And Call Me In The Morning by Willa Okati

For me, the worst thing about Willa Okati's And Call Me In the Morning is that it's not a bad book. It just wasn't a book I really found good, either. The book suffers from the same problem I have with a lot of books in the romance genre, which is extreme predictability.

(spoilers beneath the cut)


Not just that our intrepid star-crossed lovers will get their HEA (though I never really had a doubt about that) but even down to the finite, small details like the big anaphylactic shock crisis of Zane and the strawberries. Not only were all these elements introduced in the first third of the book (hello, Chekhov, my friend, we meet again!) but they were signaled, like a flag-man guiding down a jumbo jet. I felt like Okati was shouting, "LOOK HERE, LOOK HERE!" and the most surprising thing about the book, I think, was that Eli didn't take the job at Duke.

At the end of the day, what I like most, what's my greatest narrative kink is the way(s) in which a writer defies my expectations. At no point did I feel like I got that, here.

More than this, the predictability of the book was further weighed down by the lack of any significant conflict throughout the story. If you're going to do the two (ostensibly) straight boys fall for each other trope…

Look, this can go two basic ways that I can see; either there was a latent queerness in them that they realized/decided early on was societally and personally unacceptable and they buried it years ago, only to be brought out by this particular person at this particular time or, after decades of fairly contented heterosexuality, this burning beacon of awesomeness comes along to make you redefine your sexual identity to a different place on the bell curve than you thought. In either case, there's a journey there.

A journey that doesn't really happen in ACMitM, something I find more than a little unbelievable in a story about two men who are 40+years old. Zane is accepting of redefining their relationship from the start, without a visible qualm or second thought anywhere along the way. Zane's panic attack at the end is really more about self-esteem and his fear of being happy than his sudden sidestep into queerness.

Eli, who is, after all, the POV character through all the book's events, seems to have the requisite shaky nerves, but rather than taking us on an internal journey through Eli's qualms and fears and the breakdown of his masculinity as constructed, Okati instead forces Eli's positional shifts based entirely on external (and clichéd) events, like the need to stand up for Zane and himself to their bigoted coworkers or the aforementioned anaphylactic shock scare. Moreover, the need for Eli to 'get over it' feels like it's couched more in Eli's ability to hold hands with (or kiss) Zane in public than to go through a restructure of the person as whom he's always defined himself.

It feels even more damning in the lack of any real, dimensional secondary characters to help pull the slack. The only two women of the piece, Diana and [name] are pretty much there to be the yentas for Zane and Eli. I can't think of a single moment in the story that they were part of that didn't somehow involve them enabling the relationship between Zane and Eli and I, at least, found their characters painted in too broad strokes to even be particularly interesting.

Taye and Richie largely seem to exist to be "the good gays"; Taye is Eli's mentor into the world of gayness and, other than almost killing Zane and bringing about the big "climax" of the story by doing so, Richie largely exists to be Taye's partner and show Eli that gays can, too, have loving relationships. I like them better than the women, if only for their willingness to be That Gay Guy and mentor Eli through his Gay Panic, but there's no more real substance to them than there is to Diana and .

Because the secondary characters feel so entirely functional—existing only to serve a particular plot function—the lack of internal journeys for Eli and Zane feels that much less convincing and that much less (again, for me) interesting. I just didn't care about this story, these guys, their friends. There was nothing there that engaged me on an emotional level and, though Okati's prose is perfectly workmanlike, it tells a great deal more than it shows, which is much less convincing.

Going back to the climax, the trouble there is the same trouble I have with a number of TV shows which is this: attempting to create dramatic tension by threatening to kill off one of the main character only works if the reader/watcher has reason to believe you'll follow through with the threat. JJ Abrams goes out of his way to not kill his characters, even when to not do so creates narrative absurdity and a break in the willing suspension of disbelief. Joss Whedon (and Eric Kripke, for that matter) are held in such terror by fandom because we all know, all too well, that they are more than willing to pull the trigger and will do so with glee.

Within the romance genre, the likelihood that the author will actually kill half of the couple they've spent these hundreds of pages to build is unlikely, in the extreme. And for quite reasonable reasons: people generally read romance to get their HEA. The stories where the protagonists die usually get classed in a different genre.

So while Zane nearly dying from the consumption of strawberries in his shake was supposed to be the huge, pivotal scene of the story, I found it's dramatic effect nearly nonexistent because of a) the long, telegraphing wind-up to get to that part and b) the fact that Zane dying would ruin the romance and there was still another 40 pages to go. Quite frankly, I had no expectation that Okati would pull the trigger, and thus it makes the entire wait to see if Zane will live or die rather flat.

While flawed, it is abundantly obvious to me that at least some of my issues with ACMitM are subjective and taste oriented, rather than an actual fault of the writing or construction process. And, at the end of the day, I feel as though it's an excellent example of a story that is written well enough but that still falls completely short, simply for not hitting the reader's preferred narrative kinks.