Book 737: Love by Chance (Chances #1) – Blake Allwood

Since I have ZERO sense of self-control these days as soon as I finished Romantic Renovations I immediately jumped into Allwood’s Chances series, because why not?!

I did a little more digging and Allwood was planning to release a book a month starting in February 2020 with this being the fourth release and the next two in the series released fifth (Another Chance with Love) and sixth (Taking a Chance for Love) in June and July. As far as I can tell he has yet to release the July book so may be falling behind on his schedule or, fingers crossed, he’s going back and getting them better copy edited and proofread (more to come).

This is a pretty basic MM Romance. The two protagonists Martin, a jaded restaurant critic/journalist who has moved to Florida after his engagement ends, and Elian, a well-to-do restaurateur, meet after Martin writes a bad review and the lust (love?) takes over from there.

The story was engaging and I liked how Allwood had Martin’s hesitations about relationships, especially with someone who is close to their large family, really drives the story. I’m not sure the timing worked as there seemed to be some contradictions on whether Martin dated or hooked up in the two years from the opening scene breakup. And his over-cautious nature of not wanting to ever be in the position of appearing to have favorited Elian or any restaurant he’s involved with was endearing.

The background characters, especially the females left a bit to be desired and were pretty much interchangeable, with the exception of Elian’s sister. I don’t think this was consciously done, but a lot of it was the dialogue and the interactions with the main characters. Martin’s best friend and boss could have been the same person and all of Elian’s aunts/mom and other relatives could all have been the same person.

There were a couple of sex scenes, most of which were well written. As usual, I appreciated that when Allwood made his characters versatile he then actually had the characters change up positions, unlike many authors. I was caught off guard by this quote,

As his head breached my guradian muscle, I sucked in a deep breath and tensed. (Loc. 2,073)

because I have no clue what a guradian muscle is. I mean I can guess based on other context clues, but even after googling it nothing came up. And then just a few sentences later there was this gem that made me roll my eyes because of the weird phrasing,

The pleasure was so overwhelming, I felt my eyes roll into the back of my head. (Loc. 2,089)

It’s not BAD per say, it’s just not well written. I’m not going to lie when I stopped (mostly out of sarcasm) and put my hands on my eyes and then rolled them to see if you could “feel them”. It’s just poor phrasing really.

But that does lead into the broader problems I’ve found with Allwood’s work. He’s either not holding his editors accountable or they’re not great. Either way there are things that need some work like all of these:

Hello, Senior Alverez. It is my pleasure to meet you. Your nephew has told me truly remarkable things about you. (Loc. 969)

He disappeared into the back. In an extraordinarily short time, the food began to arrive. Plates and plates of it, to the point he brought a table from the back to put the overflow on.. [stet] There was so much food that he had to pull a table from the back to put all the dishes on. The other customers, who had given us hateful looks when we were given a table in front of them, now looked at us with wonder. (Loc. 1,352)

Although I could feel his the muscle rebel, I could tell he was in ecstasy. (Loc. 2,191)

If that happened again, it would shatter what was left of my heart into pieces and that I’d never be able fit them back together again. (Loc. 2,274)

In the grand scheme of things these aren’t horrible misses, but collectively when you add these and all the other minor errors together it definitely gets distracting. If you’re going to use another language, even sparingly, make sure that it’s perfect! And OMG quadruple check a sex scene, you don’t want to pull your reader out of it early the “guradian muscle” from earlier and then the missed deletion of “his” or “the” were both enough to pull me out of that particular scene.

Recommendation: This is an average read. If you enjoy MM romance you’ll probably enjoy this one. I enjoyed it a little more than Romantic Renovations mostly because he stuck with just the romance genre and didn’t try to incorporate any mystery/thriller plot lines. It was a quick read, but could definitely use a good copy edit and/or proofread.

Opening Line: “Peter was always acting silly, so I didn’t pay much attention when he crawled in front of me, blocking my view of the TV.”

Closing Line: “Elian pulled me up, and we all but ran to his new front door.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Other Books in Chances

• Another Chance with Love (#2)
• Taking a Chance for Love (#3)