Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Hot Sauce is a love story that focuses on insecurities, specifically those based in class difference, constructed around a fantasy fairy-tale-esque plot structure. A working class boy from midwest moves to the big city, learns from a master chef, becomes a celebrity restauranteur in his own right, and ends up dating the man of his dreams, a rich, gorgeous, well-connected clothing designer from one of the best families in Boston.

Can you smell the insecurities?

Brad is one half of a gay power couple in Boston, unaccustomed to the attention and unable to find equilibrium when in public wih Troy, his debonair and socially-gifted boyfriend. Troy is, through both the narrator’s account and through his demonstrated actions, off his head about Brad, and yet Brad is unsure of his standing in Troy’s life, as if any minute Troy’s tenderness and caring will turn cold and he’ll be discarded.

Complicating matters is Aria Shakespeare, an upper-crust Bostonian who Troy once knew by a different name, prior to Aria acquiring an entirely different sort of crust - the scuzzy, deceitful kind.

As a total aside, I love adopted names like this. I know a few people who rename themselves in truly over-the-top dramatic fashion.I want to ask, do you think anyone will take that tweety name seriously? Or is it all drama? I once knew a drag queen who dubbed herself “Cicada.” You’re an annoying insect? Sure, why not? I have no room to talk, though - I am the Duchess of Cuntington.

Aria tries by any means necessary, including following them to foreign countries, to interfere with Brad and Troy’s happiness, and he cashes in on the most obvious solution to his goal of breaking them up: he targets Brad’s insecurity, and inserts himself neatly as a much better alternative for Troy’s attentions, using Troy, Caroline - Troy’s social harriden of a mother, and anyone else he can find to get what he wants: Troy. Or, more specifically, the attention he’d receive from being with Troy. He wants a piece of Troy’s glamour.

My only frustration with the book was with the imbalance between the narrator’s account of Troy, and the narrator’s account of Brad’s insecurity regarding Troy’s feelings for him. The narration makes it clear in repeated demonstrations that Troy is over the moon for Brad. He wouldn’t greet anyone else in a room full of political contacts until he spoke to Brad first, he would always look for Brad in a room full of people, and he constantly surprised Brad with trips and luxurious outings, and seemed to be a conscientious, giving lover. So as the reader I had no doubts that, despite the interference of the jealous Shakespeare Aria, Troy adored Brad.

But the narrator also cataloged the ways in which Brad felt slighted by Troy, aside from the attentive devotion Troy demonstrated wordlessly. Troy does not use words to describe his feelings; he does much better with the gesture or the gift than he does with the verbal account of his ardor. He is smooth and sophisticated at all turns, except when describing his feelings verbally. Brad, however, desperately wants to hear Troy say The Words, and Troy manages to avoid these verbal exchanges.

Insecurity gets the best of all of us, however, so it’s entirely realistic to watch Brad bank his happiness on whether Troy will tell him the words he longs to hear. Brad certainly has the right to ask for a clear demonstration of how Troy feels about him, without having the moment tainted by the possibility that Troy is really using their good looks and excellent professional partnership for profit and corporate gain, or without leaving Brad any room to question if it’s he himself that Troy loves, or the public image and the sex. Troy is used to being half of several different locally powerful “golden couples,” including a lucrative and somewhat caring partership with his mother, but Brad does not have the healthy ego to accept himself as on par with Troy’s relative celebrity.

Sooner or later you have to choose to believe in the person you love or believe in the snot-nosed coke headed freakshow who is telling you with some funky evidence that the person who you think loves you does not. So do you believe the person who is kind to you or the one who consistently treats you like shit? At what point does one’s own insecurities have to stop and take a look at their silly selves and say, “Wait a minute. I’ve been given no reason to doubt this person except by the word of someone who has never been trustworthy.”

I wish that moment had come a lot sooner than it did for Brad, as he could have saved himself some serious drama. Of course, if Troy had been able to open up and be more honest about his goals and intentions with Brad, perhaps they would have been able to commnunicate better, instead of letting some deceitful freakshow and a mother-in-law come between them. The narrator’s account of Troy, and of Brad’s perception of Troy, were off just enough to make me wonder how Brad could be so blind.

However, the story is as much about Brad’s growth in trusting his partner, and Troy’s growth in his ability to take personal risks in areas in which he’s not entirely comfortable, so in the end, Brad’s growth from insecurity to trust equals Troy’s growth from security to taking personal risks to ensure that security. And their happily ever after, and the just-desserts for Aria, are quite satifying.

Now, for the dishy part.

Y’all. SERIOUSLY. Gay sex. I learned so much about gay sex I can’t even tell you. I mean, in mainstream media one sees depictions of hetero sex all over the place, in various positions and locations. Even ABC, the Ass Broadcasting Network, had in-the-toilet-stall-sex on NYPD Blue, which about made me laugh because, well, EW. Hetero sex, it is everywhere.

But gay sex? Sex between two men? That’s a taboo area that isn’t often depicted, so really, did I have much of a clue what goes on between two dudes? Honestly, no. I didn’t. I have watched porn and seen sexually explicit still images, but descriptions of gay sex? Not really something I’ve encountered so much. Is there equal division between who is on top and who’s on bottom? What are the positional variations? And isn’t there, well, santorum?

I had no clue. But now, I am becoming an educated reader of the gay romance and the accompanying sex scenes. And it’s not like the sex was gratuitous or crass, either. It was genuine and passionate, and pass me that newspaper, ma’am, I need to fan myself. I never thought that gay sex would be hot, but man alive, thems is some hot live men.

So between the hot man action and the genuine, emotional interaction, this is a damn fine romance. Stay tuned for an upcoming review after I read their earlier publication, Spare Parts.