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Sep. 20th, 2020 10:23 amGiven the year it's been I've actually read surprisingly few romance novels, which is going to give it less heft than I mean when I say that Aster Glenn Gray's Honeytrap is I think the best romance I've read this year. It's just very good!
Honeytrap follows Daniel and Gennady, an FBI agent and a Soviet agent, who are assigned to work together on a mission to find a lone gunman who fired a relatively useless shot at Khrushchev on his tour through the United States. No one actually expects them to succeed on this, but both sides see it as a potentially useful opportunity -- Gennady's sleazy boss would like Gennady to gather blackmail material on Daniel, including honeytrapping him if at all possible, and Daniel's bosses want him to convince Gennady to defect.
... and in the meantime, Gennady and Daniel get to take a really nice road trip! They talk about books and eat at diners and inevitably have to share motel rooms with only one bed and fall a certain amount in love, because that's often the kind of thing that happens when you spend quite a lot of time with someone -- but life is complicated, and people's lives take different directions, and falling a certain amount in love with someone you can't quite trust on a road trip across the country is a large chunk of but in no way the end of this love story, which spans thirty years and a whole lot of Gennady and Daniel's lives.
The thing I love most about this book is the length and complexity of the relationship dynamics -- it's in no way Unwise Lust At First Sight, you get to see these people growing to like and (perhaps unwisely) trust each other on the page, and the strength and nature of their feelings is often unequal at different times as they hit different points in their lives. ( Broad spoiler for the back half )
I also extremely appreciate that this is also not the kind of book about a Romance Across the Iron Curtain where it's assumed that the happy ending will by default involve the character from the Soviet Union coming to golden America. It reminds me a bit of Crash Landing On You in the way that it validates and centers Gennady's relationship to the Soviet Union, and parallels it to Daniel's relationship with the States: ideology and propaganda and legitimate flaws abound on both sides, but your home is your home and the people you have there, and in order for the romance to succeed that needs to be balanced. It's really well done and really good, and also consistently surprised me in ways that I enjoyed! I did want a longer last section but that's mostly because I was enjoying the whole thing so much that I truly did not want it to end.
Honeytrap follows Daniel and Gennady, an FBI agent and a Soviet agent, who are assigned to work together on a mission to find a lone gunman who fired a relatively useless shot at Khrushchev on his tour through the United States. No one actually expects them to succeed on this, but both sides see it as a potentially useful opportunity -- Gennady's sleazy boss would like Gennady to gather blackmail material on Daniel, including honeytrapping him if at all possible, and Daniel's bosses want him to convince Gennady to defect.
... and in the meantime, Gennady and Daniel get to take a really nice road trip! They talk about books and eat at diners and inevitably have to share motel rooms with only one bed and fall a certain amount in love, because that's often the kind of thing that happens when you spend quite a lot of time with someone -- but life is complicated, and people's lives take different directions, and falling a certain amount in love with someone you can't quite trust on a road trip across the country is a large chunk of but in no way the end of this love story, which spans thirty years and a whole lot of Gennady and Daniel's lives.
The thing I love most about this book is the length and complexity of the relationship dynamics -- it's in no way Unwise Lust At First Sight, you get to see these people growing to like and (perhaps unwisely) trust each other on the page, and the strength and nature of their feelings is often unequal at different times as they hit different points in their lives. ( Broad spoiler for the back half )
I also extremely appreciate that this is also not the kind of book about a Romance Across the Iron Curtain where it's assumed that the happy ending will by default involve the character from the Soviet Union coming to golden America. It reminds me a bit of Crash Landing On You in the way that it validates and centers Gennady's relationship to the Soviet Union, and parallels it to Daniel's relationship with the States: ideology and propaganda and legitimate flaws abound on both sides, but your home is your home and the people you have there, and in order for the romance to succeed that needs to be balanced. It's really well done and really good, and also consistently surprised me in ways that I enjoyed! I did want a longer last section but that's mostly because I was enjoying the whole thing so much that I truly did not want it to end.
