Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Oakley Hoffman is a walking, talking natural disaster. Not only does he seem to be the only functioning adult in his family, but he also stomps around creating irrational earthquakes with every badly thought-out ridiculous move he makes. He barely survived lockdown, and with life returning to something that vaguely resembles normal, Oakley has landed himself an inconvenient infatuation with his former best friend. Well, if he’s totally honest, he’s probably nursed that crush for years. Yet, this time around, infatuation has brought a bad streak of jealousy to boot.

Force Majeure refers to a clause that is included in contracts to remove liability for natural and unavoidable catastrophes that interrupt the expected course of events.

Book Review

Well, yes, at the risk of repeating myself: novellas are a literay form of their own—you can take them, or you can leave them. I’m more the “let’s leave them (to others)” kind of guy, but there’s one exception: when said novella is written by Sophia Soames. Anyway, as soon as Sophia Soames is written on the cover, I take it, anytime, unquestioningly, and confident that I’ll enjoy myself.

 

No disappointment here, then. Sophia does messy but endearing characters? I love messy but endearing characters. Take Oakley Hoffman, for instance, the main character of her latest novella ‘Force Majeure’. He’s a young German living in Berlin; dropped out of school at a young age and is now finishing an apprenticeship in roofing. Coming from a messy family—parents loved each other but were somehow incapable of living together—he’s not what you could call a happy guy. No, he’s a mess, too. Must be the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree thing (or as we would say in French: “dogs don’t beget cats”).

 

During the lockdown caused by the worldwide pandemic, he’s stuck in his mother’s apartment, and each time he gets stir-crazy he hangs out in the tenement building stairway. There he runs into his former best friend, downstairs neighbor Cemil “Cem” Demirci of the quirky but incredibly loveable Demirci family. Of Turkish origin, they embrace their oldest son’s gender fluidity and not yet fully established sexual identity without a moment’s hesitation. As the flame of Oakley and Cem’s friendship is rekindled, they also accept their upstairs neighbor like their third son. There’s just one problem: Oakley doesn’t want to be friends with Cem. Because he’s in love with the handsome neighbor, always has been, and struggles with deep-rooted insecurities, jealousy, and a total lack of self-confidence, which often push him to lash out with no apparent reason. What he doesn’t expect is Cem’s patience, though, and the realization that beneath his cool and confident façade, Cem hides insecurities of his own. So, when they become aware that they’re meant to be together, the obstacles to happiness seem unsurmountable…

 

But. Sophia Soames is not only their “godmother,” she’s their creator. So unsurprisingly, and I guess that doesn’t count as a full-blown spoiler, there might be a sweet HEA waiting for the readers at the end, one of those where you go “Aw!” and melt because it’s so well-deserved. The two main characters are what you could call perfect for each other; they are the only ones capable of completing, of healing the other person. Realizing that, accepting it, and finding the willingness and energy to push aside any remaining obstacles is a long process—exactly 114 pages long. Now, that could seem long (for a novella) or short (for a novel). Yet it struck me as the right length. Could the story have been blown to novel proportions? Of course. But it wouldn’t have had the same compact, intimate impact anymore, so the novella length suits it really well.

 

I confess that I started reading it one morning, and 20 percent in, I already felt raw and teary, seriously considering either going to work unshowered or calling in sick because I didn’t want to stop there. I couldn’t do either, so I was impatiently waiting for the evening to come and then finished the book in one sitting. It was sweet, sometimes annoying but at the same time annoyingly logical in the sense that I wanted to shake Oakley so that he’d become aware of the precious things he was wasting yet knew that that wouldn’t change anything because no one can force others to see some truths—they need to discover them for themselves. Yes, Oakley is messy, complex, complicated (for reasons one understands when reading the story), but that’s exactly why he felt so real and why he made me want to react by physically jumping into his story. Sophia’s  impeccable writing made him become a person rather than a fictional persona.

 

If this review has turned out just as messy, I apologize. That sometimes happens when a book grabs me by my emotions and rattles me, which was the case here. A read I recommend to all those who love an emotional rollercoaster with loveable if chaotic characters, a story where Love is written with a capital L, and where character development rhymes with… quite some steam, in fact. By the way, this novella is also included in the collection ‘Love Is All—Volume 5’ which features eight other stories from bestselling authors (the proceeds from that anthology go to two organizations that support and defend LGBTQIA+ rights).

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the author. This book has been provided by the author for the purpose of a review.

 

Additional Information

Format	ebook and print
Length	Novella, 114 pages
Heat Level
Publication Date	15-July-2022
Price	$4.49 ebook, %7.99 paperback
Buy Link	https://www.amazon.com/Force-Majeure-Sophia-Soames-ebook/dp/B0B3XVD3CF