This book is so fucking cute!!

Actual rating: 3.5 stars

It's a good book. Wonderful story, important topics. The mix of these two characters is awesome.
So, why the low rating?
While I greatly enjoyed the story, I had a hard time picturing the main characters. It wasn't until VERY late in the book that it actually says that Isaiah is black. It does get mentioned that his son is biracial a bit earlier but even that comes too late for my liking. That gives them the possibility for a much deeper connection than I thought they had.
While this might not be important to others, I feel like a person's cultural background does change how they perceive the world and how they act. And above all, which problems they face in the world. While these problems don't necessarily need to be addressed if they are irrelevant to the story, knowing more about a person helps me understand them better. Imagining how they live and why they do certain things. I would have loved to get that extra bit more: more about the people, what they do, how they are, their thoughts, just more.
I'm still glad this book exists and that I have read it. I hope you'll enjoy it.

*I received a free copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

Robin Covington has the magic touch when it comes to writing MM romance. The feels, angst, and heat in this one are what brings the story to life for me. The characters are fantastic and engaging. They pulled me right into this one and wouldn't let me go. Isaiah just grabs a hold of my heart. He's known love and the pain of it's loss. He has a big heart helps out Victor and they leads to feelings Isaiah is not ready for. Victor and Isaiah have a ton of chemistry. They couldn't be more different in personality, but they fit. Only can they both take the risk on love?

2.5

This book was okay. It didnt blow my mind, and I wish it had. The premise of a marriage of convinience lured me in, but I never felt connected to the characters.

There were good moments, chapters that were well done, but overall, it wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to feel this in my bones.

Perhaps starting with a romance after having only read fanfic for a month was the poor choice, BUT I mean, I gave this book three seprate tries and I was still only able to muster a "okay, sure." At best.

The ending was good, but the middle dragged the angst and since I hadn't already warmed to the cast I went from meh to irriated. The feeling persisted, so I took another break, and yeah, it picked back up to a middle. So, I left feeling okay.

This was my first Robin Covington read but it won’t be my last! I loved the opposites attract trope & the couple was engaging. The ending touched my heart - great HEA! Again, a good quick sexy (and heartwarming) read!

Merged review:

This was my first Robin Covington read but it won’t be my last! I loved the opposites attract trope & the couple was engaging. The ending touched my heart - great HEA! Again, a good quick sexy (and heartwarming) read!

3.75 stars I liked this a lot. was a lot smuttier than I was expecting and I didn't like the way that everyone (except presumably the authorities) knew the marriage wasn't real. that aside it was good

Alas. A very very cute and tropey plot, very very poorly executed. I would genuinely prefer for books not to tackle race and homophobia if it's just going to be done so shallowly. It started well enough, I was engaged and ready to like it, but things steadily went downhill. The plot was rushed, the character interaction was minimal, the events were nonsensical. Again, this was very cute, but also bad.

Oh boy this book. It's kind of amazing how sometimes authors manage to write textbook examples of abusive relationships without realising it.

I was very excited to read this book, as the premise sounds wonderful. I quite literally pounced on it and was left disappointed and angry. God, I was so angry by the time I finished. I was promised a non-binary russian activist ballet dancer falling in love with a black widower nfl player with a son. I got... this book.

I have so many issues with this book that I don't know where to start. There is barely any development for Victor and Isaiah as a couple. They meet, they fuck and are immediately in love. We never get anything explaining why these two are suddenly in love, they just are. When Isaiah suggests they get married, we don't see how he feels about the decision or why he suggested it. You'd think Isaiah, the man still grieving his husband after three years (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with grieving someone for years), would have something to say about the fact he's marrying someone he barely knows, no matter the reasons? We get a lot of "oh no I can't fuck him bcs that's unethical and I might fall in love even more", but nothing about the actual marriage.
Those two as a couple are mess. A horrible, horrible mess. I wouldn't mind the characters by themselves, but together, they made me back my head against the table. Their relationship is horrible. They spend half the book yelling at each other and they never, ever talk through any of their arguments. They yell at each other, ignore each other for a day, and then fuck to resolve it and then go back to ignoring their problems. They spend most of the book in denial about what they need out of a relationship and they never talk. Ever.

What made my skin crawl was how the "activism" was handled. Isaiah repeatedly tells Victor to "keep that bullshit on the down-low". He, the black gay married man calls a gay rights activism "that shit". Oookay. No. He repeatedly calls activism bullshit and never gets called out on it. It's horrible and damaging. What's worse though is that whenever something happens, such as reporters getting into Victor's face about Russia, Isaiah then yells at Victor, as if it was his fault. He repeatedly yells at Victor for apparently hurting his kid by association and please don't do that.
So whenever something bad happens that's out of Victor's hands, Isaiah makes it his fault and yells at him. And of course Victor is his dependent now and can't escape.
That's literally abusive behavior. Cut that shit out.

Then, around 80% in, we have some disgusting hate speech thrown our way. I understand the writer wanted the readers to understand that Evan's classmates are bad, but reading those lines? As a queer person, it made me feel horrible. It made me feel horrible and disgusting and I can't even imagine how triggering those lines could be for others. Don't make me read such disgusting hate speech in a gay romance novel, jesus christ. But that's not even the worst part, no. We get repeated and much worse version of all their previous arguments about activism and then Isaiah's kid calls him a coward for never doing any activism. Right, let's unpack this bit.

So first we have Isaiah blaming Victor yet again for having his "activism bullshit" "harm his kid". Because Evan defended himself from bullies spewing horrible violent hate speech. That is somehow Victor's fault. Random people's homophobia is Victor's fault, yet again.
Then we have Evan, Isaiah's kid, calling Isaiah coward for "not doing any activism". Later on Evan has to explain his father the concept of "straight passing." So let me get this straight. You're telling me that Isaiah, the twice-married openly gay black nfl player with a queer kid, has A) no concept of straight passing and B) has never been an activist??? His existence alone is activism! Every queer person just existing in this world is a form of activism. Someone as famous as Isaiah being openly gay is already so radical, it's obvious the author has no idea how much his existence alone would mean to people. But since he never says the "right words", he's a coward who never helped anyone, because the author says so. God, that made me so angry. Not to mention we actually don't see any "activism" being done on the pages. Victor talks about doing activism, but actually... doesn't. So I'm not even sure what the author is on about.

There's also Isaiah's passive-aggressive homophobia towards Victor and his slut-shaming of his best friend that he never gets called out on and made my skin crawl. Also in the version of the book that I got, Victor was supposed to be non-binary (one of the reasons I picked up the book so that was a huge disappointment), but given how that bit was erased from the blurb, the publishers agreed there was no basis for that. There were also a lot of grating inconsistencies, but in the context of the rest of the book, I'll let them slide.

There were things I liked. Isaiah's family were wonderful and the book had a really strong start, but then it all started falling apart. By 50%, I knew I wasn't going to like it and by 80%, I was angry and despairing. Missed potential is so much worse than just a bad book.

Also on my blog.

First of all: there is no genderfluid character in this book.

I’m pretty sure the author didn’t write the blurb/didn’t have control over it, but whoever is at fault for this should sit in the corner to think really hard about they did. I had never heard of this book or this author before and only got to know about it because I saw people being excited about the supposedly genderfluid character on Twittter. When I saw that it involved sports and ballet and had black main character as well, I was thrilled. It seemed the kind of romance made just for me.

But Victor isn’t genderfluid. He never, ever, thinks about his gender during the story. He refers to himself as man all the time and doesn’t even hint at being genderfluid. If it weren’t for the blurb, I wouldn’t never have thought him to be anything but a cis man. Because that’s what he is. But since he’s a more or less androgynous gay man who likes makeup someone thought it’d be good idea to say he’s genderfluid in the blurb? I guess?

This is false advertisement, this is a mess and this is frankly dishonest. I hope the blurb is changed at some time so genderfluid/non-binary readers don’t get their (our) hopes up just to be disappointed.

But speaking about the book itself… I didn’t like it.

His Convenient Husband unfortunately reads like a first draft. The writing is cliché and not that engaging and the characters make no sense at all. The conflicts are forced and come out of nowhere, which then forces the characters to act out of character. An example: one minute Isaiah is reluctant to even go talk to Victor (who is at a bar drinking because his asylum request was denied) but then when he gets there he takes two drinks and proposes to marry him to keep him safe. Like, what? And it didn’t even seem like he did because of the drinks, since not once he considers this or regrets proposing. The book is full of moments like this: the characters make choices or speak things only to create conflict and make the plot move. It’s one of the biggest Because the Plot Said So I’ve read recently.

And that (if we ignore the whole genderfluid thing) was what ruined the book for me. The characters are so inconsistent it was impossible to like or relate to them, and that along with the poor writing made His Convenient Husband almost painful to read. Which is a pity because I did like some of its themes (like speaking out when you have the platform and things like that).

In conclusion, His Convenient Husband had an awesome premise, but the execution failed to make it a good book. 2 stars.