The Barkeep and the Bro

Single Dads Club, Book 3

By: A.J. Truman

Narrated by: Nick J. Russo

I’m his boss. He’s my daughter’s ex-boyfriend. This has nope written all over it.

For 25 years, I’ve been in an exclusive, all-consuming relationship with Stone’s Throw Tavern, my family’s local bar. I don’t need a boyfriend. What I need is a new bartender.

And what I get is Charlie, my daughter’s old college boyfriend, a guy who still acts like he’s chillin’ at the frat house. He was canned from his Wall Street job and escaped to small town Sourwood for a fresh start. He knows bupkis about bartending, but he makes up for it with his cocky charm…and the tight shirts he wears, which secretly drive me wild. Now I’m making up excuses to hang by the bar during his shifts.There’s a pile of reasons why I can’t cross the line with an employee. Especially this one. He’s 20 years younger than me, and I’m a foot taller than him. Even on a purely mathematical level, this can’t work. And yet…The growing heat between the fratboy and me burns like a shot of whiskey. I just need to keep my beer can in my pants, or else I could lose my business and my daughter.

The Barkeep and the Bro will serve you up a glass of age gap, size difference, boss/employee, grumpy/sunshine, small town romance goodness, garnished with humor and lots of heat. And it won’t even ask for ID. This is the third audiobook in the Single Dads Club series, but can be listened to as a standalone.

©2022 A.J. Truman (P)2024 A.J. Truman

I AM WITHOUT WORDS

fantastic extraordinary EXQUISITE. i could do nothing other than listen. NJR is an artist and this story is MAGIC. I LOVE U CHARLIE AND MITCH MWAH

Definitely the worst of the series

Oh my goodness, I did NOT like this book. It's hard to put my finger on exactly why; I think it can be summed up by saying that I didn't like Charlie very much and, despite the weird (and very poorly conceived) ending, I don't buy the two protagonists as a couple.

There are so many odd things in this book I'm not sure where to start. Charlie's journey from straight to gay-for-you felt even less believable than that trope usually does--I certainly bought it much less than Dusty from the previous book. He was also TOO good--too nice, too brilliant, just altogether too good to be true. I didn't like the fact that he constantly made suggestions to improve Mitch's bar. I think I was supposed to see it as a fruitful partnership between the two, maybe Charlie bringing fresh young ideas, but every single time I felt as though Charlie was coming in to try to undermine Mitch and the way he ran his business. In fact throughout the whole book I didn't get the impression that Charlie respected or even liked Mitch very much, despite the author telling me that he did.

The book was also too full of the author's political opinions for a romance novel. I'm not sure what my threshhold is for "too many times hearing the word 'queer'" but this book exceeds it. I don't know a single gay man who uses that word. The discussion between Charlie and Amos after the "zucchini incident" is so full of "sexuality is fluid and changeable!" nonsense that I almost stopped listening. Hey, AJ Truman! I get that you're writing a GFY novel but my sexuality isn't fluid, and if it were, I would have taken the easy route and married a girl, saved myself a lot of difficulty. There's one VERY cringy instance where Charlie says something about how straight women sometimes wear wedding rings to signal to guys in bars that they're taken and not interested, and he interjects a very weird line railing against men hitting on women that is so awkward I can't imagine anyone saying it in real life unironically. To be fair, it's almost always Charlie who comes out with these weird political asides, so maybe I'm just supposed to accept that one of his character traits is that he's an extremely easily-offended progressive millennial, which wouldn't exactly endear him to me, but actually I'm pretty sure he's just acting as a mouthpiece for the author.

Anyway, I liked the first two books in this series (the second more than the first), but this one was a huge miss for me. Nick J. Russo is a good narrator, but not enough to elevate my rating at all.