This book started out really weird, but I did love the ending.

Jilted starts with Link getting stood up at the altar on their wedding day, their fiancée running off with Carter’s fiancée. Carter and Link meet at the bar and commiserate over their fiancées leaving them like that, and end up getting very drunk and spending a night on the town. Carter doesn’t remember the first night, but he and Link end up spending the rest of their honeymoon week together, only for Link to slink out the last morning.

Carter is unsatisfied with his life and realized his relationship with Matthew had largely been a way to be with someone who deemed him worthy. His parents aren’t very supportive of him, and he and his sister, Paige, have a fairly antagonistic relationship at times. At first, after Matthew leaves him he hides out at work and refuses to go back home, but one night he gets stoned with the office security and decides to make a change. Carter goes back to New Orleans, buying an old house to refurbish, and starts finding his own way, his own worth.

Link and Carter find each other again, but it keeps feeling like the timing is off, both trying to respect boundaries and not communicating clearly. This was frustrating and somewhat boring at times, but it didn’t come across as unrealistic exactly. Paige had come to New Orleans with Carter, and she keeps pushing at him, especially as she and Link’s friend, Eli, develop their own romantic relationship.

One of my favorite aspects of this book were all the queer identities. Link is nonbinary and pansexual, while Carter is cis and bisexual. Eli is a trans man - and he’s the one to tell Carter so he maintains his own agency around his identity. There is also a gay man and bisexual man secondary characters and a sapphic married couple. It’s all very casual, but also strong feelings of community and how queer people somehow always seem to find one another, especially when a community is most needed. Also, important to note is Link is never misgendered, not even when Carter first meets them; he makes sure to never assume, and I loved that.

One of the hard parts about reading this is it’s told in third person present tense, so it was hard to feel fully drawn into the story, but it still wasn’t a difficult read overall. I also wish there wasn’t as much miscommunication and, like, missing each other.

Overall, this ended up being an enjoyable read. It was really weird in the beginning and hard to get into, but the last third or so of the book was really good. I liked how Link and Carter finally communicated and found their way together at last. Not quite what I was expecting, but still a pretty sweet romance.

3* Only OK. The tale felt a bit disjointed, and I didn't feel as if I knew, saw or cared for the characters.

This book does follow the blurb, but unfortunately the blurb led me to believe that the tale would be funnier, more interesting and more romantic. Instead, it sounded as if Carter was a tad depressed, had low self-esteem, and that his sister interfered far too much in their lives, and that both were escaping their disinterested parents.

On top, though I realise that Link was genderqueer, I would have liked to know more about them; what made them genderqueer, how they identified, how they dressed, and what influenced them. Instead, we had carefully neutral things about them, like soft skin, nipples (not pecs or breasts), about Link riding Carter, about soft, gauzy tops and pants, etc. Though I think I get why the author didn't make a point of identifying how Link identified and didn't go there with AFAB or AMAB, it was a little irritating that we never got an insight into Link.

This had potential, but I was kind of bored with it and wasn't into any of the characters. A side character, the trans man Eli, who ended up as Carter's sister's boyfriend, was a sweeter and nicer character, and I wouldn't have minded reading more of his story.

ARC courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley, for my reading pleasure.