Sole Support By Kaje Harper

One of the things that I love about many contemporary MM romances is that their characters feel real.

Yeah sure, you still come across a lot of  novels whose characters live some author's version of an aspirational life, but there are plenty of novels rooted in realistic lives.


Kaje Harper's Sole Support felt even more realistic to me, mostly because in many ways, I am Kellen.

Here is the publisher's synopsis:

Kellen is short on cash—at least until his first novel starts to sell—but he has plenty of friends. None of them, unfortunately, share his love of books. For that he turns to IM chats with Mike from his online book group.

Though he manages to coax the shy, socially inept pathologist into a real-time meeting, Kellen has no intention of letting his new friend become more than a casual lover. Shaky finances and ailing mother aside, self-sufficiency is Kellen’s prime directive.

Mike considers himself a nerd of the highest order—short, bespectacled, prone to blurting out the wrong thing at the worst possible time. Meeting Kellen face to face is the biggest risk of his life, and he wonders if they’ll get more body parts together than just their faces. 

First meeting leads to first date—first everything for Mike—and soon Kellen’s faced with breaking his just-friends-with-benefits rule. Yet as his elderly mother wanders deeper into senility, Kellen wonders if it’s better to lean on Mike rather than fall.


What I think

Except for a few minor variations, like the fact that I'm female, in my 40s and outside North America, I am Kellen. Or rather, some parts of our lives are eerily similar.  My mother also has stroke-inducing hypertension, except she also has diabetes on top of that.

For a long time I didn't want to acknowledge that she was not well. And when I did, I moved two hours away to live with her. I'm also a writer and self-published.

I'm fortunate that my mother accepts help, but we have had awkward conversations about money, power of attorney etc.  So yeah, Kaje Harper was eerily accurate about what it takes to take care of a sick mother and I commend her for it.

The book is also well-written, the characters well-drawn. Even secondary characters, like Patrick, Kellen's neighbour, and Corinne, Mike's sister, were well-rounded enough for me to care about. They were not just just there to support the main characters, but people  with their own stories that one gets curious about.

The only small detail that bugged me is that Mike gained a lot of confidence later in the book, and we were not given any explanation as to why or how that happened. Or if  there is an explanation, it was too subtle and I missed it.

As for the story itself, the fact that it's familiar to me made it no less gripping. Even as Kellen made the classic care-giver mistakes and I wanted to shout "NOOOOO, DON'T DO THAT!" I still got it, because I made similar mistakes. And I rooted for Mike to have enough strength to hang in there, but not get taken over by the needs of the sick person too.

And I loved the fact that for all that the story deals with such a real and not particularly glamorous subject, Harper still managed to infuse the story with love, romance and hopefulness.

I recommend Sole Support highly. Get yourself a copy.