ARC Review: The Heart As He Hears It by A.M. Arthur

Posted March 20, 2016 by Dale

Blurb:

Love can slip through the smallest crack in the door.

While most of his friends have moved on to “real” careers, Jon Buchanan is content skating through life as a part-time waiter and gay porn star. Firmly single thanks to a previous relationship disaster, he focuses his spare time on Henry, a dear friend dying of cancer.

And with Henry’s happiness paramount, Jon is on a mission to help Henry meet his recently discovered grandson.

Isaac Gregory hasn’t set foot outside for the past year. He has everything he needs delivered, and his remaining family knows better than to visit. When a complete stranger shows up claiming to be his grandfather—with a distractingly handsome younger man in tow—his carefully structured routines are shaken.

Despite his instant attraction, Jon senses Isaac is too fragile for a relationship. Yet tentative friendship grows into genuine companionship. And when Henry’s health begins to fail, they realize Fate brought them together for a reason.

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My Review:

*I received an ARC of this book from Samhain Publishing via Netgalley in return of an honest review*

This was the first book I read by this author.
The Heart As He Hears It is part of a series but you can easily read it as stand-alone. Characters of the previous books are mentioned in this one but I had no problems following this story because it’s centered around two different characters. But after reading this one I definitely want to read the first two books too.

The Heart As He Hears It is about Jon, a porn star with serious body-issues and self-perception issues, and Isaac, an agoraphobic young man who still struggles with things that happened in his childhood. They are both fractured souls who are trying to cope with what happened to them, both in a different yet similar way.

Jon started his porn career to win back a bit of confidence and Isaac started an online comic to handle his fear of not being able to control a situation. He feels safest in his house and hasn’t left it in over a year.
They meet because Henry, Isaacs grandfather, who at the beginning of the story didn’t know he had a son (and a grandson) comes looking for Isaac.
Henry suffers from a terminal illness and wants to spent his remaining time getting to know his grandson. Jon is there to accompany Henry and immediately feels a connection with Isaac.

I really liked the slow-burn development of the relationship between Isaac and Jon. They’ve both been hurt before and insta-love would have felt out of character. They get to know each other and slowly a friendship forms which turns then into more.

I had a bit of the problem with the realism of how Isaacs agoraphobia was portrayed. This book is fluffy and romantic but it seemed illogical for Isaac to get better so fast and without the help of a therapist.
Other than that I quite liked the story and the characters and of course Bear. She’s a cutie!

I have no experience with an eating disorder but for me it felt like A.M. Arthur handled that aspect of the story really well and it seemed realistic.

The writing in this story flows easily and it didn’t take long for me to get into the story.

I can’t say a lot without giving too much away, but there’s a quite a bit of drama toward the end of the book which seemed over the top. It was completely unexpected and threw me a bit out of the story.
Overall though I really enjoyed it and would recommend it especially to someone who’s looking for something romantic and fluffy and who can oversee a few little flaws in the realism of the storyline.