Harper Jones is a professional bike courier, and in his business if you don’t ride fast, you don’t make money. His apartment has mice, he’s barely able to scrape up the rent, but at least he’s living life on his terms and doesn’t depend on anyone. Sam Foster is the gay son of a wealthy conservative senator. He’s noticed Harper before when he’s dropped off packages at his dad’s company, but he’s … company, but he’s never had the nerve to speak to his secret crush.
When Sam accidentally hits Harper with his car, Harper’s bike is destroyed and he’s injured seriously enough that he won’t be delivering packages for a while. Sam decides Harper needs rescuing, and he moves in with Harper to take care of him.
Unfortunately, Sam’s politician dad is convinced Harper’s a con-artist and he’ll do whatever it takes to get him away from his son.
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S.C. Wynne’s Crashing Upwards is the first of the author’s novels I’ve read that didn’t have some type of mystery/suspense element attached to its romantic story arc. And now I can say that I didn’t miss it in the slightest, because this touching category romance has everything it needed to succeed right in its characters, Sam Foster and Harper Jones.
I would hesitate to say that the way Sam and Harper become involved is in any way a meet-cute. I mean, Sam literally crashed into Harper with his car, so…yeah. That most inauspicious of meetings may not have been how Sam would’ve imagined finally getting the attention of the man he’d been admiring from afar for ages, but it certainly fed right into one of my favorite romantic tropes. Sam is a do-gooder in all the very best ways. He’s kind, thoughtful, compassionate, selfless, charitable—traits one might not expect in a man who’s grown up ultra-wealthy and works for his dad and lives in a cottage on the family estate—so Sam’s insistence that he would stay with Harper and nurse him back to health offered up the need for their forced proximity. There was no way Sam was going to allow Harper to fend for himself, especially since Harper’s only source of income was what he made as a bicycle courier. Being laid up with a bum leg meant no income plus additional expenses on top of it, replacing his mangled bike among them. Sam, being Sam, stepped up and took all the burden off Harper while he convalesced. Much to the chagrin of both Harper and Sam’s conservative father, Senator Larry Foster.
The rainbow elephant in the room is that while the Senator knows Sam is gay and claims to be okay with it, the truth is it’s an election year and Sam coming out now could cost his dad the election. The facts at hand, however, offer up some solid proof that, as far as his dad is concerned, the right time for Sam to come out would be approximately never. And, of course, being the political cynic that the Senator is, he’s also sure Harper’s going to milk Sam for every dime he can. This is the source of conflict throughout the novel—Sam wanting to live his life in the open, the Senator denying him that right for fear of losing his conservative base, and the Senator suspecting that Harper is a dirty rotten grifter.
And then there’s Harper, our island unto himself, who doesn’t want any part of it because he doesn’t do relationships, neither of the romantic nor of the friendship kind.
Watching Harper slowly warm up to the idea of having Sam in his life—or, perhaps more accurately, watching Sam slowly work his way around Harper’s emotional barricades—is the stuff of romance and why this genre, on the whole, rakes in gajillions of dollars each year. Sam treats Harper with such warmth and tenderness and concern which then, as a return on my investment in their story, I got to witness build into an emotional connection that warmed my heart. The chemical connection between the brain and the witnessing of two people falling in love, it just makes ya feel good, and this is nothing less than a feel-good novel. That’s not to say there weren’t problems along the way, including one critical misstep on Sam’s part, but Wynne allows her men to work things out and even allows the Senator, a man I didn’t have much affection for, to redeem himself as well.
As much as Wynne allows us to watch Harper emerge from an emotional distance fostered at his father’s hand, though, it’s Sam’s evolution and his becoming the man Harper will want to fall in love with and respect that is an integral part of the story. It’s Sam’s fight to live and love in the open which draws on a variety of emotions; at the fore, of course, is anger aimed at his father for being so purposefully obtuse and dismissive, but there is also the compassion I felt for Sam simply wanting to be open and honest about who he is. And, eventually, about who he loves.
In the end, I appreciated Crashing Upwards for the ease with which I fell for its characters and how it engaged my emotions in their simplest form.
I voluntarily reviewed an advanced reader copy of this book. Sam and Hunter literally hit it from the first chapter. A wonderful story of trust, insecurities and so much more, you just can’t read through this one fast enough to get to the end. Sam’s character seems a little weak in the beginning but it’s getting stronger and stronger by the chapters.
I didn’t want this book to end! I appreciated the “Epilogue” more than words can say. It finished the book so nicely!