They say to never judge a book by its cover, but it is also important to never judge a book by its title. Unfortunately for Side by Side by Jordan Clayden-Lewis, I was able to immediately work out the plot by doing both of these things.
Side by Side is a MM romance about a man that moves to Brisbane for a job at a marketing company. I have to say he was a pretty relatable character. LGBTQ millennial, moving to Brisbane after travelling round Europe, he ticked a lot of boxes in terms of relatability. However it was these characteristics that made it seem that Clayden-Lewis was either a) determined to tell the reader that he's a millennial gay man or b) someone who had never met a gay man in his life and was running exclusively on cliches.
This is not a comment on authors shoving LGBTQ agendas down reader's throats, but more a criticism on how one dimensional the characters seemed. He made each character's gender/sexuality their entire personality, and made little to no attempt to flesh them out into believable characters. There was one character involved in a weakly written B-plot who sold a bookcase to one of the main characters, but it had zero influence on the actual plot. She asked him to writer her memoirs for absolutely no reason and it inexplicably involved the Vietnam War.
Don't get me wrong, Why are we in Vietnam by Norman Mailer is one of my favourite texts and I'd highly recommend it, but the conflict had nothing to do with the love lives of a twenty something gay man and a widow in her 70s.
It's clear that the author was trying to write a beach read that appealed LGBTQ readers but the cliched language choices and obvious plot lines fell short. If you want to read something that requires less energy than reading a grocery list I'd recommend it, but if not I wouldn't waste your time.
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