When someone in the marketing department at the publisher reached out about this because I’d positively reviewed David Chang’s Eat a Peach, I had to take a few minutes to really think if I wanted to go back into this world.*
In Chang’s book, his mental health struggles are peripheral, but in Dunn’s Burn Rate, he centers them. I spent quite a bit of time reading about bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and other mental health issues before my mom died a few years ago to try and understand what she was going through and what my sister and I were experiencing. And that REALLY hit home when the first quote Dunn uses in his book is a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote THE book (An Unquiet Mind) about brains and bipolar/manic depression/brains in general.
Give me an opposites-attract, man-in-uniform, light on the sex book any day and I am here for it! I knew the first two when I grabbed a copy of this from Gay Romance Reviews, but I didn’t know the third and that made it that much better!* And that was before I opened it to find a discussion about 
So I have talked about gut punches when reading books before, but Silvera took it to a different level with this one—and this was his freakin’ debut novel!
I’m not a big reading of poetry person. I just never have been, but as I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction and things that aren’t my norm (HA! right), when the publisher reached out it was a great opportunity to say yes.*
After loving everything I’ve read by Klune so far it was obvious I was going to read this. And then, when it appeared on NetGalley AND I was approved, I had to sit on it for SO. MANY. MONTHS.* It was 100% worth the wait.