Found Family Romance Review: Wake

My rating: 5 of 5 stars / Find it on: Goodreads | Amazon / Genres: forced proximity, grief-to-healing romance, emotionally restrained slow burn, found family warmth, contemporary love stories

Introduction

Wake is a new novel from Anyta Sunday, and fans of her work will be enthralled with her latest story. Readers follow characters who fight their way to the surface, finding their way out of their own grief, coming together to find love and a found family as they surface. This story is deep and meaningful, and readers will empathize with the characters’ journeys because, in the end, we all experience grief in our lives. 

Blurb

Waves

Dylan’s anchor line was cut a long time ago. His life can be packed up and moved on at a moment’s notice. But when the one thing he holds on to—his beloved improv studio—starts to go under, he knows he needs to find safe harbour.

One year. Room and board.

All Dylan has to do is pretend to be someone he isn’t. Play a role that matters far more than it should.

Currents

A charged glance with a stranger outside a Wellington theatre.

A pull he can’t explain, leaving him breathless and disoriented.

Trent is intense, private, and grieving something he refuses to define.

Living together drags and lifts in equal measure. Secrets that feel dangerous. Late nights where thoughts sink too deep. Shared meals, a silly chicken, a riotous grandpa.

A slow, intimate pull towards shore.

Undertow

But grief can drag you out too deep.

Dylan finds himself caught between truth and tenderness, between who he’s pretending to be and who he might finally become. When the past surfaces, they must face what they’ve each been running from . . . and the love they could have if they stop.

~ ~ ~wake is an intimate, slow-burn gay romance about grief, found family, and the courage to stay anchored when the sea keeps pulling you away.

It’s a story of emotional healing and quiet devotion, of two men learning that love doesn’t rescue you from the storm. It teaches you how to stand in it.

Perfect for readers who like:

• forced proximity
• grief-to-healing romance
• emotionally restrained slow burn
• found family warmth
• mature, literary contemporary love stories

Wow, just wow! 

Every now and then, a book really blows me away with the feelings it brings to the surface. Wake is such a book. Much of the figurative language in the story revolves around the ocean, in fact, exploring its volatility, isolation, and renewability, and the human reaction of fear, of looking out onto the vast horizon and fearing what one does not know and cannot see. The ocean is used as a metaphor for both main characters’ deep grief. Wake is used as a double entendre. The first meaning evokes images of coming to the surface, as if waking from a long slumber. The second meaning is found in life’s uncertainties and how events will rock you in their unavoidable wake. 

Anyta Sunday Fangirl

I love Anyta Sunday’s writing style and storytelling. You could even call me a Sunday fangirl, of sorts, so I am pleased that Wake lived up to my internal hype for getting my hands on this book early to provide an ARC review. I come to you, dear readers, with another Sunday success. This story is one you will want to read as soon as it releases on April 7th.

Plot 

Wake follows Dylan and Trent, a whole cast of lively characters that includes an ornery chicken, an ailing but still quick grandfather and his senior daycamp friends, and, most importantly, the spectre of loss: namely, Trent’s dead brother and Dylan’s dead sister. Trent hires Dylan, a struggling actor, to impersonate his dead brother for a year as his grandfather’s health and memory decline. The grandfather has been given a year, and Trent wants his last year to be full of joy and smiles. He’s lied for years, sending postcards home, so his grandfather thinks the brother is just traveling. While Dylan has reservations about this sort of deception, he wants to keep his improv studio open and takes the job. 

Heat 

The obvious tension between the two characters has to be ignored as they share a room, get to know one another, and Dylan finds himself falling not just for Trent but for the whole family. Grandfather is funny, quick on good days, and Dylan finds in their small house a home he has not been allowed to have for years. Dylan has his own grief, his own loss that he carries with him and hides away, and he and Trent are inexorably drawn together. 

Characters

Trent

Trent’s character is complex, a study in reservation and holding back one’s true desires in the name of the greater good. What is better for Grandfather, in the end, is for Trent to be happy, for Trent to find happiness, because Grandfather knows his time is finite. And maybe the whole façade Trent puts on isn’t so much for Grandfather as it is for him. 

Trent acknowledges his attraction for Dylan in such a refreshing, plain-faced way that the reader’s heart breaks when his next line is that nothing can be done to explore it. The smoldering feelings between them have to be ignored for Grandfather. But things reach a breaking point, and eventually those feelings cannot be ignored anymore. 

Dylan

Dylan is flighty, running from his feelings before he can help himself. He’s been rejected, hurt in such a deep way that he avoids his feelings with a determination that is fed by panic and pain. Trent gets him to slow down, to acknowledge feelings he’s avoided for years, and it’s only when he finally breaks that he can surface from his own grief.

Themes

Wake navigates through heavy themes in a way that makes the reader feel as if they are at sea with the characters, fighting our way to the surface and being battered by the wake of life. 

Grief and Healing 

The imagery of grief, feeling like life is passing by while you’re stuck underwater, weaves its way through this book like the currents that batter against the New Zealand coastline. How one finds the surface, works their way through grief that feels like it will never go away or get better, how life goes on and finds a new way, all play into the overall themes in Wake. The setting, the characters, and lines of dialogue all play into the imagery to craft a full picture in a way that’s subtle, artistic and beautiful as much as it progresses the storyline. 

Truth will find a way, love will find a way

Also weaving its way through Wake’s pages is that the truth will find a way to be revealed. No matter what picture Trent wants to paint of who Mikael would be had he survived, Dylan’s self finds ways to push to the surface. Grandfather’s memory might be failing, but that doesn’t matter with how he feels about Mikael and Trent, and how Dylan shakes things up enough for him to pick up on the differences. 

Found Family

Dylan, rejected by his family, finds a new family with his friends at his acting studio. And then he finds another family with Grandfather and the zany cast of daycamp seniors, always getting into some sort of mischief and having fun. Trent has been keeping up a façade of family for years, but having Dylan around changes things, so he learns to let people in and feel like he’s part of the scene, which is more important than a fake image of what a family would have been. Both Trent and Dylan learn that the definition of a family isn’t who one’s genetics are, or how family is supposed to be. Family is who makes you feel as if you belong. 

Recommendation

This book has a lot of depth that readers of MM romance will appreciate. There’s steam and spice, but the greater story is much more impactful. You will root for these characters, cry with them, yearn with them. I highly recommend this book. It’s out as of April 7th, so get it now! 

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I received a free copy of this book via BookSirens and am voluntarily leaving a review. I write reviews on my blog, Goodreads, Bookbub, Amazon, and more. If you want me to read and review your upcoming novel read my review policy and submit a contact form.