Book Review: New Reality by Jessica Payseur
New Reality by Jessica Payseur is a sweet and sensual gay romance that warms the heart. It’s a relatively fast read at just under 50 pages, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d classify this novella as more of a romance that is sci-fi adjacent, but I enjoyed reading it for the characters and their love story. With well-timed tension and a slight danger factor (this is mostly in space, after all), Payseur sets the stakes in her universe and follows through with them. Her character-driven love story with a squee-worthy ending is worth a read. It is NSFW at times, so you may want to be wary of anyone reading over your shoulder. This is the story of Connell, a tired courier of slightly less-than-legal goods, drifting across the stars alone after the sudden death of his former partner in smuggling and in bed, left bereft and abandoned in the middle of a world he’s not sure he wants to fit into anymore. On his journey across the stars, picking up the odd job and the odd man, he somehow connects with a mysterious man through their seemingly shared dreams. Wystan Kreeger has been stranded on a distant planet for seventeen years, trapped with no possibility of escape. Their shared dreams send Connell on the haul of a lifetime: a lover, a planet, and a happiness that neither man could have ever predicted.
