Review: My First, His Last by Fearne Hill

Seb has spent his university days hopelessly in love with one of his unattainable best friends. Sweet, kind and handsome, he has been too shy to admit his desires for other men. Finding himself living in London, alone and inexperienced, he turns to his friends to find him a suitable partner.

Happily running a small art gallery and juggling his hectic social whirl, smart, outgoing Kiefer doesn’t realise anything is missing from his love life until he is introduced at a dinner party to a gentle young man named Seb.

My First, His Last is a 10,000 word M/M romantic short story. It can be read as a stand-alone piece, although Seb and Kiefer are subsidiary characters from the Johnson Road trilogy, three full-length novels charting the lives and loves of a group of friends at university and beyond.

This is a really short tale about Seb and Kiefer from the Johnson Road Trilogy. I have not read any of those stories, but My First, His Last did it’s job and made me buy the first one so I could get more of these characters. And I’m not just talking about Seb and Keifer, but also the MC’s from Johnson Road, who were the secondarys in My First, His Last.

So. while this story starts while Seb and Kiefer are well on their way, the book starts with them on their first date, the author did a bang up job of giving me enough backstory organically so I didn’t feel completely lost and thrust into the middle of something and floundering through the pages. But, I will say I wanted more. There’s enough potential meat here to make a full length novel I would have loved to read.

The story reads very realistically romantic considering it’s length and I think you can really only get that feeling with fully fleshed out characters, which these two guys definitely were. Plus I was shown things as they evolved, there was little to no “telling” needed to get me up to speed.

The buildup of the dynamics between Seb and Kiefer is so well done and the honesty towards the end when they are together in Kiefer’s gallery is sublimely written. Kiefer’s struggles were real and Seb’s reaction was perfect, it was just such a perfectly beautiful scene, I’ll read this shorty again just to experience it one more time.

**a copy of this story was provided for an honest review**