Lightning in a Bottle?

Last year, I blogged about Something Like Spring, book 4 of author Jay Bell's appropriately named "Something Like" book series. At the time, I hadn't necessarily planned on continuing to read the series... yet here I am, just shy of a year later, having finished book 5, Something Like Lightning.

"Something Like" is... well... something like a gay romantic soap opera in literary form. Book 1 set up a love triangle, and then books 2 and 3 approached the relationship from the perspective of the other two men in the triangle. Book 4 represented sort of "The Next Generation" of the saga, moving the existing characters into supporting roles and spinning up a whole new love rhombus to explore in new books.

This new book focuses on Kelly, a character we met in book 4 who was dealing with a lot of rage and no good place to put it. His is a tale of what it's like to "have loved and lost" -- though those two things aren't really as intertwined with each other as it might sound.

If you've come this far in the series, Something Like Lightning will probably work for you. Arguably, the formula is starting to wear a little thin... but also arguably, the formula is the point here. Don't go expecting it to change much. There's pleasant wish fulfillment built on finding "the one for you," and nice representation you don't get in more mainstream romance fiction.

On the subject of representation, Something Like Lightning is looking beyond just the LGBT label. Kelly is a young black man, and he's missing one leg below the knee. Writers should be able to write with empathy about characters who are not themselves, but I think Jay Bell's stretch here has mixed results. Put simply, this book was published in 2014, before Black Lives Matter made more visible aspects of racism and policing (that should have been better understood sooner). Some of the ways Kelly acts in this book simply don't feel credible to me -- where, admittedly, I might not have noticed had I read it years ago.

If Bell stumbles occasionally with the character he's writing about this time, his writing itself seems a bit stronger to me -- or at least, the plotting certainly does. My memory of earlier books in this series was that when the viewpoint changed from book to book, too many scenes were repeated, with the "inner monologue" not quite justifying the repetition. There's very little overlap here in book 5, though; Kelly's story covers a lot of new ground.

I'd say Something Like Lightning manages a B- overall. I find myself in much the same situation I did after book 4: I probably have enough in my reading queue that I'm not sure I'll keep reading this series. But you never know...