 TwoLipsReviews.com
Brandon and Nicholas are two individuals very much in love, and very good together, in music and in life. But because they are very different types of people, their love doesn’t communicate as well as it should. Nicholas needs to hear words, and for him, words spill readily from his mind and heart; for Brandon, words are difficult, especially the three simple ones Nicholas needs most to hear: "I love you." Brandon knows them, he means them, and he lives them; he just can’t find it in himself to say them. By the time Brandon first met Nicholas, after he himself had dropped out of high school to form a band, Nicholas was a well-known gay actor who reveled in acknowledgement of his preferences. Brandon was still firmly in the closet. The moment Brandon spots Nicholas in a play, and hears him sing, he knows this is the man he wants to love, to write music for, and to live with forever. From that point on, they enter into a push-me, pull-you relationship in which both hearts and souls are committed, but only one can stand to make it real. Eventually, a terrible, tragic, event will nearly tear the two completely apart, and to finally make it real at last, Brandon must resort to the one activity he could not bring himself to practice until now: the written word. He will have to recreate his love and passion for Nicholas through writing their story, before it’s too late for Nicholas. This story drops the reader into a boiling vat of intrigue, excitement, and sensuality from the first page and then turns up the heat! This reviewer could barely follow the twists and turns even from the beginning because Carolyn Gray knows how to pen a puzzler and keep the reader loving it. Despite the celebrity status of the protagonists (an actor-singer, and a musician), I found them readily identifiable and easy to care about. A Red-Tainted Silence is a story I highly recommend, and it is definitely on my keeper shelf as a frequent re-reader. Literary Nymphs Rating: 4.5 (of 5) Nymphs Brandon Ashwood is smitten the moment he hears Nicholas Kilmain sing. Intent on meeting him, he finds that Nicholas has disappeared immediately following the show. So taken by him, Brandon begins his focused quest of finding Nicholas in any way possible. Nicholas meets Brandon and quickly sees him as his own knight and savior. He can’t help but fall hard and fast for Brandon from the time they connect, but the road they’ll travel won’t be a smooth one. So begins their career, and more importantly the battle to stay together through everything life throws their way. A Red-Tainted Silence is an emotionally intense journey of love, heartbreak and betrayal. Brandon and Nicholas are an amazing couple who experience life in every way possible and learn to fight for what they want most. Ms. Gray has penned some of the most memorable characters imaginable in this hauntingly dramatic story. The slide from past to present, and back again, is smooth and easy to follow in the creative way she’s shared the lives of these exceptional characters. Readers will find themselves so immersed in Brandon and Nicholas’ lives that the bouts of violence and difficult subject matter will be heart wrenching at times, but it’s ultimately the deep love between them that makes this a tale you’ll never forget. RomanceBooks This is the classic example of a romance that takes you in spite of yourself. I buy nearly all the ebooks that Loose Id publishes in the M/M genre, and therefore I have bought also this book, moreover recommended by an American yahoo group which I participate. I have bought blindly, without really reading the plot or checking the length, and it is this last one that shocked me: I opened the book, in electronic format, at 10.00 p.m., thinking, as usual, to read it in one session, and with my great surprise and displeasure, I found instead that the book was more than 750 pages long!!! Impossible to read it in one shot and above all, did I want to begin such a long book? I put it aside for some evenings, and finally, with courage in my two hands, I have begun to read it: and then the book has made its magic. It is a heartbreaking story about two young people that meet and fall in love when they are about twenty years old, then spend the following 10 years on the ups and downs of their relation, and conclude the book still together, still fighting in order to make this relation work. The book begins from the end, or at least this is what the reader believes: Brandon is at the bedside of Nicholas, who is just after a kidnapping that wounded him in body and spirit, but they decide together that it is worthwhile overcoming their misunderstandings in order to build a future together. All is perfect, thinks the reader, this is the happily ever after of the book... but instead Brandon begins thinking of the past, of the errors he made in his relation with Nicholas, while at the same time in the present some unexpected switches occur. The reader finds himself hurled between present and past alternatively, and he cannot decide if he is more interested in understanding what happened in the past or what is happening in the present... both stories are closely tied, but also strangely far from each other: two parallel stories, but with enough strength to make them both important and enthralling. Brandon is the younger of the two, he was 17 when they met. He felt in love with Nicholas at first sight, and from that moment on, as he says, he has been prepared for the pain to come when finally he loses Nicholas; since the beginning Brandon is convinced that their story cannot last, Nicholas is too beautiful, too much centre - of - the - stage, too cool, too much... everything, so that sooner or later he will realise that Brandon is not on his level and will leave him. Brandon sees himself like a simple shadow when compared to successful Nicholas; his deep inferiority sense not only make him see Nicholas through rose-tinted glasses, but also distorts his perception of himself. While he remembers of their past, painful, heartbreaking memories overwhelm him until his mind jams to get somehow rids of the sorrow; the reader can see it because, while at the beginning memories are precise and detailed, step by step, while the story goes on, they get more and more chaotic and haphazard. Moreover Brandon, towards the end, remembers only of the ugly moments and omits the happy ones, even if there must have been some of course, since his love for Nicholas is still so strong. At the moment of Brandon’s black out, the story’s front changes: till that moment it’s Brandon speaking in first person, now it’s up to Nicholas letting us discover Brandon’s pain, understand his bitter awareness that he egoistically abandoned Brandon, just when Brandon was more needing him. Even if it’s Nicholas the one who is physically suffering, and that we find since the beginning in a hospital’s bed, Brandon suffered of unimaginable mental pains. It is through the words of Nicholas that we learn to know Brandon, the talented, the beautiful one, a kind and the faithful person. He’ll never let Nicholas down, in spite of the uneasiness that their life together brings to him; he will leave only when Nicholas pronounces the words of their separation, but only to be back once again when Nicholas needs it. Nicholas, who is not as beautiful as Brandon sees him; Nicholas, who, even if two years his elder, is the more childish between the two of them. Nicholas, who while reading Brandon’s diary, suddenly understands that something is wrong: why does Brandon speak only about their sad moments, when they had so many happy ones? And then, from his words, we start to learn about the pleasant moments of their life together. Close to the end the book focuses on the present, on Nicholas’s fight to bring Brandon out of the dark abyss he felt deeply in. And it will be up to him, the same person who since the beginning Brandon believed would have put an end to their relation, fighting tooth and nail to keep the two of them together.  |
