Never Have I Evan by D.J. Jamison
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Sorry but no.
Never Have I Evan by DJ Jamison is the first entry in her male-male romance series Games We Play and follows Dawson Woods and Evan Moore.
Dawson is the cousin of Evan’s BFF Calisto and was a college football player with prospects of going to the NFL until a drunken mistake caused him to fall from a roof, injuring his spine and ending his football career. He then gets an assistant coaching offer at a high school in small town America, where he meets 19-year-old virgin and geek Evan.
Evan is socially awkward due to being home-schooled and supposedly super smart. I say supposedly because the only evidence we’re given of his intelligence is the dating/studying app he’s been working on it prior to meeting Dawson, yet it sounds like something a newbie coder could make in a few months and not something someone like Evan, who’s been coding for “years,” couldn’t bang out in a couple of days.
Let me begin with this: my main issue is this book uses some of my least favorite tropes, namely gay for you and the jock-nerd/geek couple. The latter is beyond cliched, and Jamison did nothing new with it, while I detest gay for you.
For the unaware, this is where a character who’s only previously had heterosexual relationships falls for their same gender. The problem, as in this book, is the “straight” character shows no attraction to anyone else of their gender outside the love interest, nor do they consider themselves anything but heterosexual.
For 99.999% of this book Dawson reiterates he’s straight, then in the last few pages he gives his ex a throwaway line about how he’s now pansexual. No. Just no. This wasn’t earned, as Dawson never questioned he was anything but hetero until the very end.
Furthermore, it treats sexual orientation as a plot device and reinforces the erroneous myth that people just wake up one day and decide they’re LGBTQ+.
Hell to the no.
And if this wasn’t bad enough, the reason they get together made zero sense.
When Dawson learned Evan was gay and a virgin, he suggests they have casual sex so Evan can get experience.
Boy, bye. No straight guy would do this unless they were being paid to or there were zero other alternatives.
And Dawson had zero experience with gay sex outside of porn, which he said he had a meh sexual and emotional response to when he watched it. So, explain to me how he knew exactly what to do when it came time for them to hook up, so much so there were no bedroom mishaps.
Yeah, no.
You can tell this was written by a cis het woman for cis het women, as Jamison just copy-pasted heterosexual relationships dynamics onto Evan and Dawson, with Evan being the woman. Had I known this in advance, I’d have skipped on this book.
As it stands, I can’t give this more than 2 stars and have zero desire to read the next in the series that was obviously setup at the end of this one.
Skip this and read something better.
