“I wanted him to have that part of me, the part no one else had ever touched and no one else ever would. The last of my firsts. And it belonged to him.”
In a word: Read the thing. I will admit that things started getting a little slow for me at one point, and I thought that some of the main couple’s behaviours re: possible breakups were a bit worrying, but overall I did like this book and it’s worth a read. Rue initially approaches Erik looking for a nanny for his newborn daughter, and then they somehow tumble headfirst into a friendship and then a romance. The start is a bit rough, but things get better as the story goes on. Rue and Erik tell the story in two distinct voices, baby Alice is adorable (when she’s actually there), and the main cast is well rounded out with Rue’s best friend Dusty, who is just begging for a romance of his own. It’s a great story of first loves and found families and, when it wasn’t dragging, a great read. First person POV is something I can usually take or leave, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I greatly enjoyed it here in Erik’s voice. That man is such a romantic and I loved reading his narration when he was thinking about Rue. I’d recommend this for that alone.
[available for purchase at Dreamspinner Press, Amazon.ca, Book Depository, Chapters, and Barnes & Noble]
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS
The Trigger Warning: This book contains homophobia and scenes of an abusive relationship.
The Couple: Rue Murray is working as a (sexy?) waiter at a club to pay for beauty school. His dream is to eventually leave Delaware and become a hairdresser to the stars in Hollywood. He’s outgoing, flamboyant, and very, very gay. So it’s pretty surprising that he actually has a one-night stand (drunken, but still) with a woman and then gets her pregnant. Seeing that this might be his only chance to have children, and the mother doesn’t want the child, he agrees to take the baby and raise her as a single father. The life of a single father isn’t easy; Rue’s first hurdle is what to do with the baby while he’s at work and school. Desperation for safe and affordable childcare leads him to his next-door neighbour, Erik Van Nuys, who lives in the apartment across the hall. Erik is an author and a bit of a recluse. He suffers from near-debilitating anxiety (he also reads a bit as autistic, but that’s never once brought up so that might just be me reaching) and has no friends or social life at all. He and Rue are pretty much total strangers, but Rue is desperate for childcare and Erik is desperate for money, so they come to an arrangement. Things are a bit rocky at first, especially on Erik’s end as he has trouble with change and interacting with others, but eventually things even out and Rue and Erik get to becoming friends. Falling in love is something that sneaks up on both of them. Rue has never had a real relationship, preferring no-strings-attached sex with many partners over the years. Erik has never even had a crush before, and Rue is the first person to ever interest him romantically or sexually (I personally think Erik might be on the asexual spectrum somewhere, but that’s never brought up, he just identifies as gay whenever he bothers to think of it). The two of them become close little by little, and by the time they realize their feelings for each other it’s too late to stop them. It turns out that getting together was the easy part, but staying together might prove to be a bit more difficult. Rue and Erik are two very different people and, while they are definitely very much in love, they do have to put in a bit of work to keep things from falling down around them. Especially when drama arises that they have to deal with.
The Baby: Alice Kathleen Murray is something that Rue never knew he wanted until he was presented with her. Rue is gay; he’s never had any interest in women, so he never really put much thought into whether or not he’d have children someday. Then he has a drunken one-night stand with a female friend and it changes everything. The friend, Nicole, tells Rue that she’s pregnant and doesn’t want the baby. Rue doesn’t want the baby in the system or with parents who wouldn’t want her (like his own parents were with him) so he agrees to raise the baby. Nicole then disappears from the story altogether; she’s not really a character, I don’t think. As far as babies go, Alice is pretty good. Rue doesn’t have much trouble with her (aside from childcare). The story takes place over the first nine months of her life, so she doesn’t actually do much other than be cute. Actually, once Erik and Rue actually meet each other, Alice more or less becomes a prop for the adults to interact with. Really, she spends most of the time sleeping. One Small Thing is a romance story, so the focus is less on parenting and more on the romance, so Alice doesn’t really feature much. When she’s a bit older she has a few scenes here and there, but she’s never really the main focus.
The Best Friend: As outgoing as Rue is he doesn’t have very many friends, or people he’s genuinely close to. His one constant, though, is Dusty, who has been Rue’s best friend for a very long time. Dusty and Rue are very similar people, both being flamboyant, gay, hairdressers-in-training, but they differ greatly where romance is concerned. Rue is very much the love-‘em-and-leave-‘em type (until Erik, anyway), while Dusty is constantly searching for his one true love. He’s not having any luck, evidenced by Gary, an abusive drunk who Dusty is with for most of the book (until he finally leaves and takes shelter with Rue and Erik). There’s another man after that, but that was mostly a casual thing and he and Dusty eventually parted ways. Dusty actually had a bit of a crush on Erik too, but he didn’t bother pursuing that, both because of Rue’s feelings for Erik and the fact that Erik only ever had eyes for Rue. Dusty has better luck with platonic relationships, it seems. He and Rue are great friends who have each other’s backs and have always been close. He adores Alice, and even becomes close with Erik. The four of them eventually form their own sort of family, and it’s all perfectly natural how all that falls into place.
The Sex: The first couple of sex scenes, or at least, the first few sexually explicit scenes, don’t have much to do with the main couple. They’re actually from an erotic e-book that Erik is reading. There’s nothing really special about those scenes. Actually, the best part of them is how flustered Erik gets while he’s reading them. All the other sex scenes in the story take place between Rue and Erik. It takes them a bit to actually work up to a sexual relationship, but there is a lot of sex once they get there. There’s blow jobs and anal, mostly. The story is told in alternating first person POV, so we get sex scenes as told by both men. Rue’s telling is alright, nothing wrong with it, but Erik’s is by far my favourite. He’s just so romantic about the whole thing. Rue is the first person he’s ever been in love with and had sex with, and he’s overwhelmed with the whole situation a lot. But the love he feels for Rue really shines through the writing and makes him telling the scene one of my favourite things about this book. (Also Erik didn’t suddenly turn from a virgin to a sex god, so that was good, especially given how awkward he is about everything.)
The Writing: I have somewhat mixed feelings about the writing. First person POV can be a bit hit or miss for me, and I kinda had to side-eye this book when it turned out that way. It’s written in alternating points of view that switch mid-chapter. That wouldn’t have bothered me so much except that one POV would leave off mid-scene and then jump to the other POV, but it would jump back a bit so that we could get the other person’s reaction to the previous scene. It’s not that it was done badly, but it personally annoyed me and I would’ve rather not had to deal with it. One reason that I did enjoy the first person narration here is that I loved Erik’s inner narration, especially when it comes to him describing his feelings for Rue. I’ve never been one for romantic musings, but damn if I wasn’t hooked on Erik’s. That man is so in love it’s not even funny, and I loved the way he put things when thinking about Rue. Erik was actually my favourite character in this book, and I really did like the way he was written. He’s an anxious loner and, while he does improve in his interactions with Rue and Dusty, he’s not ‘cured’ of his anxieties (which do cause him a lot of problems) and he’s not made to feel bad about them. He also has a stutter and that doesn’t magically disappear with the power of true love either, so that was nice to read. I enjoyed the progression of Rue and Erik’s deepening feelings, and the family unit they ended up making with Alice and Dusty. I did think that some of the drama later on was unnecessary, and sometimes the reactions were a bit extreme, but I think the resolutions were fine (if a bit drawn out… misunderstandings: why we can’t have nice things). I also thought that the story kinda dragged in some places, but Erik’s narration sometimes made up for that. All in all, I did enjoy reading this, and I do recommend it.
[One Small Thing was published May 4, 2012, by Dreamspinner Press; it is available both in print and as an ebook]
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