Educating the Professor by Sean Michael
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have some serious mixed reviews on this one and I'm trying to wrap my head around them. On the whole, the story was engaging, the characters were true to life and enigmatic, but I found the dialogue between them lacking and sometimes even bordering on weird.

At the start, Kenn is portrayed as a somewhat reclusive history professor who was admired by his colleagues and cherished by his students. In his small college town, he was well known and had a quite large set of groupies following his lectures. When his best friend and fellow professor guilts him into attending a school mixer, he meets grad student/professor Dave, and he's overwhelmed by his feelings towards him.

Here's where I started getting confused. Kenn had a past and it was brutal. He told Dave from the start that he wasn't ready to start anything, yet he spent all of his free time with him. He constantly spoke of being an introvert, yet was always with people, going out, wanting to spend time with Dave.

Another issue I had was the way Dave spoke to him. At times it felt like he was talking down to a child. And the responses from Kenn were always short (yes, okay, no). Most of the middle of the book continued on like this. It wasn't really until they found their groove, finally, in an unexpected way that Kenn finally got some confidence and actually articulated his feelings and wants as well as needs, but at that point I just felt like Dave had steamrolled him. It very much felt like an uneven relationship to me.

As I mentioned, I was intrigued enough to see where the story would take me to read it fully and it ended as I'd expected, so there were no surprises there, but I just got a wholly weirded out vibe from the entire relationship. Again, this is just me and my humble opinion.

*Galley copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review. Cross posted to http://gaybook.reviews/ *


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