The Backlot Gay Book Forum discussion

Perfect Catch
By Liam Livings
Fluffy Cat Publishing, 2021
Five stars

What I like so much about Liam Livings’ books is how grounded they are in reality (at least his reality). As much as I enjoy fantasy, sci-fi, and paranormal fiction, I also appreciate “real-life” stories. Livings has a particular gift at delving into emotion, interpersonal relationships, and the small details of everyday life. For an American reader, there is the added pleasure of getting a look into a familiar, yet decidedly different, world.

Chris and Henry have been friends forever. In their comfy, working-class world, rooted in small-town Cornwall, they have a strong sense of contentment with who they are and where they live. Chris has a small but loving family—parents who dote on him and a sister he’s close to—while Henry has a more distant relationship with the grandparents (MY age, I must note) who reluctantly, but diligently raised him. Henry has been embraced by Chris’s family, and all should be well with the world.

It is when Chris’s carefully laid plans for his future begin to go awry that he finds himself looking at Henry in a different light. What he doesn’t realize is that Henry has been seeing him in that same different way for some time already. The ensuing drama is all tied up in the vagaries of making a living as a fisherman in a region where gossip travels faster than the post.

As always with tales like this, withholding information and hiding the truth triggers upset, but even that disguises the bigger issue: these longtime friends are both beginning to grapple with the emerging awareness of their sexual attraction to each other and what that might mean in their lives.

Chris and Henry are both endearing and frustrating characters. They are not moving at the same speed emotionally, even though (it turns out) they are more on the same page than they know. The solution to their problem is easy (at least in the reader’s eyes); it is their own complex personalities that keep them from finding the obvious solution.

Society tells us who we’re supposed to be—based on a whole array of parameters—biological and cultural. Fear impedes clear vision, and both of these young men have to see past their fears to get to the truth they seek.

It’s an old story in a modern world. Livings gives us a very specific regional variation on that story, and it warmed my heart all the way through.