Can You Ever Go Back Home?
My home town is a small and typical American
small town. I looked up an aerial view of my home town on Google Earth once,
just to see what Main Street looked like. From that Broad picture my town
looked perfect. There are about a dozen shops on either side of Main Street and
the Library just beyond them on one side of the street. Of course, I can pick
out the library from space without a problem, believe me. I also was able to
see how all the streets connect and how the cute little houses lined up. Even when
you’re driving through town Main Street looks perfect. On the lamp posts they
have little flags that represent the seasons. When football season is on the
local high school football players each have their own little flags. What this
broad view doesn’t show is where the drug houses are. Even if you don’t do
drugs the average citizen who lives in my town knows where they are and who
frequents those houses. We also know that the LGBT community is virtually
non-existent and the small one that does existent is usually the center of most
of the gossip. This was especially true for my character, Jaron McAllister,
while he was growing up in Pickleville. There’s no such thing as anonymity in a
small town.
The urge to leave and move to a bigger city
to gain some sort of privacy is overwhelming, especially as a teenager which is
when Jaron leaves. In a bigger city, getting lost in the crowd is easy and no
one cares who you sleep with or what drugs you do. Meeting people in the LGBT
community is much easier simply because there are more of us around and we can
be quite diverse. This diversity tends to broaden a person’s perspective,
allowing for less judgment and more acceptances of other people’s
point-of-view.
The life experiences gained from branching
out and expanding the world around a person are irreversible. Even when a
person comes back to their small town to live permanently the experiences
gained from interacting with different kinds of people will always broaden a
person’s perspective on the world around them. Jaron finds out this is
especially true for him as he makes a life for himself and his son. He also
realizes that not everyone can be put in a neat little box based on where they
live. He realizes that he has more friends in the LGBT community than he
originally thought, but it is his own openness that allows him to make these
friends in the first place.
All Jaron McAllister wanted
to do was get out of the small town where he grew up. After being bullied all
his life for being gay, that’s exactly what he does. He loses all contact with
everyone in the town of Pickleville, including his emotionally distant mother
and the only true friend he ever had.
When his best friend and
mother of the child they share, get murdered he knows he must ask for help in
the one place he thought he would never go back to. Coming back home isn’t easy
and finding himself attracted to the town man-slut spells disaster. Travis
Heath isn’t at all what his reputation suggests though.
Whispers of Home by April
Kelley
(Pickeville #1)
Publishing on 15th of
February 2015 by eXtasybooks
Contemporary Romance
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