The Mask He Wears by Fae Sutherland and Marguerite Labbe. Another book where there was so much I disliked about it, I barely know where to start.

So let's start with the premise: Ian is the secretary to lawyer Stephen. Ian has a crush on Stephen, Stephen has a crush on Ian. There are two basic problems that I have with this:

First of all, we're told that Ian is head over heels in love with Stephen and vice versa, but we never really get to see what it is about Stephen or Ian that's so worth turning their personal and professional lives upside-down for. It's all tell, no show and it's much harder for me, as a reader to be invested in a relationship that I never get to see.

Secondly, there's a huge power disparity between lawyer Stephen and Ian the secretary that never gets addressed. And it's not just that Stephen is a lawyer and Ian is the admin (I'm sorry, secretary belongs back in the 50's, yo), Stephen is also Ian's boss. While I'm willing to let the author take me on a trip to either explore the unequal power dynamics or create a way to make the relationship work despite the wild inequality of power, the power disparity has to be acknowledged. I need to know that the author knows it's there, the elephant in the room.

(Spoilery beneath the cut)
The fact that Stephen felt that a work event was the right place to make his move on Ian is, in and of itself, a demonstration of his power. Power that he has and Ian doesn't. The consequences of someone as important as Stephen making a pass at an admin are (generally) far less and (potentially) far less career-endangering than the consequences of Ian rebuffing those same advances from his boss. And though Ian holds supreme confidence that Stephen would simply go back to business as usual if Ian were to reject him, it comes across more as naïveté than "Stephen is just that awesome".

Truth be told, the actions and thoughts of both men come across as incredibly naïve, throughout the book. TMHW is another example of hyper-romanticism, where communication between the parties is open, free and without reservation from the opening scenes, where both parties are confident in the other's interest and that the interest and commitment level is mutual and equal. Without having ever discussed it, even once.

Though they don't seem to have any relationship outside the workplace, both Ian and Stephen are confident that they are in love with each other and that their love is life-long and committed. By the time they've had their first kiss, they're talking love-of-my-life permanency and Ian, at least, is horrified and outraged by the suggestion that they date and get to know each other better before taking their (potential, not-yet-existing) relationship to the next level. Only pages later, Stephen is ready to throw away his marriage (of convenience) and his career at the law firm for Ian…with whom he's never even had a single date.

Now personally—and as someone who has had a gentleman or two, in her time, confess that he's her soulmate within a very short period of time (and yet, still after some dating!)—I find that all creepy and weird, not romantic. I know that's probably blasphemy, given that it's such a staple trope of the romance genre, but there it is: creepy and weird. Unless we're talking soul-bonds, but this is not that kind of story. I'm not saying you have to sample the milk before you buy the cow, but my goodness, at least go and look at it. Don't buy it sight unseen off of craigslist, to stretch a metaphor to breaking.

Pulling back to the nuts and bolts, for a 45 page story, it reads fairly slowly, bogged down in pages and pages of exposition and rumination with very little dialogue or action. More, a lot of the exposition is repetitive, stating the same information in slightly different ways within sentences of each other.

Though the middle of the story was moderately stable, the beginning and end of the book have POV changes within the same scene and without any real transition, creating irritation and confusion. There's also a lack of consistency in POV; I'd say a good 80-90% of the story was from Stephen's POV, leaving only about 10-20% for Ian to get his say in. Though I don't think a story has to be 50/50 equal, I do feel that if you're going to split the POV between your two protagonists, there should be a better representation and a better reason to have the other person's POV than to just fill in the cracks.

I also felt that, at least in the beginning, the authors didn't have a good grasp of Stephen, in particular, writing his personality with explicit inconsistencies that took me out of the story.

If you tell me that your MC is in a marriage of convenience, because it fits with his career and then tell me that he doesn't care what people think and never has, if you tell me he was isolated in high school and only becoming BFF with his future beard-wife gave him the security to 'put himself out there', but you tell me that he doesn't care what people think and never has, if the whole freaking premise of your story is the masks that people wear and you tell me that your MC doesn't care what people think and never has, I call bullshit. Similarly, if you have your other MC just about having the vapors in outrage at the thought of being someone's piece on the side, I don't buy it if—before anything's been said or done but a declaration of love—the first thing he does is show up at his wanna-be lover's office, strips off his clothes and demands some sexing on the desk. Just…think it through, okay? No, people are not one hundred percent consistent; in fact, they are often downright contradictory, but come on. There's a difference between in-character, psychologically grounded inconsistency and plain ol' sloppy writing.

Overall, it all felt like sloppy writing.