sarina bowen the understatement of the year

After the attack, Graham doesn’t call or visit Rikker in the hospital and cuts all contact with his friend, terrified people will find out he (Graham) is queer. They’re young, they’re happy, they’re more than half-way in love… but an ill-timed kiss sees them become the victims of a violent attack, one in which Rikker is badly injured while Graham escapes unscathed – physically at least – because he runs off, leaving Rikker to fend for himself. They spent a lot of their teenage years playing video games in Michael’s basement room until one day, a tussle turns into a kiss, turns into a make-out session – and from then on, their basement activities are split between video games and games of a different kind.

Rikker and Graham have known each other since they were kids and were best buddies all through school. But unlike Wes and Jamie in HIM, Rikker and Graham had already acknowledged their mutual attraction and begun to explore the physical side of it before things crashed and burned between them, and their friendship ended for very different reasons, which ultimately forced one of them so far back into the closet, it’s a wonder he didn’t end up in Narnia. The premise of Sarina Bowen’s The Understatement of the Year bears more than a passing resemblance to HIM – one of her collaborations with Elle Kennedy – because it’s centred around ice-hockey, and the two leads – Michael Graham and John Rikker (voiced here by Christian Fox and Teddy Hamilton respectively) – are childhood friends whose friendship ends abruptly, for reasons one of them doesn’t understand. Vintage Review – audiobook released 2016, review from 2019 Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Christian Fox

Sarina bowen the understatement of the year