My Take on A.J.'s Angel by L.A. Witt

I’m a L.A. Witt fan…let’s just get that out there. I like her style and the flow of her books and, most importantly, I like her characters. The situations they’re in read as realistic to me—I can totally believe their emotions and understand why they do the things they do.

So, already having read a couple of her books that I enjoyed, I couldn’t resist buying A.J.’s Angel. Here’s the blurb, so you understand why:

Tattoos fade with time. Emotions never lose their edge.

Luke Emerson is the last person Sebastian Wakefield expects to see strolling into his tattoo shop. But Luke’s not back after four years to take up where they left off. Not even to apologize for the cheating that broke them up.

Luke wants a custom tattoo, a memorial for someone known only as “A.J.”. Much as Seb would love to tell Luke to take his ink and shove it, he’s a professional. Plus, he’s reluctant to admit, he wouldn’t mind getting his hands on Luke again. Even if it’s just business.

Once Luke’s in the tattoo chair, though, Seb finds himself struggling with all the anger and resentment he thought he’d left behind—and those aren’t the only feelings reignited. Their relationship may have been turbulent, but it was also passionate. Four years clearly hasn’t been long enough for the embers of that fire to go cold.

A few subtle hints from Luke is all it takes to make Seb consider indulging in some of that physical passion. It shouldn’t be that tough to keep his emotions from getting tangled up in sweaty sheets.

After all, it’s not like he’s in love with Luke anymore. Right?

Product Warnings – Contains two exes who shouldn’t want each other like this, steamy ex-sex they shouldn’t be having, and a whole lot of ink.

Ex-lovers! Betrayal! The hints that what poor Seb thinks he feels may not be all there is to the story, even four years along. How could I resist?

I’m glad I didn’t.

As always, L.A.’s stories are equally as full of emotion as they are scorching hot. And one of the things I really like about them (and I don’t know if other readers feel this way) is that in the end, sometimes there aren’t any cut-and-dried answers as to why people do the things they do. I love getting lost in a fantasy world, but it’s the realistic touches that truly, for me, bring them to life. Sometimes people do stupid things for no good reason, then they have to deal with the fallout.

Seb’s internal dialog is spot on…that little voice that we all experience telling us, “Don’t fucking do it!” That little voice we all too often don’t listen to. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes bad, but I found myself shaking my head in sympathy as Seb battled with his tangled emotions.

To this point I haven’t met a L.A. Witt book I didn’t like, and A.J.’s Angel is no exception. If you like hot M/M romances with realistic situations and both heart and a few LOL moments, give A.J.’s Angel a read. You won’t be disappointed!

Know me by my Name

I seem to be harking back on my heritage a lot this week, but that’s how it goes sometimes I guess. When I was doing research for my book Arctic Destiny, I came across so many interesting and difficult to read stories, and much of what I read stuck with me. And there were times were I found myself pondering similarities between the Inuit experience and that of the slaves brought to the new world. While the Inuit had to put up with interlopers coming onto their land and insisting on changing their way of life, the slaves were taken away from their homelands and thrust into an entirely new, and horrific, way of life. But in both cases these groups of people lost their names.

In an effort to control, the slaves were stripped of everything that reminded them of where they came from, and who they were before they were stolen. They were separated from their tribesmen and women, given new, Western-style names. Children born to a slave mother were also given a name by the slave master, with no record of a father and no surname.

In an effort to control, the Inuit were given numbers and told that they must guard them with all care, as though those numbers held greater weight than their traditional, ancestral-based names.

Eventually, as time passed, the slave masters were told to prepare for emancipation by registering all their slaves by name—first and last. Some gave all their slaves their own surname, one last act of ownership in my opinion; others simply picked names seemingly from the air. Some were honest enough to recognise the children they had fathered, others didn’t care to. Who would make them?

Far later, in the 1970s, the Canadian government decided the Inuit must have surnames, although that was never a part of their culture. Again, it was to make them easier to track, and control. During this time many of the Inuit first names were misspelled, distorted and twisted to fit norms that had nothing to do with their culture. Even the ancestors of Europeans, who knew the last names those men carried and tried to use them, often ended up with something that bore little or no resemblance to the original name, since the people recording them didn’t take the differences in pronunciation into account.

Around the same time, many descendants of slave in the Americas were going through a period of reclaiming the heritage they’d been stripped of. Of course, there was no way to know exactly what tribe you were descended from, where in Africa, exactly, your ancestors had lived. There could only be a blanket acceptance of African culture, a taking on board of enough to give a sense of belonging. Strange new names began turning up in black communities across the western world, names that were derided and ridiculed, but that were intended to form a bond between that child and something bigger and better than the reality it was born to.

Full circle, for the Inuit have been reclaiming their names, having misspellings corrected, taking back not just their names but the meanings, the symbolism of them. They already knew the traditional names had meanings far beyond the understanding of those who so carelessly mangled them. That the bestowing of those names was a link to, and bond with the past—to something important, bigger than the present reality.

Neither of these stories are unique. The movement, subjugation and control of people has been going on since the dawn of man. In fact, what it shows is that if you look deep enough we, collectively, are more alike than it might first appear.