New Beginning (Sparlow Tales, #2), Barbara Elsborg

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Publisher: Self-Published

Genre: Gay Romance/MM

Tags: Supernatural, Sweet with Depth, Christmas Theme

Length: 119 Pages

Reviewer: Karen

Blurb:

One moment, Teddy is driving through thick fog after his high school reunion. The next, a head-on collision shatters everything. He wakes beside the mangled wreckage without a scratch. Alone and confused, Teddy thinks he survived.

He didn’t.

Now he’s trapped in The Drift, a dangerous realm suspended between life and death, where Teddy struggles to come to terms with what’s happened. A demon is sent to help him, but Mikkel has problems of his own, not least of which is an attraction to Teddy.

To escape the afterlife’s dark underbelly, Teddy must learn trust a monster…or remain lost forever.

Warning-
Starts dark but ends light!
Multiple deaths in traffic accident.
Multiple attempts by an MC to end his life with no chance of succeeding.
Horrible mother.
Claustrophobia.
Panic attacks.

This is a novella in the world of The Other Side. Mikkel is first mentioned in this book. Teddy is a new character.

Review:

I didn’t read book #1 in the Sparlow Tales series, The Other Side, because of time constraints and its length but I picked this one up because of time constraints and its length – I wanted smaller. 😀 This is a novella. It’s also adorable. Not always a word you hear in my book reviews but if the shoe fits….

Teddy is a character that Elsborg writes well – not a lot of confidence. Shitty upbringing. Exceedingly self-deprecating. Very sweet. This time add in a tragic set of circumstances right near the beginning. That tragedy allows some very real pathos to enter the book early, and as much as I think the author has a keen sense of humour, sometimes her characters use it too much. Teddy has to sit in something awful for a little while and then he has to recover and readjust. Even though the book is novella sized, it allows the reader to get some excellent insight without humour getting in the way. It does develop later but it felt right by then.

Mikkel. My god, What a wonderful character!! Seriously. He is patient and kind and does everything he can to be honest with an added dollop of compassion. TBH, I was totally invested in both MCs. All 100 odd pages of them.

Teddy is reeling from “surviving” a car accident that everyone else was killed in. If you sit for a minute in the event, it’s a terrible thing to have happen. Survivor’s guilt is awful. It twists people up. People like Teddy. His life is altered because of it. Because of where he finds himself. It’s actually called The Drift. He feels like he’s in hell with the accident replaying over and over and over again in high definition within a vast, unending grey, something he feels he deserves.

Without walls, without trees, without a horizon that made any structural sense, the sheer vastness of the place pressed against his skull. The infinite grey overhead felt like a crushing ocean of nothing waiting to collapse on him.

Meanwhile, Azrael, the angel of death, asks Mikkel, who is a demon, to take someone under his wing because that someone can’t move on. That’s Teddy. Mikkel pretty quickly feels a pull, certainly empathy, toward the human. Mikkel is kind and gentle and all the things I mentioned above that make him awesome. He takes him to a house to help him recuperate which doesn’t quite have the effect he thought it might. The story builds off the back of that.

“This is your place for as long as you need it. Far enough away from where you were to give you a moment to breathe, a chance to sleep.”

I’ve added a tag of ‘Christmas Theme’ because while it’s not necessarily a Christmas story, Christmas occurs and there are festivities and meaning around that. And snow. I think the author might be fond of snow because it’s often a theme in her Christmassy stories. I especially notice that because Christmas = hot in Oz.

I enjoyed all the little magical elements within this novella. They felt so right and so lovely. I enjoyed the humanity – hmm, that might sound a bit ironic in a more supernatural story. While I often gravitate toward more gritty books, I also like some light in between the shade. I know the world needs more kindness right now and New Beginning gives that to the reader.

Overall, this is a delightful story, I would have liked just a little more at the end, although we do get an epilogue. After having read book #2, when I get a chance, I’ll pick up The Other Side to see the start of this world. For New Beginning, it’s 4.5 Stars!