The Paper Boys

by D.P. Clarence

Genres: Romance
Pages: 358
Rating:

Synopsis:

Don't hold the front page. Hold the guy who wrote it.

Sunny Miller's dream job on London's Fleet Street has become a nightmare. His boss at the Bulletin hates him, the sub-editors keep putting comedy headlines on his attempts at serious journalism, and he's just been scooped by that posh bellend from the Sentinel, Ludo Boche.

Worst of all for this working-class boy from Leicester, the lads in London aren't willing to date a guy who writes for Britain's trashiest tabloid. Apparently, they have standards.

Up the respectable end of Fleet Street, Ludo Boche is literally making headlines. He's the son of the editor and the heir to an establishment media dynasty, so his success is assured-if he can stop singing showtunes long enough to get any work done, that is. There's just one problem: everyone seems more interested in using his connections to get a job at the Sentinel than they are in dating him.

Sunny and Ludo come from different worlds. They are talented, ambitious, and in fierce competition for the same big story.

The last thing they should do is fall in love.

Okay. I’m going to admit up front that I ended up skimming D.P. Clarence’s The Paper Boys. I skimmed a lot, because by page 10, I wanted to claw my own eyes out rather than keep reading, but also I’m stubborn and wanted to write a review, and I don’t do that if I haven’t given a book a bit more than 10 pages.

It sounds like a very fun concept — two young gay journalists who’re rivals end up getting together while competing over the same big story? Sign me up! Buuut it’s a romance that’s being written by someone who wants to write “non-smut” romance because sex scenes don’t drive the plot forward, which… does not encourage me that he’s read a lot of romance and knows the genre he’s throwing himself into. Sex scenes can build characters, relationships, and yes, drive plot (KJ Charles being my #1 example of all these things; Cat Sebastian, too). To dismiss them as almost all failing to “drive the plot” tells me the author doesn’t understand the genre, and that (for me) is a bit of a red flag right there.

It’s also attempting to be profoundly British, but it’s been written by an Austalian who has “wonderful beta readers and a fantastic development editor who were all hyper-aware of the British class system” (quote from his FAQ).

That’s a funny way of saying “British people who read this and thought I did well”, and makes me wonder if those beta readers and development editor were British or not. It’s also possible that they are, or some of them are, but their experience of Britishness is very different from mine; that’s a fair point in mitigation. But.

Mostly it felt like it was trying way, way, way too hard. Some people in Britain do say “proper” regularly, in spoken and informal communication (e.g. “it was raining proper hard” or “it was proper cold out”), but to repeat it so often (someone counted 90+ times in the story, but by page 10 it felt like I’d encountered it every other sentence already) foregrounds it way more than is necessary to give the flavour of how a British person might speak.

I’m not going to say that literally nobody uses the word “jolly” like Ludo does, as well, but nobody I know or have ever known does. You might say “jolly good”, or “you jolly well should”, maybe, but… it really, really wouldn’t be that common.

And the class stuff… well. It didn’t match my experience, let’s just say that. Someone from that background would probably say “gay”, not “queer” (in my experience). Someone from that background probably wouldn’t call people “class traitors” (even jokingly) for being interested in the Royal Family (it’s, in my experience, common among the working class; it’s the middle class who’re uncomfortable about them). Labour are the “socialists” (insofar as anyone is, and not really in any practical sense), not Lib Dems.

If I haven’t said “in my experience” enough, add it in as many times as Sunny said “proper” or Ludo said “jolly” until it’s clear. And obviously what is “typical” is just a very broad statement: there are lots of working class people who are sceptical about the Royal Family as a whole institution, and you absolutely can write stories with them in. It’s just not written in a way that rings true; it didn’t hang together for me.

Overall, it was clearly never going to work for me. Which is not to say it wouldn’t work for anyone, including potentially other British people. But it doesn’t read to me at all like it was written by someone with a very good understanding of how to make it sound British without caricature and stereotyping.

That said, in my skimming I did come across some very cute scenes between Ludo and Sunny, and despite the author’s comments about smut scenes, he did pay some attention to the chemistry between the two and showing some not-explicitly-sexual intimacy, which helps to make their relationship feel real. The romance in and of itself is not unenjoyable — I just couldn’t enjoy it past (waves hand) all of that.

Rating: 1/5