Unsteady by Melissa Collins

Unsteady by Melissa Collins

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Blurb

Micah Hudson and Jude MacMillian were both lonely teenagers. One the new kid and one the target of relentless bullying, they quickly became friends. But when friendship grew into more, the relationship was too much for either to handle. As their tenuous bond was tested, everything tumbled down, leaving them lonely once again.

A decade later, Micah is on the brink of losing his will to live. Beyond exhausted from lying to everyone, including himself, Micah thinks of the one person who knows his deepest secret. Desperate and alone, Micah makes the only decision he feels he has: he must leave. But his need for closure depends on one thing.

Can Jude make room in his Unsteady life for Micah once again?

Review

Let’s start out with the many good aspects of this book. We have a character suffering from a permanent injury, who also suffers from PTSD. While part of me wants to roll my eyes at the almost fetishization of a serious illness in the romance community, I think it’s important for people dealing with this illness to see themselves getting a happily ever after. And I think Collins handles Micah’s PTSD well. It isn’t glossed over, and it isn’t turned into something sacred and holy and *super special.*  It’s part of him, a consequence of war, and it is what it is.

The difficulties of navigating small-town life in a conservative area of the United States are handled well, too. In some ways, Jude is overly paranoid about the reactions of people around him. In some ways, he is not. For all that it’s Pride Month and it’s great to be able to stand up and be proud of who I am, it’s not that easy for everyone and it’s important to recognize that.

There are some issues with the book, some of which stand out. The first, which needs to be said because it’s a huge issue for a lot of romance readers, is cheating.

Micah is married for most of the book – to a woman. We don’t see any on-screen physical relationship between them, and it’s kind of fraught, but they have a son together and it’s extremely obvious that they have been physically intimate recently. Micah runs off to see Jude and enters into a sexual relationship with him, while he is still married to the wife, and doesn’t tell Jude until almost the end of the book.

Not only is this cheating, which is a cardinal sin in romance, but it sets up a couple of Great Big Misunderstandings. And this feels kind of contrived, honestly. I don’t want to give spoilers, but in essence the revelation about the wife “causes” behavior in Jude that mirrors the behavior that caused the pair to lose touch.

Now, I have a lot of trouble swallowing this one. Does Jude have every right to be shocked and upset that the guy he’s been living with, and making plans with, has a wife and child back home?  Yes, absolutely. After all of the talk about regretting what happened when they were children, does it make sense for him to turn around and do the exact same thing?

No. No it does not.

And then, somehow, everything is fine again. Everyone forgives Micah because PTSD and stuff, which… doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. It’s nice to see, and the happily ever after is emotionally satisfying. The process of getting from “disaster” to “happily ever after” seems to go through some kind of mysterious black box and rely on a lot of suspension of disbelief – but once you get there, there’s a feeling of relief anyway.

If you can handle the fact that one of the two main characters is cheating through pretty much the entire book, it’s not a bad read at all. If the cheating bothers you, the other stuff will probably not redeem it in your eyes.