Skip to content

Review: Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Luc never knew his rock star father, but now that his dad’s making a comeback as the judge of a reality music show, Luc himself is back in the spotlight. When he’s photographed falling down outside of a bar (perfectly! innocently!), it threatens to compromise his job. He needs a respectable boyfriend to help clean up his image, and his straight friend has just the person: the only other gay guy she knows, vegetarian (yes) barrister (yes) Oliver Backwood (yep). And as it happens, Oliver could use a date to a family function too. It’s a match made in the Medium Place.

Boyfriend Material

Alexis Hall is one of my favorite romance writers currently working, and the chief reason amongst a large group of reasons is his deftness with articulating messy, complicated emotions and power dynamics. As I was putting this post together I took a break to reread his book Pansies, which remains one of my top five romance novels and is, accordingly, among the books I shove at romance newbies to get them in on the genre. And it’s just, truly, so great to read books that honor and acknowledge emotions without giving a pass to people for letting their emotions drive them to make poor and hurtful choices.

Someone I either follow on Twitter or know in real life said recently1 that the best thing about fake dating stories is the part where the one person gets to (metaphorically) slap shit out of the other person’s horrible family. And that is the truest thing I’ve ever read on this here internet, and let me tell you, pals, Boyfriend Material fucking delivers on that front. There are not one but two scenes of horrible families being horrible and the protagonists having to defend each other, and it’s so good for me I wish it could be distilled and bottled and I would drink it every night and then advance to putting it directly in my veins. No, there are not specific parents of people in my life that I would enjoy to be very angry at. This is all purely hypothetical.

Oh, they also have to share a bed, for reasons. This book has all the tropey nonsense your mother warned you about.

Boyfriend Material features an adorably zany cast of characters, all of whom Alexis Hall gives space to be worthwhile. Luc has a posh colleague named Alex with no sense of humor to whom he tells jokes every morning just to see how his colleague will manage to not understand them. His mum has a best friend called Judy who goes on trips to inspect bullocks and prize roosters and then comes home to eat Luc’s mum’s indefensible curries. At times the characters are perhaps the tiniest touch too zany for my particular taste, but on balance I was more charmed than bothered.

“I don’t know [your father] but he’s a big advocate for restricting the right to trial by jury so I have a sort of professional interest.”

“That sounds like him. Talks about it round the dinner table all the time. Says they cost the government a huge amount of money, that people are only in favour of them because of silly sentimentality, and they spread tuberculosis.”

“I’m not sure,” said Oliver, “but I think you might be getting jury trials mixed up with badgers.”

Alex snapped his fingers. “That’s them. He can’t stand the things. little black-and-white furry bastards causing unnecessary delays in our already overstrained criminal justice system.”

Plus, of course, I continue to feel immensely fond of Alexis Hall for his obvious affection for regional British weirdness. Luc has another coworker who is Welsh, who — well, I will just let you read the book and discover it for yourself. His Welsh coworker appears to be ridiculous and then turns out to be great, a classic Alexis Hall move. And if you find yourself generally touched by that, I would love to recommend his earlier book Glitterland, in which a grumpy posh man falls for an Essex lad. As a former Essex girl, I endorse Glitterland.

I wasn’t wild about the way the book frames Luc’s relationship with his dad. His dad shows up out of the blue, having abandoned Luc at age three and never looked back, asking for a relationship now that he has cancer and is going to die. Oliver and Luc’s mum both advocate for Luc to accept the dad’s overtures, even though both of them are well aware that it’s likely the dad is just going to disappoint Luc again. I was… not wild about this. I do not believe that you have obligations to the family that ditched you, however sick they are. If you have been ditched by a family member and they come back wanting a relationship now that they’re dying and you want to give it a try, absolutely 100% go for it! But if you don’t want to give them that space in your life, it’s fine to not. Instead Oliver implies to Luc that he shouldn’t “abandon” his father, as if it’s possible to “abandon” someone you’ve never had a relationship with. I wish that had been framed differently.

Apart from that gripe, my only tiny wish was that the book had gotten into Oliver’s Issues slightly earlier than it did. As an avowed devotee of a Chaos Muppet / Order Muppet pairing, I was deeeeelighted with the central relationship of Boyfriend Material, and as I rounded the 80% mark around 10:30 at night (this is very late to stay up if you are me), I was thinking “How pleasing, and now for the denouement.” This was a FOOLISH expectation by me. In the remaining 20% of the book it suddenly gets very very “actually people who seem to have it super together are sometimes/often/always dealing with their own dysfunctional shit that needs to be worked through too,” and poor old Oliver has to really, properly start facing up to his issues around self-worth and control. As a control freak with self-worth issues, twas unexpectedly confronting, though beautifully and perfectly handled, to the point that I got a bit teary. Only I’d have loved for Luc to have been dealing with that stuff a bit more earlier on, to make the relationship feel a bit equaler a bit sooner.

All that said, one of the reasons Alexis Hall is among my favorite romance authors is that his books are angsty, yet soft, which is pretty much my sweet spot. Luc and Oliver each have their own dysfunction, the kinds of things that arise from what life does to us all, and the arc of the book is not so much learning to set those things aside as it is learning to live a life informed, not controlled, by them. Hall is reliably awesome, and Boyfriend Material is no exception.

Note: I received an e-ARC of this book from the publisher for review consideration. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

  1. I’m sorry I can’t be more specific but I truly can’t remember who said this. I wish I could remember! I would like to credit them for their genius observation!