the story than I was expecting (or wanting). When they find out that Ellis is gay they both say that they need time to come to ‘understand’ it. Also that they think the idea of Cole and Ellis kissing in front of them is disgusting and maybe they shouldn’t do it until Rob and Russ have prepared themselves? Or something? And something about trying to understand God’s plan about the whole thing? It all really just rubbed me the wrong way, and really made me think less of the two of them on the whole. Like, they didn’t go nuts about the whole thing and jump straight into hate crimes, and they didn’t outright reject Ellis or Cole, or inform them that they were immediately headed to hell. But I really think that referring to two people’s expression of love, something that straight people do all the time without getting comments, as ‘disgusting’ and ‘something they need to come to terms with’ is pretty gross and damaging in its own way.
WHAT:
- Low-Tech College: There’s a point in the story where Ellis breaks his leg during a soccer game and ends up staying with his parents for a bit. He’s not able to go to class so he has Rob and Russ bring his assignments back and forth from the college. It was at this point where I had to really side-eye the writing (more than I already was) because what? This story takes place in modern day, as evidenced by Ellis constantly playing his Xbox and using a cellphone and talking about FaceTime and texting and whatnot. There is absolutely no way that he doesn’t have a laptop and that his professors don’t use the internet to get information to their students. Sure, it isn’t mentioned anywhere that he actually has a laptop but I’m just assuming he has one. Or that his family at least has a computer he can use. It makes no sense that Ellis, while at his parents’ house, can’t get his assignments via email or Share Point or whatever, complete them, and then email them back to his professors. That’s not how college works in this day and age. I went to a community college in bumfuck nowhere Canada and even we used email to get assignments to our professors, and there were online resources the students could use to get assignments and notes and whatever. This is really just the author showing his age.
- Mrs Montgomery: There’s a chapter, after Ellis breaks his leg and has to go home for a bit, that’s written in the third-person point of view of Ellis’ mother. That was a weird chapter, and kinda made me side-eye Ellis’ mother a bit. What she seems to boil down to is a middle-aged housewife who is unhappy with her current lot in life and is trying to hold on tight to the last of her children she feels is still in her grasp. The whole thing was pretty weird and off-putting, especially as she was inadvertently making things more complicated for Cole and Ellis (who were sort of fighting at the time) which made her come across as unsympathetic. Also she treated Ellis like a young child while he was under her care, which was just odd. Also there was a scene later on where she accidentally walked in on Ellis and Cole having sex in their own apartment into which she walked uninvited and without knocking and then Ellis had to apologize to her about it, just… why?
WTF:
- Mike: Up until this point in the story, which is more than half-way through, the tone has been pretty consistent. There’s mention of Cole being the victim of a hate crime while in high school, and that was horrible, but other than that the story has been fairly light-hearted in terms of homophobia. And then we get a chapter from the point of view of one of Ellis’ friends/teammates/person he hangs out with (?) Mike Foster. Mike doesn’t really show up much at all, and we get the sense that he’s kind of a douche but generally harmless and sometimes funny. His chapter, and the events in it, comes right out of left field. In it he discovers that Ellis and Cole are gay and dating each other and goes nuts. Apparently, unbeknownst to his friends, he’s a racist, homophobic (and probably misogynistic too, though that never has an opportunity to come up… also it’s implied that he intentionally hit a girl in a wheelchair with his car?) fuckwit just waiting for any chance to attack people based on his prejudices. This whole chapter doesn’t really fit in with the tone of the rest of the book; it’s pretty dark. Mike, and some other douchebag friends of his we don’t really know, destroy Cole’s car just because he and Ellis are together. And then, when the police show up, Mike physically attacks Cole and Ellis because… he’s awful. I guess this chapter can serve to show that you never really know what a person can be like, but man did it come completely out of left field.
- Stan: Stan is in charge of housing at the college. He’s the one who assigned Ellis as Cole’s new roommate. As a character he’s fairly mysterious. He seems fairly close with Cole, and Cole is really the only one we see interacting with him. Though his interactions with Cole, and Cole’s reactions to him, all just make me very uncomfortable. Stan doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, and I almost wish he’d been either left out of the story altogether or given a smaller role.
[My Roommate’s a Jock? Well, Crap! was published December 31, 2012; it is available both in print and as an ebook]
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